The Perfect Meal (30 page)

A man leaning on the rail a few meters away said something to me I didn’t hear. When I said, “
Comment
?,” he moved closer.

“English?”

“Australian.”

“Australia! Have
been
there! Sydney Bridge.
Bière
Fosters.” He mimed grabbing a ball under his arm and running. “Rugby”—pronounced “Roog-bee.”

He seemed to have summed up my home country pretty well. I nodded toward the flames. “When do they start?”

“Is already one hour burning,” he said, pointing to the men cutting and hauling wood. “They fill—then . . .” He made a pressing-down motion with his hands. “Become . . .
cendres
.”

Coals. “And after that, how long?”

“Then?” He held up three fingers. Three hours, before the fire was ready.

He nodded toward a smaller tent behind the large one. That must be where they were preparing the animal.

“At six, he come.” He grinned. “
Une autre crevette sur la barbecue, huh
?” Even this far from Australia, Paul Hogan and
Crocodile Dundee
had reached their long arm.

Someone called from among the men around the fire pit, and our friend disappeared into the dark.

“What was that about a shrimp on a barbecue?” Marie-Dominique asked.

“Before your time.”

We prowled the field, peering into the tents, skirting the steel barriers that cordoned off the small tents where the butchers were at work. For a couple of hours, we dozed in the car, not quite asleep, kept awake by the unrelenting chatter and the chainsaws’ howl. When we climbed out again, stiff and disheveled, a crimson sun, fat as a pumpkin, was rising over fallow fields where cows moved uneasily in a white mist.

Chilled, we drifted toward the heat that rippled the air above the fire pit. Of the firewood, only a few branches remained. The rest had fed the bed of coals glowing at near-white heat in the pit. Overnight, supports had been dragged into place at either end: square-section uprights of green-enameled steel, braced from four sides, bolted to wide metal bases, ready to assume the weight. Slots at the top showed where the horizontal beam of the spit would rest.

The big tent was up, sides pulled back as teams of men carried trestle tables inside. It was spacious enough to house a circus, elephants and all. How many people did it take to eat an ox?

There was an atmosphere of the timeless. In another century, people like these—like us—had come here to watch a joust between armored knights, or a hanging, or the burning of a heretic at the stake, or to attend a Mass of celebration and thanks for a great victory, or a carnival, with beer and games and mimed plays, and dancing.

Just then, men turned and looked over their shoulders, laughing.

Marie-Dominique grinned. “Look at this.”

It was the blue cow I’d seen in the night. But now the upper torso of a man stuck out of its back, his feet hidden under the skirt. He wore a crimson tunic and waved a wooden sword as he capered awkwardly around the field, defying the solemnity of the moment, playing the fool. If you followed the design of the costume back a few centuries, you’d find the same figure in the world of medieval buffoonery, the Lord of Misrule. A rider in a similar outfit, known as a “hobbyhorse,” is part of the team in the English Morris, or Morrish, dances. Further back again and the man would be a real Moor, a North African like those who ruled Spain, and might, but for a few kinks of history, have conquered all of Europe. The farther you left the city behind, the nearer the past became.

Beyond the tents, a tractor engine coughed, then caught and roared in a throaty snarl.

Gushing a plume of exhaust into the cold air, the tractor crawled around the corner of the tent. On two cranked metal arms, lifted high in front of the cab—just as British tanks carried bundles of brush in the battles of 1917—rested the reason for our presence a thousand pounds of flesh and bone.

The metal barriers were pushed back. Nobody spoke as the tractor moved out into the open and jolted toward us over the uneven ground. We who leaned on the railings around the pit, enjoying the heat, stepped back and, in unison, turned toward the approaching machine and its load. There was awe in the air, an awkward reverence. The blue bull ceased his dance and lowered his sword. If he had come to mock the animal at the heart of the event, to brag of our power in vanquishing him, this was not the time.

The indignity of slaughter, of being skinned and gutted, of having head and feet severed, of being spread-eagled between steel grilles and transfixed by the octagonal beam of the spit reduced not a fraction this beast’s latent majesty. St Éxupéry was right. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This was still the furious adversary matadors faced in the ring, the creature over whom back dancers leaped in the palace of Minos, the animal Picasso drew as the embodiment of maleness, the Minotaur himself.

And we were gathered to devour him.

All our lives we’d eaten meat. But that had been in fragments. To see the animal entire made us aware of our kinship, of a shared nature as creatures of flesh that walked and ate and breathed and bred and died. Here was the true conclusion of my search for the “lost,” but it had not gone far enough. What our trivial society has abandoned, and might never retrieve, was what I felt at this moment—awe, and humility, and a profound respect.

Twenty-two

First Catch Your Feast

Man did eat angels’ food: he sent them meat to the full.

Psalm 78, King James Bible

A
nd then?” Boris asked.

“And then . . . we had lunch.”

“Just you and Madame?”

“And about five hundred new friends.” I looked around the place where he’d chosen to meet me. “Isn’t this a little obvious?”

We were sitting outside a small restaurant on a corner of rue Morillons, in the fifteenth. Across the road, as far as I could see in each direction, stretched the Parc Georges Brassens. Directly opposite, a wide stone gate, its pillars topped by the life-size statues of two bulls, provided an undiplomatic reminder that, from 1894 until the 1970s, these had been stockyards and a slaughterhouse. Deeper inside the park, given less prominence, was a bust of Émile Decroix, the army veterinarian who pioneered what the bust’s inscription circumspectly calls
hippophagie
—eating horse, many thousands of which were butchered here.

“I thought it would make you feel at home,” Boris said.

“You can joke,” I said, “but it was dignified. Even profound.”

“You know I don’t joke about food. And it isn’t necessary to tell me that spit-roasting is an art.”

About roasting, he wasn’t wrong. At Hampton Court, the palace of Henry VIII, five hundred people did nothing but prepare food. Of these, only four were trusted to roast meat before an open fire. In Escoffier’s
brigade de cuisine
, the
rôtisseur
was the equal of its alchemist, the
saucier
. The joint must turn at precisely four rotations a minute to be evenly cooked—the origin of “done to a turn.” Other methods had been tried: spit boys who crouched next to the hearth (Henry’s priests deplored their nudity); dogs that ran in drumlike treadmills; mechanisms of weights and cogs. None equaled the skilled roaster’s experienced eye.

At Bugnicourt, an electric motor rotated the spit at a deliberate five turns to the minute. As fat began to ooze, drops vaporizing in puffs of smoke before they even reached the coals, the rate was raised to six, just enough to stop the dripping.

“They won’t really have cooked it by lunchtime?” Marie-Dominique had asked.

“You never roast a whole animal all the way through,” I said, recklessly squandering the stock of facts absorbed over a year of reading. “The outside would overcook long before the interior was done.”

“Then what are we going to eat?” She was struck by a sudden thought. “We
are
going to eat, aren’t we? Because I’m starving already.”

“They might carve off the cooked meat and leave the rest to keep roasting,” I said. “But I expect they’ll butcher the whole carcass and grill the raw meat as steaks.”

My guess was right. At 11:00 a.m., the mayor arrived to declare the Fête du Boeuf officially open. Ten minutes later, the tractor returned to lift the beast off the spit and carry it back behind the metal barriers.

At fifteen minutes before noon, a queue was forming outside the tent. We joined it.

And I realized I knew these people. So would anyone who grew up with barn dances in rural town halls, the thump of feet pounding on a board floor; who went to Country Women’s Association cake competitions and munched sponges as elastic as foam rubber; who tried not to groan at the annual talent show as a tiny girl wrestled an enormous mother-of-pearl piano accordion through “Lady of Spain.” I knew the too-tight collars, the unaccustomed neckties, the tweed jackets Kept for Best, the dresses too elaborate for this time of day (
I told you I didn’t have a thing to wear!
). This, for good or ill, was my patrimony, and I surrendered to the experience as one slips under the coverlet of a familiar bed.

Seated on backless benches, eight to a side, at long, bare wooden tables, we drank the aperitif of sweet Cinzano that came with the eleven-euro meal ticket, and read the ads on the paper place mats: the Citroën garage, the farm equipment dealership, the undertaker offering “Funerals at All Prices.”

The lady next to me with the unfortunate costume jewelry had driven with her husband from Lille because their son lived nearby and they were going to spend the night at his farm. On my left, a man born in Portugal but working here for twenty years wondered why I was making notes.

“I’m writing a book. About food.”

He squinted at me. A writer? So
that’s
what they looked like. He supposed someone must write those books that he, he had to confess, seldom read. No, not much of a reader.

“But if it’s about food,” he said, “why aren’t you back there?” He nodded past the stage, in the direction of the smaller tents where they’d taken the carcass.

“I didn’t know I could.”

He swiveled around on the bench. “Come with me.”

We crossed the tussocky grass that, with the tent above and around us, had become a floor. Outside, across a few meters of open space, a dozen men in aprons stood at tables under an open-sided tent and joked as they sliced and hacked and trimmed bloody meat. Off to the side, four women forked steaks from deep plastic dishes and slapped them on barbecues made from oil drums cut in half and filled with coals. The smoke and smell of sizzling meat filled the air. Behind the butchers, discarded, lay what remained of the boeuf: meatless ribs, scraped almost clean, bare as a wreck cast up by the tide.

My new friend knew the butchers, and they knew him. This was a country town. Among 954 people, everyone knows everyone else.

“M’sieur’s writing a book. About food. He’s from Australia.”

“Australia? No kangaroos here, my friend,” said one of the butchers. He held up a big fork with a dripping steak impaled. “Only good French beef.”

“Kangaroos can be good eating,” I said. “The tail, for soup, and the”—what was the word for it? Fortunately Franglais came to the rescue—“
rumsteak
.”

“You’ve eaten it?” one of them asked. Only a couple were working now. We were men talking meat, an important subject. Their subject.

“It’s good,” I said. “Lean. Like . . .
la venaison
.”

They nodded. Interested—until one of the women returned with an empty dish, ready for more steaks.

“Better get on,” someone said. “This guy won’t cut himself up. Good luck with the book.” He nodded toward my Portuguese guide. “Make sure you spell his name right.”

A few of the men grinned. My guide must have a reputation for pushing himself forward.

As we walked back, he said, “He was only joking, you know. About the name.” A few more steps. “It’s Lucas, by the way. From Porto.”

A
nd was it good?” Boris asked.

“The best.”

I’d been concerned that the beef might be tough, but it was tender and tasty, as good as any I’ve had in a restaurant. With plastic salad bowls filled with unlimited frites, jugs of a sauce made from the meat juices spiced with whole peppercorns, bowls of sliced baguette, cheese, salad, chocolate mousse . . . not bad for eleven euros.