The Savory Science

Sitting in the grill room of the Savoy Hotel in July, 1990, with a plate of salmon with sorrel sauce before me, I indulged in a peculiar fantasy. I imagined the sous-chef who prepared the sauce moving from the veal stock pot to the stove, adding the pureed sorrel and some cream just as he had been taught by the sous-chef before him in the same kitchen, and back and back through successive chefs and trainers of chefs to Auguste Escoffier himself, who organized and simplified the Savoy kitchens when he went there with César Ritz in 1890. From hand to hand, sauce pan to stock pot to stove, there was a connection between my forkful of savory sauced fish and the hand of the great man himself a hundred years ago.

This conceit was not original; I stole it, with some changes, from A. J. Liebling, whose descriptions of Paris meals eaten in the thirties can still evoke the musty, pungent aroma of truffles and cause an involuntary squirt of saliva under my tongue. Leibling was also a noted writer on boxing. He begins The Sweet Science by tracing his own pugilistic lineage back to the renowned boxers of the nineteenth century such as Gentleman Jim Corbett and John L. Sullivan:

It is through Jack O’Brien . . . that I trace my rapport with the historic past through the laying-on of hands. He hit me, for pedagogical example, and he had been hit by the great Bob Fitzsimmons . . . . Jack had a scar to show for it. Fitzsimmons had been hit by Corbett, Corbett by John L. Sullivan, he by Paddy Ryan . . . and Ryan by Joe Goss, his predecessor, who as a young man had felt the fist of the great Jem Mace. It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose.

No more fanciful, I believe, was the connection I felt with the gastronomic past and the great chef Auguste Escoffier as I sat at the Savoy Hotel eating salmon with sorrel sauce. The veal stock itself was of course one of Escoffier’s tremendous innovations in food preparation, while the nouvelle version of the sorrel sauce made famous by the Troisgros brothers uses no veal stock. My meal was a history lesson much more pleasant than a punch on the nose.