By sophomore year in college, Juli (now called Juliette) and her much older, sophisticated beau (also her boss) took me to dinner in a real candle-lit restaurant, with obsequious waiters and an extensive menu. Iceberg lettuce was the only lettuce I had ever eaten before. That night we had romaine lettuce in our Caesar salad, crisp and cooling, coddled egg sauce (which the waiter prepared at the table for the salad, mashing in the delicate anchovies) and crispy croutons fried in butter. I do not understand how anyone who has had a proper Caesar salad can desecrate it with chicken or other additions.
I ate my second escargots that night, drenched in a thick butter and garlic sauce, each plump snail in its own hollow in the circular plate topped with the sauce and fresh garlic. Juliette’s beau showed us again how to use the escargot tongs and gave us permission to dip our bread into the left-over sauce. As if he could have stopped me.
* * *
The snails I ate in Paris, with real French bread, were better than the ones that I cooked. Or maybe it was being in France for the first time, or just France. Although one can walk through the huge Parisian Chefs Market, Rungis, and see tin plate after tin plate with stuffed snails, ready to be popped in the oven, it is possible to see, even in the modest “Super U’s” of France, five or six kinds of fresh snails on ice, ready to be cooked by the enterprising chef or housewife.
By then I had been eating and cooking snails for years. Not fresh ones, of course, but the kind in a can tucked into a hearty plastic sleeve with delicately striped taupe and white shells piled on top. Fresh parsley was available in grocery stores when no other herbs were, or, alternately, there was dried parsley and butter along with freshly chopped garlic.
How I Got to France
After my annulment at age twenty-five from my first husband, Walter, I decided it was time to go to France. I contacted my old beau, Chester, who was working for a law firm in France, and was promised a place to stay in Paris as well as in Cap d’Antibes in the South of France.
I had never dreamed I would have enough money to go to Europe. I thought it was for other people, and that it would take thousands of dollars. But a girl I had worked with had told me she had traveled to Europe for very little money. There was enough in the settlement from Walter for the trip, barely.
My stepfather, John Cook, retired from the White House Travel Office, but, working at a travel agency, booked this trip. I decided to go to London first, made arrangements to stay at the YWCA, and then fly to see Chester in Cap d’Antibes, traveling on by myself to Paris, where I would stay in Chester’s apartment. All I had to do was provide the airfare and a little more money. It was mid-June in Washington and I dressed in a shocking yellow—near chartreuse—sleeveless summer dress. It was my first international trip and I was late to the gate where Mother and John were anxiously and angrily awaiting to see me off. I was the last one on the plane. The stewardess (as they were then called) huffed at me for being late and told me where to sit. I sat down in the front of the plane, second seat back, next to an Englishman.
We were asked if we wanted anything to drink and I said “No,” quite firmly.
After I had turned down escargots, foie gras, lobster, and other grand foods, the Englishman could stand it no longer.
“Why aren’t you eating and drinking?” he asked. “Are you sick? It’s a long flight.”
“I’m on a very tight budget and I don’t want to spend money on the airplane. I want to save it to spend when we arrive!”
He was a very attractive man, much older than I, but not overwhelming in any way. “But everything in First Class is free,” he said.
“But I’m not in First Class. I have the cheapest seat you can get.”
“No,” he said, “you are in First Class. I am in First Class, so you must be, too.”
I was furious. I had told John to get me the cheapest tickets possible, and now I was in First Class. How could that be? I could see dollars floating out the window and I called the stewardess over.
“Am I in First Class?” My tone was belligerent.
She looked a bit stunned.
“Yes,” she said. “Can I get you something?”
“Yes. I don’t want to be in First Class. Could I get a seat in back and get some money returned?”
“Well, no, once you are ticketed you are ticketed.”
“Look at my ticket, then. Surely I’m not in First Class!”
She perused my ticket and my boarding card. “Your Boarding Card has you seated in First Class, although your ticket is for coach.”
“But am I paying more? I didn’t want to pay more!”
We wrangled about for a while, and finally the Englishman said, “Look here, why don’t you settle down,
