“The food you missed,” Alfred de Rocca, the composer, would say, shaking his head sadly. “The meals were simply magnificent, spread out like works of art.”
The great artist Zev, whose artworks seemed painted with peacock tails and the dreams of preoccupied children, told me, “Eugene Walter was a walking civilization. He could do anything and knew everything. The conversation you missed! He didn’t just talk. It was never just talk. It was grand opera.”
I could not pass a restaurant without being told by some new friends that they had dined on that terrace with Eugene or walked along the path of that park or sat in the shadows of that ruin talking to Eugene Walter about Camus or Sartre or Genet, all of whom Eugene Walter had known and entertained and fed. I met more Italians who were in love with the whole state of Alabama just because Eugene Walter had sprung so fully formed and elegant from that Deep South state. Many Italians were fully prepared to like me because they knew my native state of Georgia was contiguous to the one that had produced the incomparable Eugene Walter. His footsteps were numerous and broad and just by tracing them through his abandoned Rome, I realized the part expatriates play in defining the American spirit to their host countries. More than all the diplomats I met abroad, Eugene spread the joy and honor and wonder of being American and represented the essence of our finest selves as he told his incomparable stories and wove his tantalizing web during his Roman years.
I never saw Eugene Walter in Rome, but I felt his presence keenly. When my family returned to America after two years in Italy, I placed a call to him in Mobile and sent pleasant greetings and a hundred “ciaos” from a diverse and fervent group of friends from Trastevere to Parioli.
“You must come to meet me at once,” Eugene said, after I had delivered the message from his Roman life. “There’s friendship waiting here for you in Mobile. Time is swift and glorious friendship is one of the few condiments that makes life both sweet and sour. What sign are you?”
“Scorpio,” I answered.
“How dreadful. But it cannot be helped. I’ll do the best I can to like you. Though I can’t promise a thing. You are a large man with a weak voice, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Your family is not much, I would guess. Good solid peasant stock, but nothing to write home about.”
“Exactly.”
“Call your travel agent this moment,” Eugene Walter said to me. “I know destiny when I hear her precious heartbeat.”
I followed the call of destiny’s precious heartbeat the following summer and found myself embracing Eugene Walter as though we had known each other for many years. He walked me through the dining room of a very fine restaurant where he was well-known. Every eye was on him. He was wild-haired and fixed you with dark, piercing eyes. His voice was honeyed and piping and his pronunciation was precise as befitted the actor and the linguist he was. He sounded like Nero with lines written by Truman Capote.
“Let us get something straight between us,” Eugene said as we took our seats and the busboy filled our water glasses. “Your mother misnamed you. She was a frittery, vain woman who did not take the trouble to get your name right. You have never been a Pat and never will. It’s a name for other people of no consequence. I will think of a name for you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“No need to thank me. That’ll come due when I find the exactly right name for you. Naming is one of the most important things. Ah! It’s coming to me. I’ve got it. It’s perfect. Do you want to hear what you should’ve been called all your life?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“Lyon,” Eugene said. “L-Y-O-N. You are Lyon and will always remain Lyon to me.”
And so I did. Each time I called to check in with him in Mobile from that day on, Eugene Walter would say, “Greetings, Lyon. You evade me because you know you should be here in Mobile, living across the street from me, sitting at my knee and writing down every word I utter. It troubles you, Lyon. You could be my Boswell. Instead you are vegetating in a perfectly empty and licentious life in Atlanta, the whore of Georgia. Do you know the oldest thing I’ve ever seen in Atlanta is a traffic light or maybe a half pound of rat-trap cheese? You belong to the ancient places, Lyon. You are an Etruscan and that is both your honorific and your tragedy.”
In the restaurant that night, Eugene took the pepper shaker, unscrewed the cap, and poured the pepper into an ashtray on our table. When the waiter appeared, Eugene said, “Take this and flush it down the toilet of the men’s room. It is dead dust and has no relationship to the sacred pods of real black pepper. This has the taste of talcum or black sand formed on volcanic beaches. Freshly ground pepper has volatile, tempestuous oils which only last about an hour after grinding. This oil is an aid to digestion. It also cleanses the blood, like garlic or cognac. Rid us of this sawdust, good man. What sign are you?”
“Sagittarius,” the young man answered, removing the offending ashtray filled with the discredited pepper.
“Splendid,” Eugene said. “Sagittarians are the blown kisses of the Zodiac, sweet-natured but peppery, like old-fashioned nasturtiums, not the sickly aromatic hybrids of today’s tacky gardens.”
I was in Mobile with my lawyer, Jim Landon, and we were staying with his sister, Sue Beard, in an area of the city near Spring Hill College. Eugene insisted that he would cook lunch for Jim and me the very next day, but he warned me that we should come prepared for chaos and surprise. Those were two watchwords of Eugene’s life that he shared with me whenever I saw him in Mobile. He took the idea of whimsicality to almost absurd heights. Jim and I entered the shabby foyer of a nineteenth-century house that Eugene was “renting for a song and the utter prestige of having me lease such a déclassé abode.”
The cats that moved throughout the house were named with boisterous, T. S. Eliot flair. Boxes, piled to the ceiling, still bore the name of an Italian shipping company. Eugene brought an insouciance to the science of disorder. Jim and I cleaned off a sofa as Eugene served us a glass of red wine.
Jim Landon possesses one of the most spectacular visual memories of anyone I have ever known. This lunch took place in Mobile eighteen years ago, yet when I called Jim at his law office at Jones, Day in Atlanta, he began speaking of it in precise detail.
“Eugene served us on beautiful Capodimonte china, although I do not think the word ‘china’ is correct. It is simpler than that. Very elegant. Let’s say plates. Yes, that will do fine. His wineglasses were thick, unwieldy, the provenance, I would venture, Woolworth’s. The tablecloth was lovely and I first guessed mohair, but upon further examination, I ventured it was cat hair. He served us barbecued chicken with a barbecue sauce I can taste to this day, taste but cannot duplicate. Pat, do you remember the orange slices floating in it, mustard and vinegar and we just raved about it? Then a perfectly composed salad, dressed with balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil. We peeled our own oranges for dessert. You mangled yours of course. I cut my peel very precisely in one continuous piece that sprang back into its original shape when I laid it upon my Capodimonte plate. Afterward, he served us a demitasse of strong Italian espresso. Then he gave us each a teaspoon of sugar moistened perfectly with Angostura bitters.”
“No wonder people think I’m a redneck, Jim,” I said. “I never think about moistening sugar with Angostura bitters.”
“That is only the beginning of the thing, Conroy” Jim said. “I must take my leave now. I have real paying clients who actually require my legal services. ‘Capodimonte,’ I believe you will discover, means ‘at the head of the mountain.’”
Eugene Walter sent me a paperback copy of his cookbook when it was published in November of 1982. He had titled it with a baroque Eugene Walter–like flourish, Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall: Rare and Unusual Recipes. I read the book from cover to cover the day I received it, and it remains one of my favorite cookbooks in a collection that has grown into a fairly extensive library. There is not a recipe in the entire book th
at does not shine with a ray or two of Eugene’s strange, piquant life. On every page, his complaints and prejudices about food and life spill out, staining the napery and the carpets with his vinegary opinions about everything. I have not come across a bad recipe in the book, and certainly not a dull one. It was Eugene who told me that as a cookbook writer he was always trying to disguise the fact that “my real job is to be a philosopher king or a prince of elves. If it has magic, Lyon, look for my footprints nearby. Promise me that, Lyon. Always.”
But always is never long enough and it is a word that runs out of time the way that life does. When I heard about his death in Mobile, I took down his first novel, The Untidy Pilgrim, from the shelf. I turned to the first sentence of the first page because I wanted the essence of the man to enter the room where I stood grateful to have known and loved him: “Down in Mobile they’re all crazy, because the Gulf Coast is the kingdom of monkeys, the land of clowns, ghosts, and musicians and Mobile is sweet lunacy’s county seat.”
Ciao, maestro. Whenever I feel magic in my life, I will look for your footprints. That is a promise, Eugene Walter, a promise from Lyon.
TUNA AU POIVRE Before I leave the glorious subject of Eugene Walter, I would like to quote from a small diatribe he sounded in his quirky cookbook Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall. Please note his obsession with freshly ground pepper; the next six recipes pay fine homage to that lordly obsession. At the beginning of chapter 6, Eugene Walter writes about the Salad Question: “A barbarous movement has swept America in the three decades that I lived in Europe, a movement as barbarous as that sullen minority which calls itself the Moral Majority as barbarous as plastic plates and glasses, as barbarous as synthetic cheeses or the crap-glop salad dressings, as barbarous as restaurants claiming to be first class but lacking a pepper mill.” Eugene rants for another couple of pages about how Americans are like huns because they eat their salads before the first course, not after it like Europeans do. In Mobile, they give out an annual Eugene Walter prize to a writer of note, and the splendid T. R. Pearson received the award in 2004. A wonderful book called Milking the Moon came out in 2001 in which Eugene Walter tells his life story to Katherine Clark. What an impish, pixilated, and original man! Ciao again, maestro, your Lyon will honor you for all time.
• SERVES 4
¼ cup coarse or kosher salt
½ cup whole black peppercorns, coarsely cracked
4 bluefin tuna steaks (½ pound each)
Vegetable oil
1. Combine the salt and cracked pepper in a shallow baking dish and press the tuna into the mixture, covering both sides of each steak.
2. In a large nonstick skillet, pour enough oil to submerge (and thereby cook) the tuna. Heat the oil over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking and sear the tuna until a crust forms. Using a long-handled slotted spatula or tongs, turn the tuna only once: 3 minutes total cooking time for rare, 4 minutes for medium rare.
PEPPERED NEW POTATOES • SERVES 4
1¾ pounds small red new potatoes (about 24)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
Coarse or kosher salt and coarsely ground tricolor pepper
1. Wash the potatoes, but do not dry. Peel a ring around the center of each potato. In a pot large enough to hold the potatoes in a single layer, melt the butter over medium-high heat until foamy and almost browned. Place the wet potatoes in the pot and cover tightly.
2. In about 3 minutes, the potatoes will start to sputter. Holding the lid in place, shake the pot to crisp all sides of the potatoes. Continue to shake the pot frequently until the potatoes are browned on the outside and tender inside (the tip of a knife or fork should slide in easily), 15 to 18 minutes. Season with salt and abundant coarsely ground tricolor pepper.
PEPPERED PEACHES Adapted from one of Lee Bailey’s groundbreaking books, Country Weekends. Peppered peaches are the right combination of sweet heat to pair with grilled or roasted meats.
• SERVES 12
6 large peaches, ripe but not mushy (will yield to gentle pressure without bruising)
¼ cup fresh lemon juice (1 lemon)
1½ tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon coarse or kosher salt
Coarsely ground black, white, and cayenne pepper
1. To peel the peaches: Place 2 trays ice cubes in a bowl with 2 cups cold water and set aside. Cut an X in the end (not the stem end) of each peach. Using a slotted spoon, lower the peach into a pot of boiling water until the skin loosens, about 2 minutes. Transfer to the ice bath and cool, about 3 minutes. The skin should slip off easily.
2. Cut each peach in half around the seam and remove the pit. Transfer peach halves to a large platter, pit side up. Brush with lemon juice and dust with the sugar and salt. Sprinkle with pepper. Do not refrigerate before serving.
BLACK PEPPER AND PISTACHIO TRUFFLES
• MAKES ABOUT 60
3 cups unsalted, uncolored shelled pistachios
1 pound best-quality semisweet chocolate (like Sharffen Berger), coarsely chopped
1 cup heavy cream
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, seeds scraped out and saved
1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Frangelico (hazelnut liqueur)
1 pound best-quality dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
1. Preheat the oven to 325°F.
2. Spread the pistachios on a shallow baking sheet and toast in the oven, 8 to 10 minutes. When cool enough to handle (but still warm), transfer the nuts to the center of a clean kitchen towel. Gather the ends together to form a loose bag and vigorously rub the towel between your hands to remove the skins. Transfer the nuts to a cutting board and finely chop. Set aside.
3. In a double boiler over hot water (simmering, not boiling), melt the semisweet chocolate, stirring occasionally until smooth. Stir in ½ cup of the chopped pistachios. In another saucepan over moderate heat, bring the heavy cream, vanilla (pod and seeds), and pepper to a low boil. Remove the vanilla pod, stir in the Frangelico, and immediately pour hot mixture over the melted chocolate. Whisk gently to combine and pour into a 9-inch round cake pan. Freeze for at least 30 minutes.
4. When the mixture has set, use a teaspoon (or melon ball scoop) to scrape the chocolate into small balls (irregularly shaped is okay; this misshapen appearance is behind the confection’s name “truffle,” after the earthy and expensive fungus). Place the truffles on a baking sheet and refrigerate until ready for dipping. (The recipe can be done in advance up to this point. Cover the truffles with plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to 24 hours.)
5. To dip and roll the truffles: Melt the dark chocolate in a double boiler over hot but not boiling water. Stir occasionally until smooth. Divide the remaining chopped pistachios into two bowls.
6. When the truffles are set, working with a few at a time (and leaving the rest refrigerated), use two forks to dip and roll each truffle in the melted chocolate. (The chocolate should be warm to the touch, but not too hot. If the chocolate “slips” off the ball instead of coating it, the chocolate is too hot. Adjust heat.) Roll quickly, tapping the fork on the side of the pot to remove excess. Immediately place the coated truffle in a bowl of pistachios and roll, pressing down gently to coat the entire surface. Do several more (leaving the coated truffles in the bowl) and then place the bowl in the refrigerator. Let the truffles harden for several minutes before transferring them to a plate. Repeat with the remaining truffles (rotating the bowls of nuts to keep a steady work rhythm going). Refrigerate until ready to serve. (Or freeze in zippered bags for up to 4 weeks.)
BLACK PEPPER AND PEAR TARTE TATIN • SERVES 8
1 recipe Pie Dough (page 7); you will end up using only about three-quarters of the dough
6 Bartlett or Bosc pears (about 3 pounds)
Juice of 1 lemon, strained
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
½ cup sugar
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, seeds scraped out and saved
½ teasp
oon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons heavy cream
Use a copper tart pan or a 9-inch skillet with a nonstick surface and ovenproof handle.
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. On a lightly floured surface, roll out one round of pastry slightly larger than the surface of the skillet, about 12 inches. Place the pastry round on a baking sheet and chill until needed.
3. Peel, core, and quarter the pears. Place in a large mixing bowl and toss with lemon juice.
4. In a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, melt the butter and sugar, stirring frequently, until a golden caramel color. Stir in the vanilla bean scrapings and black pepper. Add the heavy cream and continue cooking and stirring for about 2 minutes. Tightly arrange the pears in the pan with their narrow points facing toward the center of the pan and 4 or 5 slices in the middle of the pan. (It is best to crowd the pears into the pan because as they release moisture, they will shrink.) Cover and cook until pears are translucent, about 20 minutes. Cool.
5. Gently lay the pastry over the pears. Tuck edges of pastry under the pears. (This does not have to be perfect: tarte Tatin is a rustic tart.) Refrigerate for 15 minutes. Transfer to the oven and bake until the pastry is golden and crisp, about 30 minutes.
6. Allow the tart to cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Place a serving platter (with a large enough diameter to extend at least 2 inches beyond the rim of the skillet) upside down over the skillet. Holding the platter firmly against the rim of the skillet, quickly flip the pan, gently easing the tart onto the platter. If some of the pears fall off the serving platter while being flipped, rearrange them on the pastry in the same pattern. Serve hot.