The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier (6 page)

After watching her dress, I forced myself to do the same.

“Would you like anything before you go?”

“How about a little Gruet?” she suggested.

An excellent suggestion it was.

Gruet offers a Grande Reserve, a Grand Rose, a Blanc de Blancs, an Extra Dry, a Brut, a Demi Sec, a Sauvage and a Blanc de Noirs. They are all excellent. But I sometimes worry that they may be offering too many varieties and will run short of grapes to make enough Blanc de Noir, the house champagne at Café Schuze.

The December 31
^st
issue of the Albuquerque Journal carries a list of the most important events of the year. In 1983, that list included the election of Margaret Thatcher, one of those women who defy Susannah’s stereotype of women not being dictatorial.

But in my view, the most important event in 1983 was a family vacation – the Gruet family of Bethon, France came to New Mexico.

I assume they enjoyed their holidays; most visitors to the Land of Enchantment do. But in addition to vacation events, they also discovered inexpensive high-altitude land with sandy soil where the temperature at night drops over thirty degrees, perfect for cooling the grapes and slowing their maturation process. Perfect for making champagne.

The vineyards are located along what the conquistadores called the Jornada del Muerto, which you can probably translate even if you don’t speak Spanish. It was a ninety-mile stretch of the Camino Real feared by early Spanish travelers because of the lack of water. Draft animals and people often died of thirst. Others were killed by Apaches.

Today you can drive to the area in an air-conditioned car on a paved road that leads to Ted Turner’s Armendaris Ranch where you can see grazing buffalo, antelope, and oryx. I don’t know if people eat oryx... oryxes? oryxi? But it is a handy word if you like crossword puzzles.

We took our champagne in my patio. Geronimo was with Martin, so we didn’t have to worry about him trying to lick the flutes. He loves Gruet as much as I do.

“I wish I could stay,” she said.

“You can.”

She smiled. She has a small pursed mouth with ample lips on which she wears clear gloss. “I need to be home just in case. And I’m not sure we could sleep together in a single bed,” she added coyly.

“It accommodated us well enough this evening.”

She smiled even more broadly. “What we did this evening required us to be as close together as possible.”

“Even closer,” I said.

She giggled. “Sleeping might require more space. Or maybe you could get a larger bed.”

“Maybe I could.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Or maybe you’d prefer a second single?”

“Why another single?”

“My first husband wanted two singles. He said he was too light a sleeper to get a restful night with another person in the bed.”

The phrase ‘first husband’ jingled in my head like a coin dropping in a vending machine.

“I’m a very sound sleeper,” I said.

She lifted her glass and I clinked my flute against hers.

After we drained the last of our glasses, she took my hand and tugged me close. “I can stay a little longer if you like.”

“I like,” I replied.

I slept very soundly after she left.

15

I didn’t awake until ten Monday morning, too late to fix breakfast. So after showering and dressing, I drove to the nearest Blake’s and bought a #7, their breakfast burrito with chorizo, potatoes, onions and chile verde.

I ate the burrito on the way to Santa Fe and arrived at Schnitzel just as lunch was being served. It was Schokogugelhupf, which I learned later was a sort of chocolate Bundt cake. I could have burned off the calories from its chocolate, butter, and golden icing sugar simply by trying to pronounce it, but it didn’t seem a fitting dessert for a Blake’s burrito, so I went to my work area.

I mixed a simple slurry using thirty units each of the grolleg, calcium carbonate, and barium carbonate, ten units of flint, four of titanium dioxide, and a small amount of water to get the consistency right. I was planning to do a test firing to see how the glaze looked on the clay.

I was busy placing the chemicals back on the shelf and mentally noting how much of each I had used when Alain Billot, the sous chef, came to  see me.

Billot’s pointed chin and aquiline nose gave him a cubist look. His light brown hair was tousled, his eyes clear and bright.

“I have come for the interview Mr. Molinero wants me to have with you,” he said rather stiffly in a French accent, his arms folded behind his back. Then he smiled and brought his hands to his front. He was holding a sack.

“I noticed you did not eat the lunch. Very wise. I have brought a lunch we may share, a croque monsieur.”

I thanked him and told him I didn’t know what a croque monsieur is.

“It means ‘crisp mister’, crisp because it is fried and mister perhaps because it was the lunch of the working men. I suppose you Americans would call it a grilled ham and cheese sandwich.”

I took a bite of the half sandwich he had given me. It was delicious and surprising.

“This has green chile in it!”

“Oui. It is good, no?” His accent was heavy but he seemed to relish speaking English. His vocabulary was excellent except for colloquial phrases which he tended to mangle.

“It’s great. But I suspect Cordon Bleu would not approve of the green chile,” I said.

“Au contraire. French cooking has always been based on local ingredients. During the days of the Empire, we incorporated the ingredients of Tahiti, Quebec, Africa, Viet Nam, and the Caribbean. I believe the New Mexico chile marries well with Gruyère.”

It did indeed. We ate our sandwiches and talked of food.

“Will this be on the menu?” I asked Billot.

He laughed. “No, everything is to be genuine Austrian cuisine. Tell me, Mr. Schuze, do you think the people of your state will like the Austrian dishes?”

“Please call me Hubie. An Austrian restaurant anywhere else in New Mexico would fail, but Santa Fe is not like the rest of the state. The Opera here is sold out every year. In Roswell or Farmington, getting people to listen to Mozart would require a firearm.”

“I sympathize with them. I much prefer Bizet. Will the people try the food here?”

“Probably. Santa Feans have an openness to the new. Maybe they’ll try it and like it.”

He shook his head. “I do not think they will like it.”

“Why?”

“I have eaten in the restaurants and cafes here. Even the ones that do not serve traditional New Mexican food have the local terroir. The corn, tomatoes, squashes, and chiles have the freshness of the desert. This works to balance the starch. Even the meat is light because of the slow cooking methods. Austrian food is dark and heavy, like Mozart’s Requiem.”

“If you don’t like Austrian food—”

“Why do I work here? Because I am traveling your country to learn about the food, and Santa Fe is on the list of cities with the best restaurants. This was the only job available. I will stay for a while. Then I go to Seattle.”

“And after you have been to all the cities on your list?”

A big smile lit is face. “I will return to France and start an American restaurant.”

After he left, I speculated that the sandwich was the real reason for his visit. He struck me as the sort of person who would do such small acts of kindness. I thought Molinero’s talk of inspiration was nonsense, but I began to realize that I was in fact drawing inspiration from the staff. Alain Billot’s appreciation of New Mexican ingredients and even Arliss Mansfield’s gentle incompetence were shaping my thinking about the final product. I’ve always said I’m an artisan, not an artist. I know how to work with clay, and I do dead-ringer copies. But for the first time, I began to hope I did have a creative side. I wanted my design to be special.

16

When Molinero introduced Raoul Deschutes as the poissonnier, I assumed the term didn’t mean what it sounded like. Deschutes announced the meal would be Gebackener Karpfen. I was avoiding M’Lanta Scruggs and had taken a seat next to Jürgen Dorfmeister who was Austrian.

“Fried carp,” whispered Dorfmeister. I would rather have poison, I thought to myself. I exited the dining room and went out to the loading dock to get some fresh air.

Dorfmeister showed up a minute later. “What’s wrong? You don’t like fried carp?”

He had a massive head with shaggy black hair, leathery skin, a red bulbous nose, and a big soft belly. He looked like the Santa from the wrong side of the tracks.

“I’ve never eaten carp, and I never will.”

“I had it growing up,” he said. “Otherwise, my childhood was happy,” he added and laughed.

He lit a cigarette, and I moved a couple of feet away from him.

“Will it bother you if I smoke?”

“Not so long as the smoke doesn’t come my way.”

He held the cigarette aloft and observed its smoke stream. “The winds seem to favor you tonight.” He laughed at his joke then said, “I know it’s unhealthy, but I breathe smoke all day. I figure I’d rather get lung cancer from something I enjoy than from the grilling fumes.”

“So you are the grill cook.”

“Yes. That pompous ass Kuchen insists on calling me the grillardin. But grill cook is correct.” He looked at his cigarette lovingly and took a long draw. Then he looked up at me. “I am a man of large appetites, Schuze. I love red wine and scotch – not together of course.” He chuckled. “I love meat, so I love my job. The only time I don’t like my job is when I have to grill fish. I hate fish. But this is no problem in an Austrian restaurant. The carp is fried and the trout is smoked, so scaly creatures rarely come to my station.” He crushed out the cigarette between his fingers and dropped it into a pocket in his chef pants. “Tell me about yourself. You are from New Mexico?”

“Yes, Albuquerque, about an hour south of here.”

“You drive back and forth every day?”

“No, Molinero is paying for me to stay in a hotel.”

“Does it have a bar?”

“Yes.”

He threw his arm around my shoulders. “Then let us go.”

I didn’t see any way to say no, and he was an interesting guy whose company would be preferable to an empty hotel room. And since the bar was non-smoking, being with him would not be a hazard. Or so I thought.

When we got in the Bronco, he flipped a cigarette out of the pack, rolled down the window, and reached for the lighter only to find it was missing. Then he started looking in his pockets, I assumed for his own lighter.

“You can’t smoke in my car,” I told him.

“What if I sit in the back with the window down?”

I hit the button that lowers the rear window behind the back seats.

He turned when he heard the noise and saw the window’s location. “You expect me to sit behind the seats?”

“If you’re going to smoke.”

“The bar in your hotel allows smoking?”

“No.”

“I feared as much.”

He exited the vehicle, walked around to the back, lowered the tailgate and climbed in. “For this humiliation, you must buy the first round.”

He lit a cigarette. I drove us to the La Fonda. As we made our way from the parking garage to the hotel, he squeezed in one last cigarette.

I ordered a glass of Gruet. Jürgen ordered Glenmorangie single malt scotch neat – no ice, no soda, no water. According to the label, the stuff was handcrafted by the Sixteen Men of Tain. Judging by how much the bar charged for it, all sixteen of them must be millionaires.

“Why did you call Kuchen a pompous ass? Didn’t you come here with him from Austria?”

He downed half of his scotch in a single gulp. “No. My father died when I was four. I scarcely remember him. When I was ten, my mother married a minor functionary at the American Embassy. A year later we moved to Washington.”

“The man your mother married was named Dorfmeister?”

He laughed loudly. “No, his name was Duncan. He never adopted me, so I remained Dorfmeister, which I prefer.”

After the initial large slug of scotch, Jürgen switched to sipping. I asked him if it bothered him that Duncan hadn’t adopted him.

“I knew nothing of these things. He was my mother’s husband. He paid the rent and provided the food, and she seemed to like him. Looking back, she had no skills, so landing an American was good for her. We lived a boring middle class life. My mother’s only interests were domestic, and my father seemed to have no interests at all. I suppose his work may have occupied him well, but he never spoke of it. I wanted to do something, so I started cooking at home. It was the only thing my mother and I ever had in common. I left on my sixteenth birthday, and my cooking has been a passport to see the world.” He turned to the bartender. “Barman, another scotch please and some snack worthy of my friend’s champagne.”

The bartender brought another glass of amber liquid for Jürgen and two bowls of pistachios. These strange green nuts have become all the rage since several enterprising individuals began growing them in the Tularosa Basin in the southern part of the state. I popped one in my mouth and discovered it had green chile flavoring. I wondered if there was anything New Mexicans wouldn’t put green chile on.

We enjoyed an evening of multiple rounds and wide-ranging conversation. When the tab came, we each gave the bartender a credit card without looking at the total and told him to add an appropriate tip. Jürgen was too drunk to read it, and I didn’t want to know. We signed our respective tabs, and Jürgen said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to take me home.”

“I’ve had too much champagne to be your designated driver.”

“Then give me the keys to your vehicle.”

“Jürgen, there is no way I will allow you to drive my vehicle in your condition.”

He gave me a hurt look. “I’m not going to drive it. I’m going to sleep in it.”

“The back window is open. Be my guest.”

17

Parking garages unnerve me. Their sterile concrete environment almost invites ambush. There being no place to hide seems to apply only to the victim.

The early morning sun shown between the ramps, casting long shadows of the pillars and creating regions of pitch dark.