AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
Arriving rather late for dinner on Sunday night at the house of sophisticated friends, I found them in a state of some excitement. They had read that afternoon in one of the colour maga- zines an article by Margaret Costa about the annual congress of the Association des Maitres Cuisiniers de France to be held at the Hotel Russell in Russell Square, and had just been talking on the telephone to the host chef, a Monsieur Zarb. If we arrived within half an hour he could offer us a little preview of the gastronomic festival about to open the follow- ing day.
In the taxi on the way there I held a copy of the magazine as close to the window as possible, steadying it against the swaying of the cab as we lurched round the corners. let no one fear that they will be disappointed with the food they eat there. Raymond Zarb, the chef de cuisine, is a maitre cuisinier himself. . . . M Zarb and his brigade have been pre- paring for weeks for this great event. . . . Telephone orders have been flying around for squabs, quail, fresh salmon and pike, baby rabbits, agneaux de !ail.... Nor will this gastro- nomic treat be offered to the maitres cuisiniers alone. Anybody within a reasonable distance of Russell Square and a few pounds in their pocket—prices will not be excessively high—can share it next week.'
The dining-room of the Russell Hotel is large, with a high blue ceiling and decorative plaster mouldings. Caryatids support the roof, and a few rather retiring guests, alone or in small discreet groups, sat at the small tables quietly chewing their food. We were greeted by a slightly daunting head waiter, looking not un- like a blond Frankenstein. He was Polish, and allowed a brief and unconvincing smile to appear for a moment before banishing it. Un- fortunately the kitchen was shut. Aha, Mon- sieur Zarb. One moment, the telephone was ringing, perhaps that was Monsieur Zarb even now, warning them of our arrival. Apparently it was.
Surrendering ourselves to the discretion of Monsieur Zarb in the choice of food, we settled down in a corner and listened to the amusing repartee of the head waiter, whose name was Eric. His English was a little slurred, but we were able to understand that he claimed as a joke to come from Siberia. My friends asked him whether he had ever thought of going back there and he said he had. At this moment the foie gras arrived, a perfect pink and inlaid with a slice of black truffle. A bottle of chilled white Burgundy was brought to the table, and the conversation wandered agreeably over literary topics of a sophisticated nature.
I began musing on the advantages of being a professional gastronome. The style, it struck me, was quite easily acquired, consisting prin- cipally of a warm cooing enthusiasm, enlivened with shafts of occasional wit, and constantly rising to ecstatic climaxes, where the English blazes up into fiery French. 'Monsieur Brou- haha, who is ninety-three, is an enthusiastic amateur embalmer during the day, and still
prepares the food with his own hands. Who can forget, sitting in the timbered abattoir—
Alexandre Dumas fits is said to have struck his head on the low beam over the doorway and to have remarks t, with characteristic aplomb, "Ah, zut!"—who can forget those
deliciotis Iruites lugubres stuffed with crudites algeriennes, or the astonishing maitre d'hatel limb(' a la bonne heure.. And in return for this, endless vistas of tables laden with lambs and sucking pigs, pies and pastries, salads and ratatouilles, and a huge abundance of puddings, all to be consumed in a haze of alcoholic en- joyment and sophisticated conversation on various topics and charged tip to the paper.
1 he next course was lobster and some kind of delicate fish served in a thick sauce with new potatoes. Another bottle of wine arrived, and the conversation became less sophisticated, dwelling on a friend's experiences in a Turkish bath in Beirut. After that there was an escalope, covered with a rich sauce containing a rare kind of mushroom, specially flown from Paris. Monsieur Zarb himself appeared, genial and rotund, and on Eric's promptings accepted a glass of wine. Peaches were carried in, bottled by Monsieur Zarb himself, and served in a blue halo of flame. It seemed then that perhaps the life of a professional gastronome might eventually become laborious, and overshadowed by the spectre of premature death. The con- versation lapsed, the warm silence of content- ment only broken now and then by boisterous shouts of laughter.
Eric, now even more cheerful in his abrupt way than before, carried in a tray of chocolates
and petits fours, surmounted by a little wooden easel with a plate on it made of white icing sugar and bearing a picture of Donald Duck, One of the waiters explained that it was a picture of Mr Vak Vak. During the ensuing laughter Eric knocked over the plate and it broke. The laughter became more uninhibited, and humorous comments were written on the plate in biro. The mood of irresponsibility was just reaching its climax when we were handed a bill for four of us for nineteen pounds three shillings. Dimly I began to understand just what it was that made the professional gastro- nomes coo.
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