High Bonnet Read online

  2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Introduction copyright © 2001 by Anthony Bourdain

  Series introduction copyright © 2001 by Ruth Reichl

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover by Prentice-Hall, Inc. in 1945.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Jones, Idwal, 1890–1964.

  High bonnet: a novel of epicurean adventures / Idwal Jones.

  p. cm.—(Modern Library food series)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41559-2

  1. Restaurants—Fiction. 2. Young men—Fiction. 3. Cookery—Fiction.

  4. Cooks—Fiction. I. Title. II. Modern Library food.

  PS3519.O43 H5 2001

  813′.52—dc21 00-067901

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERN LIBRARY FOOD SERIES

  Ruth Reichl

  My parents thought food was boring. This may explain why I began collecting cookbooks when I was very young. But although rebellion initially inspired my collection, economics and my mother’s passion fueled it.

  My mother was one of those people who found bargains irresistible. This meant she came screeching to a halt whenever she saw a tag sale, flea market, or secondhand store. While she scoured the tables, ever optimistic about finding a Steuben vase with only a small scratch, an overlooked piece of sterling, or even a lost Vermeer, I went off to inspect the cookbooks. In those days nobody was much interested in old cookbooks and you could get just about anything for a dime.

  I bought piles of them and brought them home to pore over wonderful old pictures and read elaborate descriptions of dishes I could only imagine. I spent hours with my cookbooks, liking the taste of the words in my mouth as I lovingly repeated the names of exotic sauces: soubise, Mornay, dugléré. These things were never seen around our house.

  As my collection grew, my parents became increasingly baffled. “Half of those cookbooks you find so compelling,” my mother complained, “are absolutely useless. The recipes are so old you couldn’t possibly use them.”

  How could I make her understand? I was not just reading recipes. To me, the books were filled with ghosts. History books left me cold, but I had only to open an old cookbook to find myself standing in some other place or time. “Listen to this,” I said, opening an old tome with suggestions for dinner on a hot summer evening. I read the first recipe, an appetizer made of lemon gelatin poured into a banana skin filled with little banana balls. “When opened, the banana looks like a mammoth yellow pea pod,” I concluded triumphantly. “Can you imagine a world in which that sounds like a good idea?” I could. I could put myself in the dining room with its fussy papered walls and hot air. I could see the maid carrying in this masterpiece, hear the exclamations of pleasure from the tightly corseted woman of the house.

  But the magic didn’t work for Mom; to her this particular doorway to history was closed. So I tried again, choosing something more exotic. “Listen to this,” I said, and began reading. “ ‘Wild strawberries were at their peak in the adjacent forests at this particular moment, and we bought baskets of them promiscuously from the picturesque old denizens of the woods who picked them in the early dawn and hawked them from door to door.… The pastry was hot and crisp and the whole thing was permeated with a mysterious perfume.… Accompanied by a cool Vouvray,… these wild strawberry tarts brought an indescribable sense of well-being.…’ ”

  “Anything?” I asked. She shook her head.

  Once I tried reading a passage from my very favorite old cookbook, a memoir by a famous chef who was raised in a small village in the south of France. In this story he recalls being sent to the butcher when he was a small boy. As I read I was transported to Provence at the end of the nineteenth century. I could see the village with its small stone houses and muddy streets. I could count the loaves of bread lined up at the boulangerie and watch the old men hunched over glasses of red wine at the café. I was right there in the kitchen as the boy handed the carefully wrapped morsel of meat to his mother, and I watched her put it into the pot hanging in the big fireplace. It sizzled; it was so real to me that I could actually smell the daube. My mother could not.

  But then she was equally baffled by my passion for markets. I could stand for hours in the grocery store watching what people piled into their carts. “I can look through the food,” I’d try to explain. “Just by paying attention to what people buy you can tell an awful lot about them.” I would stand there, pointing out who was having hard times, who was religious, who lived alone. None of this interested my mother very much, but I found it fascinating.

  In time, I came to understand that for people who really love it, food is a lens through which to view the world. For us, the way that people cook and eat, how they set their tables, and the utensils that they use all tell a story. If you choose to pay attention, cooking is an important cultural artifact, an expression of time, place, and personality.

  I know hundreds of great cookbooks that deserve to be rescued from oblivion, but the ones I have chosen for the Modern Library Food Series are all very special, for they each offer more than recipes. You can certainly cook from these books, but you can also read through the recipes to the lives behind them. These are books for cooks and armchair cooks, for historians, for people who believe that what people eat—and why—is important.

  INTRODUCTION

  Anthony Bourdain

  The term “foodie” has come to mean someone enthusiastic about, or even preoccupied with, food and restaurants and chefs in particular, a character who exists on the fringes of the restaurant business—either writing about it, dealing with it in some ancillary way as perhaps a wine merchant, food stylist, critic, or consultant might, or simply as an avid observer and regular diner—someone always on the lookout for something new, something marvelous, for the next thing. You might think you know a foodie or two. You don’t.

  As a chef and student of the history and literature of my profession, I thought I knew all the “chef books.” By “chef books,” I mean books written about or from the point of view of chefs, works that capture the particular worldview, peculiarities, obsessions, and daily routines of culinary professionals past. As a young prep cook just beginning my long and occasionally painful climb to the top of the kitchen brigade, I came across a tattered copy of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and I can hardly describe the excitement of my discovery, the warm feeling of recognition, the immediate sense of kinship with the plongeurs and cuisiniers of Orwell’s pseudonymous Hotel X. My effort, my anonymous toil in the belly of a large, busy restaurant prep kitchen, was suddenly part of a glorious continuum—the bullying, the insanity, the hard-drinking part of a rich tradition that fortified the hearts and honed the skills of the deserving and weeded out the unworthy—stages in a process to be endured proudly. Early chefs’ predilection for alternating unbelievably obscene tirades with withering sarcasm became overnight an art form to be appreciated and emulated—even when I was the hapless target of their scorn. I was, I realized after reading Orwell—and later the work of former chef/mystery author Nicolas Freeling—part of something bigger than myself; I was a soldier in a secret near-paramilitary organization, a soon-to-be made member of an underworld society, a “thing” that had been going on for centuries out of the view of the general public. I had, I realized, without fully understanding it at the time, committed myself to a subculture for whom food revealed its secrets, a debauched elite who worked at different hours, took its pleasures in di
fferent ways, and viewed the world outside the kitchen doors and outside the late-night revelries of cooks and chefs with suspicion and dismay. Any book, television show, or movie that opens a window into This Thing of Ours is usually brought immediately to my attention: “Dude!” one of my cook friends will say, “You see that Gordon Ramsey video? He’s hard-core, man, you gotta check it out!” or, “You see Al Pacino in Frankie and Johnny? Whassup with that neckerchief thing? Man thinks he Chef Boyardee or somethin’! You watch him move back there? I wouldn’t hire that goof for a dishwasher!” or “Check out this book Flash in the Pan, man! He got it right. It’s all there …” Chefs are legendary gossips—and the chefs’ information network—an informal, worldwide web of kitchen phones, online message boards, late-night bars and e-mails—would impress the CIA or NSA (if they knew about it). A chef hurls a bowl of pasta at a waiter in Seattle, someone hears about it in New York. A lost classic of cuisine is about to be reprinted, somebody, somewhere has already got a full review up on a chef message board—a weathered copy is being passed around from one calloused hand to another. (I’ve seen more copies of English-language versions of Zola’s foodie Dead Sea Scrolls, The Belly of Paris, in the last few months than supposedly exist in the country.) We chefs like reading about ourselves and about our peers, past and present.

  Idwal Jones’ High Bonnet took me by complete surprise. I knew nothing of the book or its author until a galley arrived in the mail, and my reaction—after only a few chapters—was something like outrage. As a chef, I don’t like surprises, and Jones’ incredible account of lunatic chefs and maniacal gourmands surprised the hell out of me. “Why don’t I know about this guy? Who was he? Where did this book come from? Was the author a chef? How much of it is true?” The author had to have been a chef or professional cook—that was without question. But the descriptions of food and cooking were … well … nearly pornographic, his accounts of kitchen life so close to the bone. It was a mystery that grew more deliciously painful with each turned page.

  High Bonnet is ostensibly the story of Jean-Marie Gallois, the nephew of a confiseur from Provence, a young man who from the early pages seems fully imbued with the culinary sensibilities of the Mediterranean. From the get-go, every character seems single-mindedly, almost insanely obsessed with food and wine. Life, in Jones’ story, revolves around the getting of food, the cooking of food, the discussion of food—and the planning for same. When Jean-Marie throws together an impromptu Sauce Sicilienne for his uncle and guest—a down-on-her-luck baroness—he finds himself recommended for employment at a prestigious Paris restaurant, the Faisan d’Or. A description of the baroness’ reaction to Jean-Marie’s sauce illustrates what I mean by pornographic: “The sauce was unlocking memories that her infancy had bequeathed her of Rhone vineyards blinding white in sunshine; Provence with its ‘garlic-scented smile’; the buttery in her ancestral kitchen, with its rows of herb canisters; the dry rattle of coriander, as evocative of Egypt as the flutes in Aïda; tangerine peel, with its regal pungence and aroma; the butter and chives recalling a tangy cow yard and mossy-walled garden by the Mediterranean shore where she had gathered shells in her pinafore.” Whew! I don’t know about you, but I need a glass of ice water.

  Professional cooks will recognize the intricate hierarchy, familiar character types, and profane dialect of the restaurant kitchen. But even they, I think, will be shocked by the intensity with which all the characters in High Bonnet pursue their pleasures and their craft. Everyone, it seems, is a gourmet or a gourmand, racing through life oblivious to all creature comforts but the pursuit of flavor. Cook and aristocrat, Vietnamese anarchist, dwarflike rôtisseur, expat Colombian, alcoholic waiter, madman, and hustler alike all careen through Paris’ dark arrondissements in search of something good to eat, something wonderful to cook—all of them with strong opinions about food—no sooner finishing one meal than planning another. Meet Jules, the sauce master from the Faisan d’Or who bonds with Jean-Marie, his young charge, over a secret stash of saffron, who refers to Sauce Espagnol, rightly, as “a springboard … a mother of all fancies,” words that any right-thinking cook can wrap around himself like a warm blanket. There’s Pierre, the ugliest but best waiter in Paris, who survives on bread and brandy during working hours to devour the world after. And there’s Guido, the “Italian maestro,” a classic example of what French cooks refer to as a debrouillard, an extricator—that much valued breed of improviser/hustler/spy and artist that all chefs fortunate enough to find keep on their payrolls:

  “Guido was from Venice. Venetians make good artists, spies, and historians; Casanova was all three. Guido knew all that was whispered in the Faisan d’Or.… Further, he was a geographer, and so learned in the arcana of foods that if you mentioned any point on this revolving globe he could tell you whatever it produced that was edible, and how much it was entitled to respect.… Ah, the furious swiftness of our Italian maestro, his flood of awful mediaeval profanity, oaths curling his lips, eyes shining with the gleam of a serpent’s! He worked best after he had cursed and lashed himself into a rage.” I’ve known this guy. A few times. Sous-chef material.

  Less a story of Jean-Marie’s rise to chefdom (when he gets his high bonnet) than a madcap rush to pleasure, the story seems to lose itself to its characters’ monomania as it hurtles them along in search of culinary kicks. There is no snobbery in High Bonnet. Good food is for those knowledgeable enough and sensitive enough and enthusiastic enough to appreciate it. Whether it’s a simple bowl of pasta with “buttery tomato sauce” or a hilarious “Pleistocene Dinner” made from a recently discovered prehistoric musk ox, a classic sauce or, in one priceless moment, a meal of roasted kidneys in a “filthy little café on the banks of a canal … noisy, full of tanners and abattoir workmen … dogs yelp[ing] underfoot” where “four mastodonic kidneys, whose ruby meat winked in the matrix of fat … slid … into the stove, to frizzle and snap like Chinese firecrackers,” there is no law, only pleasure. For the discerning eater, no rules apply other than the dictates of the palate.

  Much of the joy of High Bonnet comes with simply allowing the characters to talk, to tell stories, to pontificate, to rail. A story of a chef, a “man ruined by a dish,” will stay with me forever, a tale of a man who discovers a recipe for curry in India, enjoys spectacular success re-creating it in Paris, and is then brought down horribly when he runs out of a vital ingredient. More timely, perhaps, in the face of a new wave of chefs who practice their craft in sterile, nearly heat-free laboratoires, is a spirited discussion of the appropriate degree of filth in a restaurant kitchen: “Never expect a perfect dinner to emerge from a clean kitchen. As well expect one from a laboratory. Revolting! A cook whose mind runs on soap and antiseptics is fit only for the guillotine,” says one character. “Now take Papa Andrieu at the Vielle Tour. His little kitchen is about four feet by ten. If its floor were trimmed with a pick and shovel—which Heaven forbid!—the ceiling would be very much higher. It is an Alps of peelings, cinders, grease, impacted chicken bones, and bread. The debris of meals goes back to the days of the War—perhaps the Napoleonic Wars!… Assuredly, where vision and creative flame exist, a little honest dirt is no barrier to art.”

  Spoken like many an old-school professional, I’m afraid.

  When I finally found a brief biography of High Bonnet’s author, Idwal Jones, I was, if anything, more tantalized. He was, it appears, something of a renaissance man; authoring works of criticism, Western fiction, viticulture, folklore, and cooking. He worked, at various times, as an engineer, prospector, rancher, and journalist, as well as being a Cordon Bleu chef and member of various food and wine societies. A friend of both M.F.K. Fisher and Eric von Stroheim, he sounds like one fascinating dude. All I can say is he writes like a cook. His book High Bonnet, now finally reprinted by Modern Library, will endure as a classic of its genre, food-spattered copies, no doubt, to circulate in many restaurant kitchens. For me, that’s the highest praise there is.

  —

  Ant
hony Bourdain is a twenty-eight-year veteran of professional kitchens, having served as a chef, sous-chef, saucier, line cook, prep drone, and dishwasher. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he is currently the executive chef of the brasserie Les Halles in New York City. He is the author of two novels, Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, and most recently, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a nonfiction account of life in a restaurant kitchen.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction to the Modern Library Food Series by Ruth Reichl

  Introduction by Anthony Bourdain

  Epigraph

  I. IT WAS THE MEDLARS

  II. THE GENTLEMAN UPSTAIRS

  III. IN PETIT-MONTROUGE

  IV. MONSIEUR POM-POM

  V. THE DURUY MASK

  VI. THE BISHOP’S ARBOR

  VII. CHEFS DINE ELSEWHERE

  VIII. MANUEL, THE INCA

  IX. MAYOR IN THE ATTIC

  X. FRANÇOIS LE GRAND

  XI. MUSK OX AND SHERBET

  XII. FROM OVERSEAS

  XIII. TINKERS’ HOLIDAY

  XIV. LORDS AND LADIES, VALE!

  Dedication

  PUPIL: Good Master, many men have written largely on cookery; so either prove you’re saying something original, or else don’t tease me.

  COOK: What I know I didn’t learn in a brace of years, wearing the apron just by way of sport!

  —Athenæus: Banquet of the Learned

  I

  IT WAS THE MEDLARS

  The vender was again passing Xavier’s café on the Toulon wharf with a basket of medlars on his head, a tuneful cry in his throat. The season being advanced, the fruit was dark-gold, pulpy, deliciously overripe.

  “On this voyage to Genoa, Jean-Marie,” the master of the Piccolo was saying, as he filled my glass, “you will be first officer. Bene?”