Once in Paris my old expatriate friend Nancy Holloway and I ventured to a Left Bank restaurant and splurged on a plate of andouillettes, known Stateside as chitlins, laced with expensive truffles. And since we were in a reflective mood, we ordered a bottle of champagne with the dish, engaging in a ritual that years ago was a New Year’s Eve tradition at chic urban African-American parties.
Nancy, a native of Cleveland, arrived in Paris in 1956 with a dance troupe and stayed on forever to sing jazz. One day she called me on the phone, longing in her voice, saying, “Let’s go eat some back-home food.”
So we set out for a glorious old bistro aptly named Josephine “Chez Dumonet,” located on rue du Cherche-Midi, but in no way connected to the famous chanteuse, Josephine Baker, who took Paris by storm in the 1920s. In late afternoon we stumbled out of the emporium satiated, our psyche restored, at home away from home.
Nancy and I went our separate ways, and I walked along, my mind now on Leroy Haynes, the legendary Paris restaurateur who once told me that the soulful food of France reminded him of fine Southern cuisine. He said France’s chicken with brown sauce, even coq au vin, wasn’t really so different from smothered chicken in finger-lickin’ brown gravy. He added that a down-South lemon chess pie was a close match for a lemon tart, and a Georgia-style onion tart laced with cheddar cheese was a dead ringer for a quiche.
A host of other similar dishes came to mind: Stewed tripe, roast chicken for Sunday dinner, sauteed squash with onions and sage, pickled pig’s feet and head cheese are just as popular back home as in France, Haynes said. Concurring, I thought of French potato salad made with parsley and mustard, which reminded me of my sister Helen’s version, made with chopped sour pickles and apple and stirred with homemade mayonnaise.
My late sister was a heralded cook at a cafe in Choctaw County in Alabama where we grew up and was especially known for homemade ice cream, delectable cakes, pies and fragrant quick breads infused with coconut, currants, citron peel, nuts and spices that were so like the popular sweetbreads served today at Paris tea salons.
The conversation with Haynes was back in the early 1970s, at the rather homespun restaurant he owned at 3 rue Clauzel in Pigalle, the red-light district. Haynes hailed from Kentucky and was living in Atlanta, working as a social worker, when he was inducted into the Army in May 1941. He was sent to Europe, and when his military service ended he became a black expatriate in Paris. In November 1950 he opened his restaurant, with a French wife as a partner.
Haynes was a robust, jovial man, kindhearted to no end, ready to dish out advice and a plate of soul food for the asking to the down-and-out in Paris. Black soldiers on European military bases from as far away as Germany came by the truckloads to his restaurant.
Soon it became a must-visit place for American tourists and celebrities alike. The restaurant walls were lined with framed photos of diners, including Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
I especially remember talking with Haynes on a warm night in May 1972, moments after the great black expatriate writer James Baldwin and his rainbow entourage swept into the restaurant. A short while later there was an urgent telephone call for Monsieur Baldwin, the waiter announced, all eyes now glued on the “star.” With much fanfare, the heavy black telephone-this was before the ubiquitous cell phone-was carried to Baldwin’s table. The moment soon passed and the night moved on.
I turned my attention back to the restaurant’s frayed menu, which was imprinted with dishes I grew up on: Ma Sutton’s Southern Fried Chicken, New Orleans Red Beans, Uncle Jason’s Bar-B-Q, Ham Hocks with Cabbage. And there were fruit pies, down-home side dishes such as okra and tomatoes, and Haynes’ fabled Kentucky Oysters, a euphemistic name for plain old chitlins.
Time passes on. Haynes went to his final resting place in 1986, and my lunch with Nancy Holloway was in late summer almost a decade ago, though it seems just like yesterday. My teenage son and I were settled in a rented apartment for that summer around the corner from the lovely Place des Vosges in the Marais district. Most of the day my son was in school while I was holed up at the quaint old apartment finishing the manuscript for a cookbook, “Soul Food,” and watching the Summer Olympics from Atlanta on TV whenever I could.
I often imagine the black expatriates who had flocked to the city over the past three-quarters of a century, in the kitchen cooking just as I did. There have been many: entertainers such as Miss Baker, Sidney Bechet and Bricktop; writers Richard Wright, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Baldwin; jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater; artists Beauford Delaney and Herbert Gentry; former Alvin Ailey dancer Beth Shorter-Bagot, a dear friend who has lived in France since 1985, first in Paris and now on the western edge of Burgundy, near the Loire Valley.
“There are similarities in soul food and French cooking found in the belief that everything is used,” Beth said last fall as we sat dining in the kitchen of her lovely old farmhouse in the French countryside that she shares with her husband, actor Jean-Pierre, and teenage son, Gabriel. “In soul food it surely comes from the slave experience of having to make do and create something good and tasty out of what you had at hand or on the farm. French cooking came out of this same farming culture too.”
She stopped for a sip of a delightful Jolivet Sancerre we were sharing and continued: “In France, like in the Old South, everything is used. For example, shrimp shells are ground and made into sauce. The French love chitterling sausages, or andouillettes; they have grades, and AAAA are the best. In the city of Lyon the sausage is grilled and served with French fries and a creamy mustard sauce. Here the restaurants serve puff-pastry shells stuffed with pig’s-feet meat as a starter.”
Jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, who is now in New York but lived in Paris from 1984 to 1999 and still has a home there, concurs. She remembers that whenever she got a nostalgic urge for “back home” food she would go to a local brasserie and order poulet roti et frites, or roast chicken with French fries, remembering Sunday dinner back home. And when the pang came for down-home chitlins, she would search out lamb intestines if the bistro didn’t have pork.
“My favorite French food is still those pork dishes,” she says, voice full of enthusiasm. “Andouillettes, a pot of white beans made with sausage and goose known as cassoulet,
and choucroute, which is cabbage and pork or ham hocks. Pork may be out of favor with many black Americans, but I love it. That’s soul food to me.”
Mindful of Bridgewater’s remark, I decided to serve roast chicken when I invited Lisa Jackson to Sunday dinner last fall during my visit to Paris. I had rented an apartment in a dusty old stone building on Rue de Sevres near busy Boulevard du Montparnasse. When the midafternoon sun streamed into the apartment and illuminated the Eiffel Tower to the west, I thought of celebrated soul sister artist Lois Mailou Jones, who more than half a century ago had a little atelier in the same neighborhood during her stay in Paris.
Lisa hails from Woodbridge, Va., and her parents, Phyllis and Paul Jackson, are old friends. She is a graduate of Stanford University and was spending the year in Paris, enrolled in a cooking school. My son, a medical student, was also on holiday in Paris, and I invited him to join Lisa and me for dinner.
I went shopping early that morning at the bustling outdoors organic market on Boulevard Raspail, a short distance away. Besides the rotisserie chicken, I bought buttery golden potatoes, kind of like home fries, the makings of a salad, a couple pieces of cheese, fresh berries and a few wedges of watermelon.
Walking about, I spotted racks of spareribs, platters of pig’s feet, or trotters, covered with gleaming aspic and decorated with slivers of carrots and tarragon leaves, plus ears of fresh corn, which the French used to grow as feed for chickens but now also grow for the table. My eye also caught Savoy cabbage that was as green as collards, pink-speckled fresh peas in the shell that reminded me of the cranberry variety we grew down South.
Lisa arrived in the early afternoon bearing two bottles of delightful rosZ wine, macaroons and a small bag of madeleines, those lovely oval little cakes made immemorial by writer Marcel Proust in “Remembrances of Things Past.”
The afternoon soon slipped toward dusk. At dinner’s end I bit into one of the fragrant madeleines and was flooded with memories. For the life of me, the light-textured little cakes reminded me of Mama’s teacakes, an old Southern specialty, on the other side of the world.
Following is a favorite recipe rendition of that sweet memory:
MADELEINES
Makes 24 three-inch madeleines
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter plus 2 to 3 tablespoons butter, softened
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups bleached, all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 large eggs at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1. Place the 1 1/2 sticks butter in a small heavy saucepan or skillet and melt over low heat. Stir in the lemon peel, nutmeg and vanilla extract, mixing well. Remove the pan from the heat, set aside and cool the butter completely.
2. Sift together the flour and baking powder and set aside.
3. Using the softened butter, generously butter two madeleine pans (see note) with large 3-inch molds and set aside.
4. Position an oven shelf in the middle of the oven. Preheat to 400 degrees. Combine eggs, sugar, salt in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a whisk or wire whip attachment. Beat on high speed until light and lemony and more than doubled in volume, 6 to 8 minutes. Scrape down sides of the bowl now and then with a rubber spatula. (Alternately, combine the eggs, sugar and salt in a three-quart bowl and use a hand-held electric mixer to beat for about 8 minutes, or until more than double in volume, scraping sides several times with spatula.) Set bowl on the counter and sift the flour over the beaten eggs. With the spatula, carefully fold into the batter, using only several strokes. Stir the melted butter briskly and pour over the batter. Then fold the butter into the batter until thoroughly blended, lifting the batter from the sides and bottom of the bowl. Don’t beat the batter after adding the flour.
5. With a rubber spatula, put a generous tablespoon of batter into molds of both pans. Dab leftover batter into each mold, dividing evenly.
6. Set one pan aside, away from oven. Place the other pan on the middle oven shelf and bake for 12-14 minutes, or until cakes are light golden on top, nut brown at edges and slightly shrunken away from the pan. Turn pan from front to back midway through baking. Remove and proceed with second pan, baking in the same manner.
7. Cool the baked pan of madeleines on a wire rack for a minute or so. Quickly remove cakes from the molds, running a thin metal spatula or knife around the edges.
8. If not eating immediately, rewarm madeleines in a 350-degree oven before serving. The cakes also freeze well.
Note: Madeleines bake best in tin-plated madeleine pans.
