Ingredients for disaster

National Review, Dec 2, 1991 by Dibgy Anderson

WHAT TO DO when your hosts give you salad at the beginning of dinner? Leave immediately. The same with soup.

I mean, of course, either green salad or those dreadful hotchpotch salads with tomato, lettuce, bean sprouts, alfalfa, kidney beans, sweet corn (considered cattle food in France), and a thousand and one other things, all dripping in any dressing except olive oil and wine vinegar, topped with packet pseudo-croutons and served in children's bowls. And by "soup" I mean minestrone, tomato, or those weird whitish ones which taste the same when they are supposed to be chicken as when they are called clam chowder. I do not mean bouillabaisse or zarzuela, which aren't soups in the same sense at all, or first courses using "salad" ingredients: tonno e fagioli with raw purple onions; anchovies, basil, and tomato; or even authentic "composed" dishes such as salade Nigoise with tomatoes, grated carrot, eggs, tuna, anchovies, potatoes, and olives.

But why leave? The soups and hotchpotch salads are not that unpleasant (though the dressings are), just very dull. And the green salads can even be enjoyable. Why not endure them until a better course arrives? Because it won't. Anyone who serves these soups and salads at the start of dinner will serve worse things later and anyway will turn out to be a gastronomic subversive of little taste and no manners, a person seething with black ingratitude toward his Maker and his ancestors.

I exaggerate? Consider "subversive" first. The proper place for green salad is after the fish and meat and before dessert and cheese. It is not difficult to make, so there is little excuse for a badly made green salad. But there is no excuse for serving it in the wrong place. This order was established by our betters. To change it is to subvert order. The next thing a subversive will do is start serving fruit with salad at the beginning of a meal or declaring that courses don't matter and why not bring it all on and let each guest help himself in the order he prefers?

But, second, and much more important, anyone who thinks dishes should be tolerated on the grounds that they are bearably dull and not positively offensive has failed to understand what eating in meals, orderly meals in courses, is all about.

This is crucial, so let me spell it out slowly: it is wrong to start dinner with dull salads and soups because every time you do so you are rejecting 120 other splendid dishes with which you could have started. Take two letters of the alphabet at random, A and S. Every time Shirley and Martin serve their guests dull salad or soup, they are preventing them from eating: aubergines roasted, peeled, and mashed with olive oil and garlic, or in beignets, or in ratatouille, or with mozzarella and parmesian; anchovies in pastry or stuffed with spinach or with oil and dried chilis; artichokes with melted butter or oil; asparagus with vinaigrette, with tarragon-flavored cream, in pastry, or with ham; all manner of aspic dishes-do you begin to see the point?-shrimp fried in olive oil or with brandy; salt herrings; sardines opened, flattened, and done with tomato in the oven; sea urchins; scallops; shark marinated in vinegar and fried in slivers; salsify in lemon and oil; salmon roe, raw with lemon. Every time someone bends over the soup tureen with the ladle, he turns his back on all the assorted charcuterie of France, her salamis and those of Italy and Spain, Serrano hams, salted and smoked meats and fishes, and all shellfish-the oysters, mussels, lobsters, crabs, the wonderful squid and other cephalapod dishes-and the tens of recipes for land snails, not just those cooked in rather tedious Burgundy fashion but in tomato or almond sauces, or with anchovies and pine nuts.

The moment the host thrusts his vulgar chrome and glass tongs into the hotchpotch salad and tosses it to ensure no one shall escape his ghastly sweet dressing, he throws back in his Maker's face all the best things of creation and spits on the traditions which much better men than he worked to perfect. Once he has started on this path of black ingratitude, arrogance, and vile contempt for excellence, it is but a short pace to that condition which is logical consequence and last result of such vices-vegetarianism.

Are you beginning to understand the enormity of the offense? Then look at its awful ramifications. They are worse. It is not just a matter of a dull course. It is the central problem of how to fit all the good dishes there are into the few meals and courses we have. A trawl of the better cookbooks will reveal, as I say, more than 120 first courses no serious cook or gastronome would want to go without for more than a few months, somewhat over a hundred fish courses, and well over two hundred meat, game, and poultry. Then there are vegetable dishes, egg dishes, pastas, risottos, salads (in their right place), cheeses, desserts. Many of them I could not go even weeks without. Can you imagine having eels only six times a year or waiting three months between kidneys?