On food and wine, and dinner with Hemingway.
‘…for Paris is a moveable feast.’
I had one of those sneaky, stubborn headaches. A wet and stormy morning outside was not encouraging either. It had been such a lovely summer and autumn! No more. Winter has come.
What to do, what to do, what to do — thought Christopher Robin.
I should write a letter, or maybe a newsletter for my website — or maybe not. No inspiration. I went into my little office and looked at the bookcase. It’s a lovely old thing, a barrister’s bookcase. I keep my favorite books in it. It has folding glass panels that come down over each shelf, ostensibly to keep dust and damp out. I seem to remember them holding off little fingers when my daughter first discovered it too. Many moons and memories ago.
The books are organized by theme — poetry Irish, poetry UK/America, dictionaries, biographies. The third shelf down was not organized at all, not like my OCD self. I admit I raised an eyebrow.
Notably, it had three black-and-white jacketed books side by side right in the middle. I took them out.
‘The Táin’ — a beautiful translation of the Irish epic ‘Táin Bó Cuailgne’. I remembered the heroes, the queen, betrayals, the beautiful Louis le Brocquy drawings — stories too dark for this day though.
‘Beowulf’ — another full-of-wonder translation, this one from Seamus Heaney, but I just couldn’t face monsters or dragons today.
Then there it was.
‘A Moveable Feast’ by Ernest Hemingway. Ah! Now maybe I can escape from this headache and stormy morning. Go to Paris.
I don’t remember when I originally read the book, perhaps secondary school.
I began the first chapter ‘A good café on the Place St.-Michel’.
The first line.
Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over.
Well then. His morning sounds like mine. But I am on the Irish coast and he was walking the streets of Paris. He finally found somewhere warm and welcoming.
‘It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day, it was that sort of day in the story.’
WHAT? Now, this is interesting. He’s in a stormy morning, writing about being in a stormy morning, and I’m in a stormy morning reading about both of his mornings. O-K.
I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half carafe of the dry white wine they had there…
As I ate the oysters with their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans.’
I am sure it was just about now, I took a sharp intake of breath and gasped.
For what it’s worth, I have spent half my life to date, studying and researching the chemistry of food and wine pairing. I teach and demonstrate, I explain, I write, I research. I collaborate with academic colleagues, restaurateurs, chefs, winemakers, sommeliers, farmers. We are paving new ground in many ways, a lot of this work has not been done before. Lots of people say ‘it doesn’t matter’ just eat, drink, whatever — friend, let me assure you it really can matter a great deal.
And now here’s Hemingway, in 1920’s Paris, absolutely nailing it.
I couldn’t help myself, I got out a notebook of my own. I read on and on. I copied details from the meals, intel on the wine and food he had.
Then I dismantled them — as best I could, you understand, nearly 100 years later — into the elements we now know interact when wine and food come together.
As I ate the oysters with their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away…
Oh, this is so interesting and so cool! And please forgive me in advance, but I just have to tell you some nerdy stuff.
That ‘faint metallic taste’ he refers to (that the white wine washed away, yayy!) is associated with a condition called ‘dysgeusia’ — happens when our sense of taste is compromised. Metal is not a ‘taste’ so what he felt is a distortion of normal perception. There are many causes: pregnancy, some drugs used in chemotherapy, I've also heard meds used to treat acrophobia (fear of heights) can trigger it. BUT — if you are NOT pregnant, or ill — this metallic ‘taste’ can also frequently happen if you eat food high in glutamates and drink a rich wine with it, especially red. Sometimes a slice of not-quite-ripe tomato can trigger it, or sushi/sashimi without soy, or smoked salmon.
Red wines are more often guilty than white, involving a process called ‘chelation’, where metal ions (charged particles detached from either your food or wine) bind to other loose ions they shouldn’t do. As a result, the electrical balance in your mouth is altered. Our taste receptors read taste via electrochemical signals, so if that e-chem balance goes awry because the metal ions go maverick — enter dysgeusia. A brightly acidic, fruity wine can help fix that. By changing the pH in your mouth and introducing an appetitive taste presence, balance is improved and all may indeed be well.
Au revoir metallic thing.
‘…a dozen portugaises and a half carafe of the dry, white wine they had there’
We’re not exactly sure what the wine was here but Portugaise oysters were very popular in Paris at the time. Apparently, they’re almost extinct now. If the wine was Muscadet (Hemingway was very partial to it) it is a nigh perfect pairing from a chemical perspective. He makes no mention of sauce (like mignonette) so this would have been a delightful combination to bring out the best of both. There are other French whites that would do well — Vouvray sec, Anjou blanc, the Alsatians: Pinot gris, Pinot blanc, also Picpoul de Pinet and Chablis — just to name a few.
We know he didn’t like, as he tells us later, ‘heavy’ wines (did he mean alcoholic & oaky?) or ‘sweet wines’. His oyster wine description suggests high acid, bright fruit, light/medium weight. Combine that with high salt and a little glutamate/umami from the oyster — you have a thing of beauty.
The next food-and-wine moment that got my attention had to do with fishing, in a chapter called ‘People of the Seine’. He seemed to really like these people who fished under the big bridges on the river. He liked their food too.
They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called ‘goujon’. They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavor than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily and we ate them bones and all.
One of the best places to eat them was at an open-air restaurant built out over the river at Bas Meudon …It was called ‘La Peche Miraculeuse’ and had a splendid white wine that was a sort of Muscadet.
There you go! Muscadet by name this time. Let’s explore. Hemingway gives us dace as the fish benchmark, I have never known ‘goujon’ the fish. Yes, goujons the strips of FRIED fish, of course, but not a fish called goujon. (Google tells me it may be a type of catfish. Je ne sais pas.) Dace lives in freshwater, so salt as a taste element will not be as big a deal with the goujon as it was with his oysters. He said they were not oily fish — lighter texture — and they were fried whole — suggesting crispiness — so a fresh, fruity Muscadet (he tells us later in the book he mostly drank ‘new’ wines) would be really gorgeous. Yum and yum.
Now another vignette. Ernest and Hadley are coming back to Paris from a trip.
Another day later that year when we had come back from one of our voyages…we stopped at Pruniers on the way home, going in to sit at the bar…We had oysters and crabe mexicaine with glasses of Sancerre.
The oysters and ‘crabe mexicaine’ (crabmeat seasoned with pimento) with Sancerre sounds good; in fact, the pimento semi-sweetness would balance any errant bitter notes a Sancerre might have. Nice one Ernest. Again.
Some more about that trip. Ernest went trout fishing on the Rhône while they were away. Hadley says —
‘Do you remember I brought some wine from Aigle home to the chalet? They sold it to us at the inn. They said it should go great with the trout. The Sion wine was even better. Do you remember how Mrs. Gangeswisch cooked the trout ‘au bleu’ when we got back to the chalet? They were such wonderful trout, Tatie, and we drank the Sion wine and ate out on the porch with the mountainside dropping off below…’
Sion is the main town in the canton (district) of Valais in Switzerland. This wine, note ye well, was also a favorite with James Joyce, who Hemingway befriended while in Paris.
Now then.
‘Truite au bleu’ she said. Literally, blue trout. Well, this is new, I don’t remember that from the last reading. I come to find out this is an all but forgotten preparation for freshly caught wild trout, probably of Alpine origin. The Swiss claim it’s theirs, the French say it's French… these guys are bringing it to NY in the 21st century and they tell a great story too.
Basics. You make a simple, acidic court bouillon. The freshly caught LIVE trout are stunned/killed with a fast, sharp blow to the head. Immediately gutted, they are then cooked for just minutes, depending on size, in the court bouillon. The blue bit comes from a color change to the coating on the trout’s skin while immersed in the acidic court bouillon. It turns — blue (more chemistry).
Light, succulent fish in a beautifully light preparation is telling me you’ll need a similarly beautiful, elegant white wine. Yes indeed, Mrs. Hemingway, it sounds like that Sion white from the Alps would indeed be stunning (pardon the pun) with your trout.
The next moment was this one, from a winter (Thanksgiving to Easter) the Hemingways spent in Austria. They seemed to have such fun! I am so incredibly grateful for their enthusiasm for wine and food, especially on my wintery Saturday morning.
We were always hungry and every mealtime was a great event. We drank light or dark beer and new wines and wines that were a year old sometimes. The white wines were the best…Sometimes for dinner there would be jugged hare with a rich red wine sauce, and sometimes venison with chestnut sauce. We would drink red wine with these even though it was more expensive than white wine.
Rightly so! They should, without any doubt, have had red wine with those meals! Jugged hare is rich. Oh yeah. Tannin (from the red wine) & protein (from the hare) would bind up very happily, allowing the wine’s acidity and fruit to strut their stuff. Beautiful.
Venison is a much more dense meat than hare, so it could bind with a heavier wine. There are many lovely reds in Austria and we have no details what he meant here, but knowing how amazing his instincts were and how enthused they both were about pairing wine and food, I bet those meals were really something.
Shortly after this time, Hadley and Ernest separated and divorced. I think I sensed regret in his words at the end of the book. It did make me sad.
But as I scan back through my notes, the color and joie de vivre he shared about how they ate and drank, especially pairing food and wine with such instinctive brilliance, blows everything else away. No posh restaurants required in Hemingway’s Paris.
There were feasts to be had everywhere. In his own words.
‘This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.’
Now I think I know what I’m going to write.
