Une tranche de pain bis

Une tranche
de pain bis
(A slice of
brown bread)
William Eaton
Zeteo is Reading
December 2014
L
ast week’s Dirty Cookies concerned savoring the unpalatable. Since then, in a
recent issue of The Brooklyn Rail, I have come across some of Colette’s many
encouragements to savor the rather more palatable. From Mary Ann Caws’s translation, “I
Love Being a Gourmande”:
The real gourmet is the one who takes as much delight in a buttered tartine
as in a grilled lobster, if the butter is a fine one, and the bread well kneaded. .
. . As far as “favorite dishes” are concerned, I prefer . . . everything good,
that makes, at mealtime, a little feast for the papillaries and the mind. One
day, I feel like salads, loving as I do pure olive oil, fruity, and red wine
vinegar that I prepare at home. One day, meat is the thing, in its least
harmful forms, on a charcoal fire, sprinkled with fresh pepper—black, from
the Antilles—with a pinch of ground salt, I certainly didn’t say: sel fin. If the
entrecôte is prepared with parsley, if it has retained a succulent rim of fat, it
doesn’t even need butter. . . .
I refuse the help of the Paris mushroom, for it liquefies the gravy without any
real profit. I banish it from the poulet chasseur, from the sautéed rabbit, from
the filet of veal, that it renders still more pallid. But I smile at it when it is
there alone, bare and rose-tinted, ready to be sautéed in an irreproachable
butter, or grilled, or eaten raw, moistened with oil and lemon. In last
November’s mild weather, I found some edible mushrooms in the grasses of
the bois de Boulogne. Liberated from their leathery skin and consumed right
there, how delicate they were!
I could not help but be reminded, not only of my own Zeteo essay On Savoring,
but also of one of my favorite Colette passages, from her Prisons et paradis:
William Eaton is the Editor of Zeteo. A collection of his essays, Surviving the Twenty-First
Century, will be published by Serving House Books. For more, see Surviving the website.
Une tranche de pain bis, longue d’un pied, coupée à même la miche de douze
livres, . . . noyée dans le lait frais ; un gros cornichon blanc macéré trois jours
dans le vinaigre et un décimètre cube de lard rosé, sans maigre : enfin un
pichet de cidre dur, tiré à la cannelle du tonneau . . . Que vous semble ce
menu ? C’est celui d’un de mes goûters d’enfant. En voulez-vous un autre ?
A foot-long slice of brown bread, cut from a twelve-pound loaf, . . . drowned
in fresh milk; a large white pickle steeped three days in vinegar and a small
cube of pink bacon, not lean; topped off by a little jug of hard cider filled
from the spigot of the barrel . . . What do you think of this menu? It’s the
menu of one my childhood treats. Would you like another?
Credits & Links
The photograph of champignons de Paris (Paris mushrooms) comes from a website on these
mushrooms, which site (last modified 15 octobre 2010) is the work of l’Université Pierre
et Marie Curie. In French. Note that this is the browner variety or “rose tinted”—variété
rosé—of this mushroom, which is often sold in its quite white form (variété blanche). The
site notes, inter alia, that this species of mushroom, Agaric bisporus, is one of the few that
has been cultivated for centuries and that these mushrooms, as seems evident in the
photo, thrive on decomposing organic matter.
Mary Ann Caws, “I Love Being a Gourmande,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 5, 2014.
Colette’s text, in French, first appeared in Paris-Soir, 27 January, 1939, and has been
reprinted in Colette, J’aime être gourmande (L’Herne, 2011), a small volume put together by
Gérard Bonal et Frédéric Maget.
Caws is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the
Graduate School of the City University of New York (where Zeteo was born). Reaktion
Books recently published her The Modern Art Cookbook.
Colette, Prisons et Paradis (Hachette, 1932). In French.
Francophones can also find the “childhood snack” passage in « Lettre adressée à Madame ou
Monsieur Untel, rédacteur en chef d’un journal prestigieux de la France. »
Eaton / Une tranche / Zeteo is Reading / 2