"Ruth Reichl - Tender at the Bone V1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reichl Ruth)

"C'est bon, oui?" he asked. I nodded.
The butler appeared with an entire sole on a platter. "The real thing," said Monsieur, as the butler began to bone the large, flat fish. "You will see how simple and delicious this is."
It was not like any fish I had ever tasted. "If all fish were like this," I said, "I would like fish," Monsieur laughed. Madame
looked more sour than before, and I wondered what had made her so unhappy. Then the next course arrived and I stopped thinking altogether.
"What is it?" I asked, looking at what appeared to be a giant Venetian paperweight on a platter. It glistened and gleamed, a dome made entirely of vegetables.
"A chartreuse of partridge," said Monsieur du Croix. "Very few people make it correctly, but our chef is a master."

"It is so pretty it would be a shame to eat it," I said, hoping he would not destroy that beautiful still life of carrots, peas, and beans.
"And a crime not to," said Monsieur du Croix firmly sticking a knife into the dome. "Food is meant to be eaten."
After the chartreuse there was a simple green salad. "We have a greenhouse just for the lettuces," said Monsieur as he mixed it. "And we bring the olive oil and vinegar from France. The meat is very good here, but the olive oil is inedible." He handed the butler a plate of salad to take to his wife.
He turned to me. "Have you ever had a soufflщ?" he asked. I thought about La Belle Aurore, but heard myself saying, "No, never."
I was rewarded with a huge smile. Monsieur turned to his wife and said happily, "What a pleasure, to watch a child eat her first soufflщ!" She inclined her head in regal agreement. He winked at me,
"Close your eyes," he commanded as I took the first bite. I did, and my mouth closed over the hot, fragrant air only to have it disappear at once. But the flavor stayed behind, the chocolate reverberating from one side of my mouth to the other. I took another bite, hoping that I could make the texture last a little. I couldn't, but I kept trying, my eyes closed, until my spoon went back to the plate and found nothing there.
"Do you always eat like this?" I asked Beatrice after we had thanked her mother for dinner and climbed back up to the children's quarters.
"Oh no," she said, "only when I dine with my parents. And that happens very rarely."
But on Sunday the table was once again set for four, and Monsieur du Croix was smiling with anticipatory glee. The first dish was a clear consommщ that tasted as if a million chickens had died to make it. Eating it I suddenly laughed and Monsieur looked quizzically in my direction. I didn't know what to say; I had been thinking of one of my mother's prize dishes, canned consommщ chilled until it jelled, topped with sour cream and supermarket salmon caviar. I had to say something, so I blurted out, "I was wondering what happens when you chill this soup." Monsieur looked to the heavens and exclaimed, "She even thinks like a gourmet!"
"Ris de veau a la financiшre!" he announced next; it was one of the dishes from Aunt Birdie's wedding menu, but I had never tried it. Alice didn't like sweetbreads; "Pancreas!" she'd said, as if the idea were absurd. My stomach twisted a little but I did not want to disappoint Monsieur du Croix and I resolutely picked up my fork, It crunched through the crisp vol-au-vent pastry to skewer a bit of sweetbread. "Who could not like this?" I thought to myself, savoring the softness of the sweetbread against the pastry. "It's wonderful!" I cried.
"You must bring your friend again," said Monsieur du Croix to Beatrice.
"Oui, Papa," she said meekly. As we climbed the stairs to pack she said, "You will come again, won't you?" She said it again, after we were settled on the train. At the very last minute the chauffeur had handed each of us a package. Inside were a dozen pastries far more beautiful than anything we had seen in the pastry shops. "I think my father likes you," said Beatrice simply.
I went back the next weekend, and the weekend after that and then it was just assumed that when Beatrice went home I went with her. We saw very little of her mother, but her father almost always ate with us. He called us "mes deuxfilles," and he set out to please and surprise us at each meal, introducing us to caviar, lobster bisque, marrons glaces.

"What a bore!" said Beatrice, "I wish he were interested in sports." But I had begun to see that her rebellion was just a pose and that she was secretly thrilled to have her father's attention. "Will you help me bake something for his birthday?" she asked, and we began combing through cookbooks, looking for something to please him. "What about a lemon souffle?" I was remembering the recipe from La Belle Aurore.
"Aren't they difficult? He would be so pleased."
I didn't know enough to know that souffles were hard to make, and the recipe Beatrice found was very precise. "I wonder why we are supposed to clean the bowl with lemon?" I asked.

"Because," said Beatrice with authority, "the smallest amount of grease in the bowl will keep the egg whites from whipping proper y.

"How do you know that?" I asked.

She didn't answer. "We have to make sure the top of the souffle dish has no butter on it either," she said smugly. "That way the batter won't slip as it rises." I realized that she had been doing some studying on the sly.

Monsieur du Croix beamed when we carried the souffle into the dining room. Even Madame du Croix smiled. Beatrice went pink with pleasure. "I think that is the first present I've ever given him that he really liked," she said later as we lay in bed. Even in the dark I could hear the smile in her voice.
Having Beatrice as a friend had improved my status at school, And I had learned enough French to start catching up with the class. I spent the first week of May memorizing a Ronsard poem,
and when Madame Cartet called on me in recitation class I began, "Mignonne, allons voir si la rose" and realized, suddenly, that I was going to get it all, every word, correctly. When I finished there was a sigh and I knew that the entire class had been with me, holding its collective breath as the rose faded on the vine. "Vingt!" said Madame Cartet. She actually sounded happy to be giving me a perfect score.

But I wasn't the only one doing my homework. One lunchtime in late May Monsieur du Croix began to talk about the coming summer and his favorite vegetable, the tomato. "No, Papa," said Beatrice, "the tomato is a fruit." Monsieur looked slightly stunned and then said, "I beg your pardon," as he reached out and rumpled her hair.
"You've been studying!" I said as we climbed the stairs. Beatrice blushed. "He's never really talked to me before," she said quietly.
And then, suddenly, it was June. School was over. I spoke French. I could go home.
I wasn't nearly as happy as I had expected to be.
"You're coming back aren't you?" asked Beatrice. I hadn't considered the future, but now I did. I thought about my friends in New York. Jeanie suddenly seemed hopelessly unsophisticated. I thought about our small apartment, with its peeling gold bathtub. I thought about my mother's moods and her poisonous messes.
"Yes," I said, "I'm coming back."

5 - DEVIL'S FOOD

Х And I did go back. But after three years in a French school I was tired of girls and uniforms and Catholic school. Jeanie's letters were filled with the assassination of President Kennedy, civil rights marches, and guys with guitars in Washington Square. She was listening to Joan Baez and going to coffee houses. I wanted to go to a real high school, have a boyfriend, and learn to drive a car. I had visions of sock hops and proms and flirting in the hallway.

My plan was to finish high school in New York, but my mother had different ideas, In one of her more manic phases she sold the house Dad had built in Wilton and bought a different one, on the water, in the next town. "It's a surprise," she said when she presented my father with her fait accompli, "you'll love it." I think Dad hated the house on sight, but he was too polite to say so. He accepted it. What else could he do? My grandmother, the impresario, had paid for the land on which my father's handmade house stood, and the title was in my mother's name.
Our new house was white, with bay windows and an attached garage on a street of proper houses, The kitchen was fully equipped with avocado-green appliances. There was even a dishwasher, something we had never had before. The sprawling living room had wall-to-wall carpeting and a fireplace. The dining room had a view of Long Island Sound. Downstairs there was also a book-lined, pine-paneled den that Mom called "the library," a screened porch shaded by an ancient willow, and my parents' bedroom. Upstairs was my domain.

I think Mom had visions of some cozy mother-daughter relationship, where we would sit in my fluffy pink bedroom and whisper secrets in the dark.