Most important, of course, is the organization of a menu in terms of what may be called a “gastronomic aesthetic.” Whether a meal begins with an hors d’oeuvre or a soup (except for the potées or garbures that are entire meals in themselves), this course must be conceived to heighten—not quench—the appetite. It should be light of body and not overabundant. From that point on, the movement should be from fish or other white delicacies, such as brains or sweetbreads, into meats, and from light meats into dark meats, from light butter or cream sauces into rich dark sauces drawn from stocks and red wines. By this I do not mean to suggest that a dark meat may not be prepared in cream or a fish in red wine, but I do think that it would be a mistake to include these two preparations in the same menu. In the last century it was not unusual to serve fish after meats and chicken after game. To most people today this would seem outlandish.
Repetition should be avoided in a menu. The French claim that the truffle alone may be respectably allowed to appear in more than one dish at the same meal. Though that seems like nonsense, if there are mushrooms in the fish sauce, don’t garnish the meat with mushrooms; if one of the main dishes is rich in cream, don’t serve a dessert based on whipped cream; nor a custard sauce with the dessert if another sauce is thickened with egg yolks. Don’t serve rice with the fish and potatoes with the meat, or watercress with the roast and a green salad after. Don’t serve a gratin based on Swiss cheese and include the same cheese on the cheese platter.
The juxtaposition of cold and hot, crisp and creamy, rough and smooth, sauced and dry, should be considered. Rare venison accompanied by poivrade sauce, which requires hours, if not days, of preparation, is sublime.
On the whole, it seems to me best for a simple meal to contain only one sauce, and for a more complex menu to be limited to two, which should be very different in character, or perhaps three if one includes a sauced dessert.
The cheese course I think of largely as an excuse (and a good one) to drink another wine. In France, if one serves a single cheese, it is invariably a Camembert. I prefer to serve a cheese platter that may include a fresh goat-type cheese, a Swiss Gruyère, a blue, and a softripened variety. One’s guests are happier with a choice.
About desserts, one should remember that heavy desserts should only follow the simplest of meals. Heavy desserts are a tradition only in those countries where a single main dish is also habitual. Something light and playful in spirit is best. Lots of air, perhaps in the form of a soufflé, or a mousse, is usually appreciated. If you want to serve a dessert wine, avoid chocolate at all cost. Ice creams and ices kill wines also (one of the more surprising habits in France is that of drinking brut champagne with desserts—often ice cream). With simple meals, many people are happy with a piece of fresh fruit for dessert.
Wines are of two sorts. The one whose consumption is the greatest—that known as gros rouge in France (its white equivalent is often called pousse au crime), the American counterpart of which would be those gallon jugs of cheap red wine—is a product essentially of the laboratory: a knowledgeable mixture of a number of inferior wines, more or less high in alcohol content. It has been subjected to violent clarification processes (known as “defecatory”), often involving the injection of horse’s blood into the wine. This is less shocking than it seems, for the blood, high in albumin content, acts merely as a precipitant for the impurities contained in suspension in all young wines. (Most fine wines are clarified also—but by the addition of the gentle egg white.) It has been “stabilized” by heating and by the addition of bacteria-killing chemicals. It is not a living thing.
The other wine lives and grows, and although in recent years technicians and winegrowers have come to understand a great deal more about the life of a wine and the different factors responsible for its development, it retains its mysterious autonomy, and even those old men who have nursed the vines and the wines of their fathers since childhood are constantly surprised by turns taken in a wine’s development, whether it be over a period of months as the new wine is refining in kegs or in the course of its life span in bottles. Although, in the large picture, a single wine develops along the same lines from one bottle to another, it rarely happens that two bottles of a very old wine—even though they be from the same keg, bottled at the same time, and laid side by side in the same cellar—present identically the same characteristics when opened one after the other.
The wine one drinks from one’s glass depends on a vast number of things that make it precisely what it is at that moment. The basic personality of a wine depends, for one thing, on the grape variety; certain varieties seem to be meant for the climate and soil of certain regions—their qualities are either lost or transformed when they are transplanted elsewhere. The age of the vines is also significant. They must be eight to ten years of age before producing a wine of maximum quality (grapes from younger vines are often harvested separately to make a lesser wine) and are usually replaced at the age of seventy or eighty years). Important, too, are the exposure (hillsides or inclines exposed to the south and east being considered the best), the care and pruning of the vines, the weather of the particular year, the care and rapidity with which the grapes are harvested and the weather at that time, the method of vinification and the cleanliness of the vessels in which it takes place (vinification is that part of a wine’s preparation related to the fermentation processes and succeeding purifications). That personality may or may not be developed to its fullest extent, depending on the age of the wine, the care it has received, the temperature at which it is served, the amount of time it has been allowed to breathe and expand between the opening of the bottle and the drinking of the wine, the shape of the glass in which it is drunk, the preparation it accompanies, the condition of one’s palate, and so on.
Not only is vinification an extremely complex process, but, methods vary from one region to another, and the following discussion must, necessarily, be very general in nature.
RED WINE
All the grape varieties used for making fine red wines are whitefleshed and give a transparent juice. The coloring matter comes from the skins. (Certain grape varieties known as teinturiers are red-fleshed and are used to strengthen the color of inferior wines.) The grapes, once picked, are usually passed through a machine that crushes them at the same time that it separates them from the stems. In the past, the stems were left and the grapes were crushed by treading them with one’s bare feet. This is still done on certain small properties, and if economically practicable would still, no doubt, be the best method, for in this way the seeds do not risk being crushed and lending their bitterness to the wine. The removal of the stems is useful in producing wines that are more supple (the tannin contained in the stems does not go into it), and slightly higher in alcoholic content and color, since the water from the stems is eliminated. The crushed grapes are then put into enormous vats, which may be either open or closed; these are traditionally wooden, but today very often of glass-lined cement or stainless steel, which are much easier to clean and maintain. In these vats the juice and the pulp ferment together, the color is transferred to the juice because of the molecular transformation in the pulp, and the sugar is transformed into alcohol. In a normal year– neither too hot nor too cold—the fermentation begins easily and the temperature in the vats does not rise too high (if it goes beyond approximately 95° F., the bacteria are paralyzed and the fermentation is arrested before all the sugar has been transformed into alcohol). In cold years it is often necessary to heat a certain quantity of crushed grapes (pied de cuve), which, when in full fermentation, is then added to the vat in order to launch the bacteria rendered sluggish by the cold. In hot years the fermentation is often too active. The must (grape juice) is aerated and special cooling apparatuses installed in the vats are put into operation to prevent the temperature from rising beyond 85° F. (In the past, all that could be done was to throw in a few blocks of ice—far from the ideal solution.) Normally, the alcoholic fermentation