The Table Comes First Read online

  Is this not the way big change often happens in all the arts? A composite, hybrid, open-ended, and eclectic thing, is soon treated as though it were a closed grammar, systematic and finished, only to be revealed later to have been a splendid mess all along. (Jackson Pollock’s spatters and pourings only latterly assume the utter precision and harmony we are directed to observe in them; the chaos one beholds on first glance is not entirely or even mostly an illusion. It was part of the intention.) It is the job of artists, including cooks and painters, to make whatever they can of whatever matter lies at hand. Then it is the job of critics to pretend that what looks like chaos is really closed order. (Clement Greenberg, the American art critic, had to take Pollock’s spatters and pourings, applied intuitively, and make them look like a logical culmination of everything that had ever happened in painting.) And then it falls to scholars later on to show that what looks closed was really just as chaotic as it first seemed: that American painting, or French cooking, is a mix of sixteen different things and eighteen different impulses, and anyway, was not the same in 1808 as it was in 1819. (This gives generations of critics and scholars work and keeps us off the streets, leaving the next generation of cooks and artists to do their work in relative peace.)

  Yet the story of the birth of the French restaurant cannot be well told without the twin story of its Sancho Panza, the French café. The history of the café and the restaurant are no less intertwined than the history of the bed and the table; both entanglements represent a passage subtle and not always easily traced, then or now. In the best study of that history, From Taverns to Bistros: The History of Cafés, a French scholar named Luc Bihl-Willette identifies at least six distinct features that separated the restaurant from the café, though some seem more metaphysical than concrete.

  It does seem sure that the modern café was born by government decree. One of the first laws made by the National Assembly after the revolution was one passed in 1789 that simply made it legal to sell coffee and wine and spirits in the same place—for the first time a drinking shop, where alcohol was sold, could be a place where other things to ingest were sold as well. We have been conditioned by Edmund Burke and his followers to think of the French Revolution as only a scary, top-heavy Utopian folly, and forget that it had its libertarian aspects, too. For the moderate Girondins, economic liberty was a crucial part of revolutionary liberty; Adam Smith was a new god France should worship. Monopoly was the enemy. Where, before the revolution, the selling and serving of food was bound around by archaic rites and privileges—only certain guilds could make breads; others pastries; still others sell tea and coffee; these aristocrats had the monopoly on salt, those on molasses—the revolution deregulated all that, and allowed, with modest momentousness, the neighborhood café, and, soon, the ordinary restaurant, to sell spirits and caffeine at the same place and time.

  This helped the restaurant to become what it was and is. First, of course, by encouraging the entrepreneur, but also by mixing up the goods, and particularly by mixing up the two liquids of coffee and wine. For modern restaurant cooking is first and foremost a boat that, as in a Saul Steinberg drawing, steams its way downriver from the thousand dreamy islands of alcohol to the wide beckoning current of caffeine, from the stress-busting drink to the reawakening demitasse. A modern French meal not including both (even if the caffeine sometimes takes the degenerate form of tea, and the alcohol of spirits) is impossible to imagine. Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners. A modern meal is a drama unfolding between the Opening Drink and the Concluding Coffee, with the several acts passing between the libations.

  And, without strong coffee and red wine, it isn’t possible to have good restaurants. Though it is hard to tell the restaurant from the café in following the restaurant’s semi-occult history, a case can be made that the café was the more original of the two inventions, or at least the more singular: around 1900, there were thirty thousand cafés in Paris, and fewer than six thousand in London—and it is hard to know how many of those in London were true cafés, and how many mere tea shops. On the other hand, when it came to the “drinking shops,” early bars, there was one for each one thousand potential drinkers in London, eleven to one thousand in Paris. The café was a civilizing institution, whose name guaranteed, or suggested, a genuine ward against alcoholism. The grand café of the Paris boulevards, like the proper restaurant, was always a source of wonder to English people, as it was to Americans.

  Yet though joined at the hip, the temperamental difference between the two was real. The restaurant belongs to its cook. You come to eat, and though, as Brillat-Savarin saw, anyone can eat there, still you come to eat. Four pistoles are not nothing. The café, though, belongs to its habitués, and pleasure can be rented for the price of a coffee. We do not all feel equally at home within it; the newcomer to the quartier gets uneasy looks from the chess players at their usual table. But at the ritzy restaurant the awkwardness of the nouveau riche who has money in his pocket though not yet the rules of conduct graven in his heart is part of the comedy (and pathos) of urban modernity. (In Chaplin’s early masterpiece The Immigrant, Charlie as a recently arrived Jew knows some of the rules of the new American grand café—that you applaud when the music ends—but not others that don’t apply back where he comes from: for instance, that you should not ever, under any circumstances, eat with your knife.)

  That the double presence of coffee and wine is necessary to “force” the restaurant, as the seeded underbrush is necessary to force the trees, is made plain when you see what happens in places—Ireland and England—where you drink your drink in one place and take your coffee in another: it’s a recipe for alcoholism, bad coffee, and a weak restaurant culture. (It was only after the proliferation of the espresso bar and the wine bar that London cooking began, thirty years ago, to become first rate.)

  French cooking was made not merely in the space between caffeine and alcohol but in the simultaneous presence of both, thus blending, in sequence, the two drugs by which modern people shape their lives. Good food takes place in the head space between them. Most modern people use these drugs in some guise at one dose or another, but some of the primacy of Paris as a restaurant town surely has to do with its first having perfected the proportions and the form of each one. Modern life is regulated by these drugs, morning to night—one speeding us up, and one slowing us down. (The rock-and-roll-age equivalents, cocaine and pot, do the same work for another generation—do it more hysterically, but do the same work.) The British variants, tea and whisky or beer, are separated, by tradition and perhaps by necessity, in space and time: the four o’clock tearoom and the ten o’clock pub. (In the American diner, the two shaping drugs are caffeine and sugar—a cup of joe and a piece of pie.)

  The decree of 1789 not only provided the French restaurant meal its fluids; it gave it its form. It was then that the system of alcohol began—fortified wines began to be drunk at the end of meals rather than right through. The wine began to be rated, blossoming into the greatest triumph of the French genius for systematization, the classification of Bordeaux in 1855. None of this happened quickly. The evidence for the introduction of the trou normand, the shot of spirits in between courses, for instance, is very shaky until our own time. But everyone noted that it was a new thing in France to drink sweetened coffee at night, at the end of meals, as a stimulant and digestif.

  Alcohol, as Malcolm Gladwell has reminded us, is above all a myopic drug: it forces the imbiber’s attention ever more narrowly upon what’s in front of him. It closes us off and isolates us, that’s its odd charm. (And its special danger. You can see only the boy or girl in front of you—but not the truck bearing down on the side road.) A little glass of wine, and all there is in the world is the date and the table—or often, in lonely moments, the bar and the bartender—but the world and its stresses flee for a moment into a vague blur of the background.

  Caffeine, on the other hand, is a far-sighted drug. Several sips of café noir and the sipper feels char
ged up, the corners of the café gleam, and we look around the room, ready to take on the world again. We read while we drink coffee, romance while we drink wine. Coffee, one might say, is a flow drink, wine a focus drink. Focused, we can let our attention wander; feeling in the flow, we can happily try to focus once again. By a familiar mental or merely chemical trick, we dose ourselves with one drug to get our brains to produce the opposite effect: our tongues burn intolerably as we eat capsaicin, which is the hotness in hot peppers, and so the brain overproduces its own opiates, to compensate. The pleasure of spicy food is a trick we play on our inner junkie. Wine, though clinically a depressant, forces us to feel happy for no reason; as we sink, we search for pleasure. Coffee, though a stimulant that should propel us out of our seat, lets us concentrate more fiercely on the task at hand. (Good writers have often been drunks, but none has written well while drunk; the drinking is an escape from the pressing pain of concentration—awareness—fueled by coffee through the working day.) Wine takes us from the world, and coffee restores us to it again. In between, we eat.

  A restaurant meal, in 1789 as now, is really a short sonata in head fuels. Without the drinks, we could hardly find our hungers. Wine “depresses” and narrows the buzzing room until we feel happily alone, on our own little island. Without it, a restaurant can feel as unbearably crowded as a subway car. After the meal (then as now richer in a restaurant than at our own home, and more lulling in its fullness and richness), coffee reawakens us to the world—the room’s walls press outward again. If there is a tiny bit of salt in the coffee—an old French trick—the enhancement is even greater. The walls recede, the door opens, and the night beckons us on.

  The café and restaurant have their interplay in history, but they also had one that went on every night. In Henry Murger’s mid-century Scènes de la Vie de Bohème—the novel that gave us La Bohème, and which is also the best memorial of ordinary food life in early-nineteenth-century France—the “Bohemians,” artists and writers, all go out to dinner after the hero, Rodolphe, suddenly comes into money. Significantly, they go to one of those “exotic” Provençal restaurants, this one on the Rue Dauphine, “well known for its aioli and for the literary tastes of its waiters,” but eat there only moderately, since they have plans for a late supper, too. Only after their restaurant dinner do they go to their pet café, the Café Momus, where “from that day the establishment became uninhabitable for the rest of the patrons.” There, they have coffee and liqueurs. The restaurant belongs to food, and to its waiters; the café to caffeine, and to its patrons. The two together, like scrub oak and driftwood in a beach resort, make the landscape of the modern food town.

  Brillat-Savarin saw this—that coffee, once a breakfast drink alone, had, in the era of the restaurant, come into general use “after dinner as an exhilarating tonic.” Grimod, too, recognized the essential alliance of the two elements. “It would now be unthinkable to invite guests to the simplest of meals were there not two or three liquors flanking the coffee pot,” he said. In the café first, and in the restaurant later, the marriage of the two true fuels was made, and modern life began.

  * * *

  Beyond all this—beyond even the life of the lewd hanger, the marriage of the two modern drugs, the merging of faraway cooking styles into one idea of “French food,” beyond the spirits flanking the coffeepot and the advent of the Opening Drink and the Concluding Coffee—there was a world of writing and thought in Paris then that made the new thing, the restaurant, happen. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, in a path-making article on the invention of gastronomy in nineteenth-century France, borrows the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of a social “field” as the unit of social life to explain why Paris became the place where dining first happened.

  This idea of a social “field” seems opaque until one sees that it is not really far from what we already call in common speech “a scene.” There is, for instance, a fine French bakery in the little American seaside town where I am writing this, started there by a couple of émigré Frenchmen, but there is no food scene. The shop will live and die, thrive or fail, together with the two Frenchmen who planted it. A bakery in New York, on the other hand, will be replaced by another, perhaps a better one. Or we might say, “There are a couple of good rep cinemas in Philadelphia, but there’s really no movie scene,” meaning a crowd of critics, commentators, loyal fans. There can be good basketball players in a city and no basketball “culture,” no scene, and a good jazz scene in places that few jazz players actually come from. A field is really just the fancy name for a scene. The scene most often conjures up the object of its desires. In London in the 1970s, for instance, good writing about food happened before the food did: a scene emerged before there was a subject. There were places to eat all throughout Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. There had to be. But there was a restaurant scene in Paris alone.

  One thing that makes culinary history, the story of how people used to make and eat food, different from other kinds of stories about the past is that it has as its object something that still goes on every day for everyone—eating is the great democratic equalizer, like breathing, more even than sex is—and at the same time it also goes on particularly, in weird or expensive ways, for a handful of people. It is as if in the history of culture everyone in every city in every age were painting three pictures a day: separating common history from “art history” would then become very hard. They were eating just as often, cooking and spicing their meals just as precisely to the tastes of the people about to eat, in Bulgaria in 1790 as they were in Paris. But in Paris, and only in Paris, was there yet a real food scene—a mass of critics, diners, chefs, and above all writers who were talking and writing about food in new ways. They didn’t eat more in Paris. They couldn’t. But they did talk about it more than they did in other places, and then wrote about the things they said.

  This may seem to make more of the role of writers than one should. What do you mean… they wrote their food? But it happens all the time. Studying the growth of American baseball at the beginning of the twentieth century, the great sabermetrician Bill James once pointed out that you can’t really separate what Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb were doing from what Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner were publishing. The growth of the sports page made the growth of sports possible; the baseball writers made what we think of as baseball. We sense that the two are different and we should, since what the cook or the first baseman does is harder than what critics and columnists do. But you need both to get high-order accomplishment. It was the scene that gave birth to the restaurant, as much as the restaurant that gave birth to the scene. It takes a scene to make a world.

  What made the food scene spring up in Paris? What made the writers critique food instead of love or life or pure reason? Older histories, as we’ve seen, tend to put the “creative” moment a little too late, and say that chefs were pushed out from the aristocratic houses as the mouths they fed were lost along with the heads around them, and, desperate to make a living, they opened restaurants. But no one, however desperate, starts a business without perceiving an unmet demand; a place to sell food for money would never have opened if the interest wasn’t there to start.

  Historians now tend to put their finger on a few linked causes for the new “field.” First, and most important, though easy to forget, was the end of famine in France. We take the fact of plenty now so much for granted that the press of scarcity can strike us as charming, or even, at times, enviable: how they must have enjoyed having strawberries only in season, a steak once a month. And if they missed a season or couldn’t get a steak, all the more relish when they finally had it! In truth, starvation was, through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, a constant fear, a yearly specter in Europe. As Ferguson writes, “Cyclical famines had ravaged the continent for centuries.” New methods of farming; new means of distribution, instanced by the growth of central city markets; and, above all, the end of the feudal order, with its monopolies of gra
in and other goods, resulted (in most places, at most times, for most people) in, at last, enough to eat throughout Europe. The first need for those who want to reflect on the meaning of lunch is the certainty of having dinner. Though there were periods of hunger through the revolution, they were only periods. There were still famines, during the Terror, but people thought of them as discrete crises because they didn’t happen all the time. Bad and cruel things still happened, but France, at least, was now a country of relative plenty.

  Scarcity creates sanctions; abundance encourages altruism. When your plate is empty, you are inclined to see eaters as sinners; when your plate is full, gluttony looks fine. In a Catholic country like France, the new plenty helped promote a more relaxed idea of pleasure. The second change, linked to the end of famine, was that enjoying food for its own sake came to be regarded not as an instance of gluttony but a virtue of its own. So the sudden release from the bonds of guilt creates an exhalation of pleasure. “Luxury” suddenly looks like life. Voltaire wrote a poem about this change called “The Man of the World,” in which he tries to show that everything once called superfluous can be seen as truly needed. Once we accept more than subsistence living, which needs are on the money, which over the top? The pace of freedom quickened, so that by the time that Eugène Sue’s novel The Seven Deadly Sins appeared, in 1848, he could argue that the “sins” are not deadly at all, that they are in truth blessings—and gourmandise one of the best among them. All the people in Sue’s imaginary family are in the food business—butcher, baker, fishmonger, food importer—and they all come together in the end to celebrate the good things that come from a life devoted to what would have once been called gluttony. From seeing the table as the enemy of virtue to pressing the glutton button at will—few alterations in human consciousness have been larger, or taken place over less time. It was a world changing its mind, as much as cooks changing places, that made Paris the capital of food, and caused the invention of the thing that we call French cooking.