Every so often I think about the last supper of ex French president Fran?ois Mitterrand, which had a horrifying beauty. He was dying of age and a long illness.
There were oysters and so on, a feast, then a dish called ortolan.
It’s a small songbird. To prepare it, the ortolan is drowned in a glass of Armagnac. This is not a metaphor. It is actually drowned, and then it is cooked in a cassoulet.
It is illegal, but some chefs will make it.
Then to eat it (which is how Mitterrand ate his):
You place a white cloth over your head and pick the bird up with your fingers, and then you eat it whole, wings, feet, organs, head, everything except the feet. The ortolan is supposed to represent the soul of France.
The white cloth is to create a closed sensory world of just taste and scent.
The cloth is also, traditionally, to hide the act from God.
After the meal Mitterrand didn’t eat again (by choice it seems). He died 8 days later.
There was an extraordinary article in Esquire in 1998 by Michael Paterniti telling the story of ortolan, and Mitterrand’s meal… and also Parterniti’s experience in recreating it himself. It’s visceral prose.
Here’s what I taste: Yes, quidbits of meat and organs, the succulent, tiny strands of flesh between the ribs and tail. I put inside myself the last flowered bit of air and Armagnac in its lungs, the body of rainwater and berries. In there, too, is the ocean and Africa and the dip and plunge in a high wind. And the heart that bursts between my teeth.
(Paterniti also did this programme with NPR in 2008 which is a shorter read.)
I don’t know what keeps drawing me back to this story.
It’s shocking, for one. Real shock seems rare in the WEIRD 21st century, like boredom and like awe. I don’t mean shocking like a jump scare, or overwhelmed with horror. I mean the act has this enduring shockingness. No matter how many time I go back over the story, it’s this flawless crystal of beautiful, exquisite taste indivisibly joined to a central horrifyingly barbaric act - the drowning - like an equation somehow. The context in which Mitterrand chose the meal is part of it too. It seems emblematic of so much of the privilege and progress we have today, individually and as society, beauty with an horrific core, irreconcilable you would have thought. An artist or a writer would be able to decipher what’s going on, to diagram the entire thing, but for me it’s like staring at a Rothko painting. I can’t tell you why I can’t look away, but there it is.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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Every so often I think about the last supper of ex French president Fran?ois Mitterrand, which had a horrifying beauty. He was dying of age and a long illness.
There were oysters and so on, a feast, then a dish called ortolan.
It’s a small songbird. To prepare it, the ortolan is drowned in a glass of Armagnac. This is not a metaphor. It is actually drowned, and then it is cooked in a cassoulet.
It is illegal, but some chefs will make it.
Then to eat it (which is how Mitterrand ate his):
You place a white cloth over your head and pick the bird up with your fingers, and then you eat it whole, wings, feet, organs, head, everything except the feet. The ortolan is supposed to represent the soul of France.
The white cloth is to create a closed sensory world of just taste and scent.
The cloth is also, traditionally, to hide the act from God.
After the meal Mitterrand didn’t eat again (by choice it seems). He died 8 days later.
There was an extraordinary article in Esquire in 1998 by Michael Paterniti telling the story of ortolan, and Mitterrand’s meal… and also Parterniti’s experience in recreating it himself. It’s visceral prose.
(Paterniti also did this programme with NPR in 2008 which is a shorter read.)
I don’t know what keeps drawing me back to this story.
It’s shocking, for one. Real shock seems rare in the WEIRD 21st century, like boredom and like awe. I don’t mean shocking like a jump scare, or overwhelmed with horror. I mean the act has this enduring shockingness. No matter how many time I go back over the story, it’s this flawless crystal of beautiful, exquisite taste indivisibly joined to a central horrifyingly barbaric act - the drowning - like an equation somehow. The context in which Mitterrand chose the meal is part of it too. It seems emblematic of so much of the privilege and progress we have today, individually and as society, beauty with an horrific core, irreconcilable you would have thought. An artist or a writer would be able to decipher what’s going on, to diagram the entire thing, but for me it’s like staring at a Rothko painting. I can’t tell you why I can’t look away, but there it is.