Featured Book Review

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Found Meals of the Lost Generation

Recipes and Anecdotes From 1920s Paris

By Suzanne Rodriguez-Hunter

(Faber & Faber Inc.)

Reviewed by Sybil Sever Kretzmer The Los Angeles Times Book Review Magazine Sunday, March 19, 1995

It is always dangerous for a writer to combine one literary genre with another; frequently one disappoints. Happily in Found Meals of the Lost Generation: Recipes and Anecdotes from 1920s Paris author Suzanne Rodriguez-Hunter successfully weds tempting cookery with a collection of engaging biographical sketches and quotes from many of the better-known writers and artists of the era. This is not an entirely original idea. There are many French cookbooks based on this concept, including Proust: La Cuisine Retrouvée, Colette Gourmand: Recette Originale de Colette and La Table de George Sand all combine personal recipes with literary or biographical references and quotations from their featured authors.

Found Meals was initially inspired by a year Rodriguez-Hunter spent in Paris armed with guidebooks tracing the footsteps of Scott and Zelda and other legendary expatriate residents of Montparnasse, no doubt aided by Noel Riley Fitch’s excellent little handbook Literary Cafes of Paris or perhaps Arlene J. Hansen’s Expatriate Paris: A Cultural and Literary Guide to Paris of the 1920s. It was this experience and subsequent passionate interest in the now quasi-mythic Paris of the 20s that sparked the desire to construct a kind of edible time machine. In lieu of actually sitting down to a meal with Djuna Barnes or Sherwood Anderson, one could at least partake of the same dishes they once enjoyed while communing with their spirits.

Rodriguez-Hunter availed herself of more than 100 biographies, memoirs, letters, and novels, and her research yields abundant references to food and meals of the Moderns from the now-historic banquet thrown by Picasso and Gertrude Stein for Henri Rousseau in 1908, to the exalted Cucumber Sandwiches a la Oscar Wilde served at the weekly salon of Natalie Barney; Kiki’s Boeuf en Daube from her native Burgundy; and the Truite Grenobloise dinner A. J. Liebling shared with his father in 1927 at Maillabuau’s, then one of Paris’ best restaurants. The author devotes each chapter to one or more important expatriate personality, from Antheil to Zelda, with a deftly distilled biography and a relevant, often amusing anecdote or quote relating to an actual meal. Once equipped with a genuine menu, she proceeds with recipes that replicate the meal as authentically as possible.

For example, the memorable trip Ernest Hemingway took with Scott Fitzgerald to Lyon to retrieve a car Scott and Zelda were forced to abandon due to rainstorms, is skillfully recounted down to Fitzgerald’s delicately passing out at the table next to his virtually untouched Poularde de Bresse. The Found Meal recipe accompanying this history is predictably Sauteed Chicken with Morels and a bottle of Montagny. As the Lost Generation was perhaps better known for its consumption of alcohol, it is apt that Rodriguez-Hunter also includes recommended wines and liqueurs for many of the menus, as well as offering cogent advice on choosing and buying caviar, French cheeses and selections of fruit.

The greatest flaw here is the absence of an index of recipes. To find, for instance, Bouillabaisse a la Marseillaise you have to first remember that it is the Found Meal for Zelda Fitzgerald and then search for the corresponding chapter in the table of contents.

With the exception of Alice B. Toklas, the Lost Generation was not particularly known for its culinary contributions. Therefore, in her quest for authenticity, the author has had to rely heavily for source material on cookbooks from the era, namely Chef Pampille’s 1920 Les Bons Plats de France, the 1926 Epicurean Yellow Guide to Paris and Environs, and the 1930 Joy of Cooking. Many recipe sources are not credited at all, but occasionally she does surprise us with Toulouse-Lautrec’s personal recipe for Riz a la Valencienne, Edith Wharton’s Corned-Beef Hash, Virgil Thompson’s Gnocchi, and Charlie Chaplin’s Welsh Rarebit. While they may not qualify as bona fide members of the Lost Generation, they at least share the same time frame.

Anyone reasonably competent in the kitchen should find no problem in following the recipes in Found Meals. Written in true 1920s style, they do not list the ingredients beforehand, nor do they contain references to such newfangled contraptions as food processors, blenders or microwaves. The recipes range from the dead simple Fresh Peaches and Cream (Wash peaches well. Peel. Slice even sections into bowl; cover with fresh cream. Serve.) through the basic Roast Chicken and Mashed Potatoes to the more exotic Escargots a la Bourguignonne with its toe-curling instructions [on] how to purge common garden variety snails to render them edible. (It takes two weeks).

Encompassing the years 1908-1930, Rodriguez-Hunter adroitly covers key expat players: Picasso, Stein, Dos Passos, Joyce, Beach, McAlmon, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Kiki, Man Ray, Natalie Barney, the Murphy’s, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Kay Boyle, et al. Even without any recipes, this little gem of a book stands on its own as an efficient survey of the lives of many of the names we have come to know collectively as the Lost Generation. Whether read as a general introduction to them or just as an enjoyable review, Found Meals brings to life again an era made legendary by a small group of very talented individuals.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all the recipes contained in this work is the one conceived by Jimmie the Barman, a.k.a. James Charters, an ex-Liverpudlian boxer and the most popular bartender in Montparnasse. He knew them all and they followed him from job to job whether he worked at the Dingo, the Jockey, the Hole in the Wall or any of the many other watering holes frequented by the Left Bank crowd. One wonders what he would make of today’s demand for mineral waters. His assessment of contemporary imbibing types is most interesting. Painters and photographers are the heaviest, noisiest drinkers; followed by journalists; the most depressed are sculptors; and most imbibers of white wine are writers. He continues, I must tell you of a cocktail I invented while I was at the Dingo that had a powerful effect on some of the Quarterites...two stiff drinks of it will have some surprising effects!

THE JIMMIE SPECIAL

For two people, combine in a cocktail shaker: 1 jigger cognac, 1/2 jigger Pernod, 1/2 jigger Amer-Picon, 1/2 jigger Mandarin, and 1/2 jigger sweet cherry brandy (kirsch). Shake thoroughly. Drink straight or mix with soda to taste.

On women this drink had the effect of causing them to undress in public, and it often kept me busy wrapping overcoats around nude ladies! But even knowing this did not prevent some of the feminine contingent from asking for the Jimmie Special. I wish I had 100 francs for every nude or semi-nude lady I’ve wrapped up during the best Montparnasse days! For this startling recipe alone, the book should do well.

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