05 May 2010
 
The Art of Living Well


 
(French King Henry III ‘s “L’Ordre du Saint-Esprit.” Hung from a blue ribbon or “un cordon bleu” it became associated with the lavish and decadent feasts held by the Order. Photo Le Cordon Blue)

 
Pool Czar Peter was stalking around the deck of the pool late yesterday when I strolled in from a stint on the patio at Willow. The green tarp is gone, rolled up for the season, and a lowly green garden hose has been gurgling into the depths since yesterday morning.
 
The flow does not look like much, but there is an imperative of steady effort over time. When I wandered out on the balcony to survey what the skies hold for today I saw that the level had risen over night to only a couple feet below the depth numbers interspersed on the deep blue tiles of the inner rim.
 
Thinks are looking up. We are almost there, to the grilling season, and the swimming season, and getting all mixed up in the lives of others after the enforced solitude of that last brutal winter. We will be living well again.
 
I am still a little disoriented from the book signing. Copies of “Knives at Dawn” were still stacked up at the Maitre D’s station inside, and I was just getting comfortable with the fact that when the earnest people cited the CIA’s view of something, they were not talking about the people I know, but the ones at the Culinary Institute of America, the not-for-profit equivalent of the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.
 
I first ran across the legacy of the institution in Norway, of all places, where the summer of 1970 found me working as volunteer labor on a farm near the Oslo Fjord. I was lucky. Some comrades in the program had been assigned as virtual slave labor for six weeks not far up the road, and were introduced to whale blubber as a discrete food group.
 
Instead, I was introduced to the concept of the art of living well. The dining table groaned with goodness at the noon-time main meal, and again with something lighter in the evening, when the light was still full and dusk hours away.
 
My host family was of the Thorenson Car Ferry fortune, and the son of the owner of the place had recently completed the one-year Le Grand Diplôme Le Cordon Bleu. There was no television on the farm, only a little strange radio in English. With the almost endless hours of daylight that far north on the continent, we talked a lot.
 
Ule was his name, a slightly willowy man of thirty summers with thinning blonde hair and pale blue eyes. When he was not trying to ingratiate himself with Julie, my fellow laborer from California, we talked about what he wanted to do with his culinary degree. I was surprised to find that the farm was part of it- the Thorensons were raising the amazing white Charolais cattle, strong and powerful and very intelligence. They had the idea that they might supply the restaurants of Oslo with high-quality beef, raised humanely and allowed to fatten naturally on native grass.
 
It was the first time I wound up eating anything I had talked to first, an impressive cow named “Dollar,” and likewise had the novel idea of where I was in the food chain.
 
After I returned to the States we all got caught up in the swirl of protests against the War and all the other turmoil of the 1960s (which actually continued to the fall of Saigon in ‘75). The back-to-the-land movement and the Whole Earth Catalog and all the other stuff held the young tendrils of the local-food movement, and blended with something else that had begun in America just before World War Two, and which flowered in the years of sudden plenty of the 1950s.
 
Julia Child was the poster girl for that, and her marvelous cooking show. She had been a Spook in the war, an endearing trait, and she had a close philosophical alignment with the legendary James Beard, who can generally be cited as the individual who inspired the spirit of fine dining in America.
 
He was imbued with the spirit of Auguste Escoffier, the French chef who was the embodiment of the l'Art de Vivre, the Art of Living Well. He was the pioneer foodie, host of the first food program on television in 1946, long before the medium became ubiquitous. He was the first to suspect that classic American culinary traditions might cohere into a national cuisine, and he was an early proponent of local products and markets. The Times proclaimed him the “dean of American cookery” in 1954, and everyone that came after in the food game owes him a debt.
 
Everyone knows the Frogs live longer than we do, but manage to drink, eat and smoke more with less heart disease and other chronic ailments. The  common wisdom is that there must be something in the wine that promotes good health, but I suspect it is simpler. They take more time in what they are doing, have less stress, digest better, and have more sex.
 
I could be wrong, but I certainly think that living well is not only the best revenge, but is also the way to live longer.

Predictably, there is now a diet supplement that purports to convey the benefits of red wine without having to drink it. Absurd.
 
Anyway, that was why Tracy O’Grady, the Co-owner of Willow wound up representing America against France in the biggest cook-off on the planet in 2001, and why her restaurant is so good and so much fun to visit.
 
I was going to tell you about the Tracy’s “Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d’Or Competition” but as usual, I got side-tracked and we will have to take this up tomorrow. Sorry. I suddenly feel like having a nice breakfast.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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