Free Eating by Jason Epstein Page A

Edmund Wilson, I would eventually correct. Some writers whom we met in the American zone who were working for the CIA warned us to avoid the Russian zone. The Cold War ground rules had yet to be clarified, and there was talk of kidnappings. We ignored this advice and returned often for soup and sausages, reluctant to admit that, with the war so recently ended, we were preparing to go at it again. In Berlin, amid our Cold War friends, Korea was no longer an anomaly. War now seemed routine, accompanied by the ideological quarrels in the intellectual journals that I now found it obligatory to read, and which would soon convince me that warfare, both cold and hot, is our normal state, and peace an aberration.
    We were happy to leave this bleak city still largely in ruins and drift off to Italy for a few weeks. We had been away too long and were ready to think about going home. I wondered whether I still had a job after my long absence.
    We arranged passage on the
Andrea Doria
from Naples. In the Azores, the cheerful little ship became fogbound. We arrived in port a day late. Our waiter, whose glasses had broken during the crossing and hunglopsided across his Roman nose, explained that because of the delay we had run out of pasta. On deck as we approached our pier, an Italian father was holding his two small sons in his arms, pointing to the Manhattan skyline, and shouting,
“Fantastico, bambini, fantastico.”
Despite the warlike rumblings in Berlin, this was how it seemed to us, too, in the early spring of 1954. In my absence, the paperback series I had launched had gone from triumph to triumph. I was welcomed back, enthusiastically.
    Barbara and I were relieved to be back in our Greenwich Village garret, which after our month in Paris seemed to us more than ever like a set from
La Bohème
with its skylight and fireplace, its old brick walls, crooked floor, and window boxes filled with geraniums in spring. We had spent the last three months in hotels and restaurants and other people’s dining rooms. I was eager to cook at home, but not like our favorite Grand Véfour with its Escoffier menu. It was obvious to us that the mood had shifted. In the Paris bookshops, stacks of Samuel Beckett’s plays were piled up everywhere, and there was an existentialist on every street corner. In London, still aching from the war,
The Waste Land
was on everyone’s lips, with intimations of
A Clockwork Orange
just ahead. Inevitably, an “existential” cuisine was not far off. It would take many forms, from the Zen bakeries of San Francisco to the innovations of
la nou-velle cuisine
with its deconstruction of culinary metaphysics. It was in this spirit that I began to reproducesome of the simpler dishes we had encountered on our trip. Chez Allard’s wonderfully simple braised duck with olives became a favorite.
    BRAISED DUCK WITH OLIVES
    Nothing is easier than braising a duck and serving it with olives. You will need a heavy nonreactive Dutch oven, preferably porcelain over cast iron, a three-and-a-half-to-four-pound Pekin duck, a little oil for browning the duck, thyme and rosemary for stuffing, assorted vegetables, a half-bottle of Pinot Noir, port, arrowroot to thicken the braising liquid, a little Cognac, and some pitted picholine or similar olives. Dry the duck with paper towels, and with a hair dryer if you happen to have one. Remove the loose fat from neck and tail, prick the skin all over with a fork, and season the inside with salt and pepper, then stuff the duck with a few branches of rosemary and thyme. The skin should be very dry in order to brown evenly. Remove and save the wings. Heat a little oil or rendered duck fat in the Dutch oven, and brown the duck, breast side down at first, then the back and sides. When the duck is nicely browned, lift it from the cocotte, set it aside, and pour off all but a few tablespoons of fat. Toss in the duck neck, wings, and giblets (but not the liver), an onion studded with a few cloves, two