Food - Bee Wilson on the chef who yielded to his own kitchen knives
There are sometimes moments in the kitchen when you want to kill yourself. They may not happen very often, but when they do, they can be as dark as any bedsit depression. When the bread won't rise; when the sauce splits; when the beautiful flan collapses as you remove it from the tin; when you've wasted a pint of cream on a custard that curdles - all of these are strong reasons for feeling rather bleak. But they need a second factor really to push you over the brink, and this is social disgrace. Kitchen disasters become critical only when they involve guests, especially ones you are in awe of. While you watch your respected companions grimace over your disgustingly over-salty soup - the same recipe that tasted perfectly delicious just the other day when you made it for yourself - you develop the urge to bury yourself in the deep freeze. At such moments, however, I think of Vatel, the 17th-century maItre d'hotel who stabbed himself because the fish for the King didn't arrive.
Vatel died in 1671, a middle-aged and childless bachelor. We know almost nothing about him except that he was the son of a labourer from Picardie who rose fast in the kitchens of the rich and famous, ending up with the Prince de Conde. It is mainly thanks to Mme de Sevigne, the great letter-writer, that he is remembered at all. In two letters to her daughter, she recounts the last hours of "Le Grand Vatel", this perfectionist whose "talent was set apart from all others".
At the time of his death, Vatel was in charge of overseeing a house party of the most grandiose dimensions: from Thursday 23 to Saturday 25 April, Louis XIV and a court of 2,000 demanding hangers-on were to be entertained by the Prince de Conde, Vatel's boss. Vatel didn't sleep for 12 nights. Everything had to be just so. And so, at first, it was. The King arrived on Thursday evening and went stag-hunting in the moonlight. Lanterns shimmered, and the magnificent dinner was taken on a tapestry of gorgeous jonquils. This was an era when glory was attached to the laying out of vast numbers of different dishes, rather than multiplying complication on a single plate. There would have been soup upon soup, platter upon platter of sheep's feet, sausages, pigeons, cutlets, melons, fine pates and fricassees, all in the first course alone - more than anyone could possibly eat.
But, during the second course of roast meat, disaster struck. Because of some unexpected extra guests, there were several tables left without meat. Vatel despaired. "My honour is ruined; this is a humiliation I cannot bear," he exclaimed. The Prince tried to calm him, but Vatel was still wound up when, after supper, the fireworks, which had cost a fortune, failed to go off properly. At four in the morning - his nerves shattered - he met the supplier bringing fish for the next day's princely feast. There were only two batches. How could this be? Vatel had sent to every single seaport in the country. The spiralling disgrace was now too much. When no further suppliers showed up, Vatel went to his room and stabbed himself three times, until the shame went away.
Some merciless French commentators have claimed that Vatel's behaviour shows he couldn't have been a true cook; that he should have improvised a substitute for the fish and made the best of it and, above all, kept his head in a crisis. But the sting in the story is that there was no real crisis. On the Friday morning after Vatel's suicide, the fish did, in fact, arrive as expected, and the royal party ate a meal as sumptuous as the one the night before. The King went on a gondola ride, and again hunted stags by moonlight, as Vatel had meticulously planned. If only he had been alive to see it, Vatel's honour would have been completely restored. Which all goes to show that it's always too soon to despair in the kitchen.
For more on Vatel, see Dominique Michel's Vatel et la naissance de la gastronomie, available from fnac.com
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