Proust makes much of this boeuf a la mode, a culinary masterpiece of such value that for it's sake the narrator of Remembrance will tolerate the insufferable housekeeper, Francoise.
I contemplated the name, giggling immediately at the imagined American response (uh, beef with a scoop of ice cream?), then further at the very boeuf itself. Boeuf... alone, in the kitchen of Marcel Proust Support Group headquarters, I mouthed the word, recalling the discomfiture of my high school French class, of the contortions of face, tongue and sinuses required to pronounce authentically.
To utter this boeuf, which sounds approximately like "boof", one must protrude the lips in a kissy pout, force the first consonant to rumble sonorously but quickly through the nasal cavities, and flick out the final consonant with a slight moue of disgust. After doing this a few times, I was giggling again, until I started thinking about boof being the sound of a playful swat, or then again, somehow onomatopoeic. Several weeks passed as I contemplated this choice.
My first reservation about this recipe is the aspic, which is, bottom line, animal flavored gelatin. It will compromise my reputation as a foodie to confess this, but I must admit that Jell-O is one of those childhood thrills that I might enjoy in secret, or in the company of trusted friends, but particularly if it is red flavor. Not cow flavor. Even Proust's encomiums on the aspic failed to mitigate my distaste, but perhaps it's just that I've never had a great one. A bad aspic, or even a mediocre one, is a nasty piece of work.
I spent several hours studying half a dozen recipes for the creation of boof a la mode, after which it was perfectly clear than the creation of this potentially unattractive dish would take many hours and perhaps two days. More inclined to a simple preparation, I perused the choices in the two Proustian cookbooks. At last it occurred to me that in the last years of MP's life, he couldn't stand the odor of food cooking, and he ate very little. The one thing he asked his housekeeper, Celeste Albaret, to make once in a while was a fried sole, a fine and simple dish to prepare; and so for this issue, it's what I would make.
The evening of the same day, saying he felt better, he asked her to cook him a sole. Sole was what his mother had given him to eat during childhood illnesses...
Ronald Hayman, Proust... A Biography
This is, without a doubt, an extremely easy main course to prepare; removing the oil from the napkin on the plate is definitely the hardest part.
Proust's housekeeper, Celeste Albaret, mentions the sole inclination in her book, Monsieur Proust: "My dear Celeste, I believe I could manage to eat a fried sole.' So I ran to buy the sole and fried it hastily and served it on a large china dish, on a damask napkin folded in two, so that the oil could soak in and with half a lemon at each of the four corners of the napkin... Sole were about the only food he could eat at the end of his life."
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