Bras and alimony are going out of style in the name of liberation. My purist friends are forsaking eclairs for the unsulfured prune. All about me, husbands and wives are destroying each other in celebration of honesty and real communication. Disciples of the bicycle faith sneer at one’s wistful fantasies of a dark brown Mercedes-Benz. And yet here I am, bravely, foolishly hopelessly aligned with the arriere-garde, enchanted with the ever-so-lightly tarnished joys of the S.S. France… floating fortress of old-fashioned, unashamed decadence.
Where else in this drearily democratized world can the average salaried Middle American taste the luxury of a Mellon of a Whitney on a mere $180 a day, tips and port tax included? Dear underprivileged affluent over-readers! Here are servants, on tiptoe. Voice your whim. You who are programmed for service with a snarl and a sneer must fight the reflexive flinch. For a few days you are Jacqueline Onassis. Wear paste rubies and let the ship’s laundry iron your pantyhose. Scuffed wedgies disappear, return immaculate. Invisible hands turn down the bedcovers at night, replace a once-used washcloth, snatch a slightly damp towel from your heated rack, plant three apricots in your somewhat ravaged fruit basket.
I suspect I’d go bananas on a round-the-world cruise. But the five-day transatlantic crossing – a fast-eroding tradition – is a perfect measure of decadence. Fly abroad and cruise home slowly, avoiding jet lag, bracing pokily for the culture shock of Manhattan re-entry. If you are in the wondrous intoxication of an illicit adventure or the rich new greening of a long-time love, you can’t possibly grow bored. And for the lovelorn there are ping-pong, squash, swimming, shuffleboard, stock market coaching, sunning, pinball machines, a seizure of teenagers in the discotheque, predictable nightclub acts, French movies without subtitles and mostly gold-plated oldies from Hollywood. First night out it’s “Father of the Bride.” True there is always that heightened potential for erotic intrigue. Alas, the first-class crowd is solidly geriatric. Still, there is a kind of magic… hours – or even a day – mid-ocean where you feel utterly liberated from reality, in sybaritic free fall, attached neither to where you’ve been nor where you are going. When anything is possible… if only for the moment.
But clearly, the most serious athletic action aboard the S.S. France is… eating. After the hysteria and chaos of the first day afloat, the service is impeccable. But the kitchen is curiously, maddeningly two-faced. It can be brilliant. It can be boring.
First crossing. Westbound. First reaction: disappointment. From afar, the ship is enormous, handsome, fantasy realized. Close up it is tacky, 1940 motel moderne. The first class Chambord dining room has been called “the greatest restaurant in the world.” Certainly it takes a kind of greatness to feed 1,400 even from a kitchen the size of Monaco. But the dining room is too bright. The stemless wine glasses are too small. The cheese is marble-cold, marble-solid… the reblochon is not ripe. Lunch an hour out of Le Havre skirts mediocrity: unseasoned lentil soup, eggs aurore with two little dots of black olive pitifully masquerading as truffle, risotto worthy of a prep-school cafeteria, and coq au vin with as much élan as you’d expect to encounter at a Thruway Hot Shoppe. “It’s the first day,” Claude the waiter defends. “They’re all upset.” By dinner the tone has elevated from steam-table to middling Continental. There are seeds in the melon. The salmon, hacked and flopping over the edge of the plate, drips its fine Béarnaise. No generosity of bread or cheese can camouflage the anemia of the onion soup.
There is one hope. The “greatest restaurant in the world,” I have been told, will do anything that whim, craving and gluttony can command. Our table captain, Michel, accepts the special orders soberly, agreeably. He urges we try a quiche for lunch. Quiche, indeed. Hardly an exercise to dazzle the gastronomic saints, but very well… and for dinner, let the kitchen construct a timbale Brillat-Savarin.
First, though, there is breakfast to explore: seeds in the melon again and “fresh-squeezed orange juice” that isn't fresh. (Next morning, the room steward finds a source for the real o.j.) Almost anything ever considered suitable for the breaking of the fast by modern man is on the menu. Portions are paralyzing. Cheese is served in a six-ounce wedge. Ask for apricot jam, gets a quart jug of it. Stinging black coffee comes in a pot with a cup large enough to drown a caffeine addict. If I’d asked for baked Alaska or fettucine, I do not doubt it would have appeared… escorted by a brace of croissants.
The sea is rough but the spirit is cheerier. The quiche is feathery and pleasant, a modest herald of the kitchen’s custom-order skill. And Brillat-Savarin’s timbale is an absolute beauty: moist little brioche garlanded with glazed fruit blossoms, and filled with poached pears in a sea of vanilla sauce, served with apricot puree. Is it possible these whims are being indulged without extra charge? If I demand quail’s eggs and duck’s tongues and foie gras, won’t there we a bill?” “ Absolutely no,” Michel assures me. Imagination thus liberated, nostalgia, curiosity and lust proceed to dictate menus for the meals to come.
Now out of the steamy caverns of the kitchen emerge dazzling architecture and sculpture in ice and sugar, the classic confectionary almost nobody does anymore. Sugar matadors and windmills and snails, three-foot-high pulled-sugar bows in red and green, the branch of a tree with four candy birds perched over candied frivolities.
An order for sorbet au pamplemousse provokes the appearance of a whole grapefruit ringed in a spun sugar nest with stem and leaves of pulled green sugar. Off comes the top to reveal creamy grapefruit ice. A highly specific bombe request – lemon soufflé glacé surrounded by pear ice cream with raspberry puree – inspires a ribbon-edged steeple with eaves of almond crunch topped with a candy rose.
On command the kitchen creates a supreme of guinea hen bedded on a sublime mattress of wrinkled black morels in a puff pastry shell. Or half a monster salmon delicately poached and napped in a sorrel cream – no match for the exquisite sauce of Troisgros in Roanne, but still, good enough on its own. And sweetbreads, rose-rare kidneys and morels in a delicate mustard cream. Communications between kitchen and my gastronomic command center are less than perfect. A bid for soufflé Plaza Athénée brings a sticky blend of ingredients instead of the classic layered duplex – cheese soufflé atop lobster. My yearning to revisit the salade de gastronomes as served at the Pot Au Feu outside Paris – string beans, artichoke blossoms, truffle and foie gras tossed in sherry vinegar and oil – invokes an overwhelming excess of foie gras and truffle. Still I feel I’ve eaten my $180 daily tariff in salad alone that day. A description of Père Bise’s hot pâté en croute is misinterpreted in a giant puff pastry tourte. But what a splendor. Inside are large chunks of boned duck, livers, blanched bacon and a gaudy majesty of truffles. A dozen golf-ball-sized specimens have been trimmed into tender black batons, their cuttings tossed into the Périgueux sauce, surely the “dirtiest” sauce ever created, sheer sludge of truffles.
The chef has apparently never heard about Fernand Point’s vinegar-sauced duck, so he wings it. What a Trimalchian conception. The bird itself, of modest pedigree, is hung with jewels. Elizabeth Taylor at a Rothschild ball. Not a diamond left behind in the vault. Fluted lemon and truffle rounds are strung along a decorative attelet piercing the bird’s rump. Surrounding the breast – delicate quenelles of chicken, precise timbales of foie gras mousse, one marked with a truffle star, another with a star of carrot. The sauce is subtly tart and the plates so grossly overloaded, it is several minutes before my fork stumbles on the ultimate bauble: a pastry puff filled with apple.
“Even Claude is impressed,” I note. Claude the waiter, ever the pessimist, is embarrassed to be caught in the vice of pride. “Life is life,” he shrugs. “When they make it for 1,000 it’s never as good as when they make it for two.” Bluntly candid Claude. His faith in the kitchen is minimal. “You won’t like it,” he will say if I ask about a particular dish on the menu. At one lunch I issue so many custom orders, there is no hope of working in the plat du jour, bouillabaisse. “Nothing to get upset about,” he cheers me. Against his dour warning, I order chestnut pudding, and it proves to be a boring sponge with elusive chestnuts. “You’re always right, Claude,” I salute him. “Alas,” he agrees. And sighs.
As brilliant as the kitchen can be when provoked, the daily fare remains fiercely mundane: soggy vegetables, bland soups, zestless sauces. There is caviar, every night if you ask for it. Once the France offered giant sturgeon eggs. Now we nibble the tiniest seed pearls. And where is the stunning cold buffet of grandeur days? Is the hard edge of restaurant economics or a passion to cater to Americans’ beef-and-potato tastes? Where are the half-dozen terrines and pâtés that used to tempt each evening? “Are the peas fresh?” I ask Claude. “It couldn’t be,” he replies. “Of course it could be,” I protest. “Peas are in season.” It could be but it won’t be,” he amends. No fresh peas. No raspberries. All out of fresh strawberries by the fourth day. Yes, there are a few menu-listed successes. Still, the kitchen’s single greatest exaltation is producing daily the most perfect petits pains ever encountered.
For the wine lover, there is the same ambivalence: modest prices and great depth of choice (plus table wines on the house) but nothing particularly exciting, nothing to be dazzled by.
Two days out of Le Havre, I scheduled the ultimate challenge for the final evening afloat: the great pot-au-feu of Dodin-Bouffant, sensualist hero in the Brillat-Savarin style from “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff. Dodin, plump and celebrated voluptuary – to him an ardent kiss and a silken bosom are second only to a river fish en daube with pistachios – has been the honored guest at an ossifyingly vulgar banquet staged by the Crown Prince of Eurasia. Resolved to teach the Prince a lesson in manners and taste, Dodin offers a dinner of daring simplicity… a mere six courses with boiled beef as the entrée. The regulars at Dodin’s table are seized with “a cold, cruel embarrassment.” The prince is insulted. Boiled beef… a dish for the servants. But this “fearsome boiled beef, so scorned, reviled, insulting to the Prince and to all gastronomy” was to prove an astonishment.
Michel takes the order to the kitchen. Sadly he reports there is no mention of such a dish in all the ship’s reference library. Each day of the voyage he grows gloomier. But at noon before the deadline day, he glows. “I have it,” he cries. Was the kitchen going to bluff us? Or had someone been clever enough to cable Paris for a reading from the Passionate Epicure? Tomorrow we would see.
Five adventurers join me for the anticipated astonishment. Dinner begins with a robust broth, not the “masterful sonata” of Dodin’s simple little dinner (“da Vinci tenderness, Ribera brutalities, Greuze-like charm”) with cream of carp’s roe in artichoke bottoms and rissole of shrimp tails laced in cheese… but then I hadn’t specifically commanded that soup. This broth had character and floating dumplings in herb-flecked marrow. At Michel’s urging, there is a fish course – the France’s specialty, turbot stuffed with mousse of lobster, garnished with giant medallions of tenderest lobster. Dodin would have blanched at the overkill. But now the mythic pot-au-feu, triumphantly held high, is lowered for the presentation. There are thin slices of beef larded with blanched bacon, boiled veal, boned suprême of chicken stuffed with a herb-scented marrow forcemeat, fine moist country sausage, all on a foundation of foie gras, with carrots and turnips, horseradish-scented cream and pedestrian tomato sauce. Dodin’s boiled beef, only slightly exaggerated. Triumph for the kitchen. A restless night and not-quite-painless dreams for the greedy challenger.
Next morning there is no rush at all for pampered first class passengers. Baggage handlers wait patiently in the corridor to collect your gear. There is breakfast in the dining room for those with stamina. Feet touch the reality of the 44th Street pier. One’s immediate fate is entrusted to an unsmiling longshoreman whose idea of decadence cannot possibly mesh with mine. The customs inspector sniffs my herbs of Provence. “What exactly’s in here?” He wants to know. I feel faint as he inspects a tin of boar pâté. I shall never eat again. Never. Not for days. Maybe I’ll take a vitamin pill now and then, perhaps, a tuna fish sandwich. At six o’clock that evening I find myself blissfully consuming hot and sour soup at the Harbin Inn. What a splendid renaissance. How like a phoenix.
Click here for Vintage Listings Page.