Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 21, 1994 TAG: 9412220003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHELLE LOCKE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: OAKLAND, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
From Papa's favorite roast chicken to Gertrude Stein's tea parties to Josephine Baker's naked lunch, Hunter has researched and recreated menus of the expatriate Americans in Paris for her book, ``Found Meals of the Lost Generation.''
Part chatty history, part cookbook, ``Found Meals'' is a tasty read, reflecting the lusty appetites of the coterie of writers and artists who went to France in the 1920s.
For Hunter, an Oakland free-lance writer, it was the culmination of a decades-long fascination with the generation she first read about as a conservatively raised 18-year-old delving into the pages of Hemingway's ``A Moveable Feast.''
It was a revelation.
``I realized that there were all these people who lived out there in a way I didn't know existed. They sinned. And they lived to tell the tale,'' she said.
Hunter went on to spend a year in France, where she found herself visiting her idols' homes and haunts.
The idea for the book came one day while she was reading ``The Sun Also Rises,'' and realized the restaurant Hemingway wrote about in the book still existed, albeit under a different name.
She and a friend went there and ordered the same roast chicken that the characters Jake and Bill enjoyed in the book, topped off by the same walk.
``It was just wonderful. It was as if we were dining with them,'' Hunter said.
From there came the idea of finding references to food in the fiction or memoirs of the expatriates and matching that to recipes of the time.
``I just read everything I could get my hands on,'' she said.
In all, Hunter researched more than two dozen gatherings, providing settings, guest lists, conversation and recipes tested in her own kitchen.
The book begins with a famous 1908 banquet Picasso threw for painter Henri Rousseau, then an old man who was generally scorned by the official art world.
The banquet was supposed to be a stately evening featuring a ``riz a la Valenciennes'' (a sophisticated paella) with a guest list that included Stein and her new friend, Alice B. Toklas.
But a wild night ensued, complete with a gate-crashing donkey. Hunter admits what really happened that evening is hard to guess; a quantity of booze was quaffed and guest accounts conflict. But the recipe she provides for the main dish appears faithful to the original - she based it on a recipe by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
A much quieter affair is the description of a dinner Langston Hughes shared with his lover, Mary, on their last night together.
Hughes was one of several black Americans who formed a significant community of their own in Paris during the 1920s, drawn partly by the lack of racial barriers.
Still, that didn't help him get a job. He had to work as a nightclub dishwasher, a lowly position that prompted Mary's father to order her back home to London.
There was time for one last, romantic repast, described by Hughes in his autobiography from start - wine and veal - to finish - wild strawberries bought on the way home and eaten in a window seat while ``sadly watching the sun set over Paris.''
Friendship and food were the focus of a road trip by Hemingway and his new acquaintance, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The two set off in April 1925 to rescue a car Scott and Zelda abandoned in Lyon. Hemingway was stunned to find the car missing its top (Zelda's version of the convertible) and the subsequent drive home through spring rains was an uncomfortable one.
A stop at a hotel in ``famous chicken country'' provided some respite, as Hemingway recalled in ``A Moveable Feast.''
After eating ``poularde de Bresse'' and drinking a bottle of white wine, Fitzgerald ``passed out at the table with his head on his hands,'' Hemingway wrote. ``It was natural and there was no theater about it and it even looked as though he were careful not to spill nor break things.''
Hunter's cooks' tour of the Left Bank ends in the late '20s, by which time the ranks of the expats had been thinned by deaths, defections and the influx of tourists.
It was over by the stock market crash of 1929, she writes, using an apt quote from expatriate Harold Stearns to sum up the era.
``It was a silly life,'' he wrote, ``and I have missed it every day since.''
``Found Meals'' by Suzanne Rodriguez-Hunter is published by Faber and Faber, with a suggested retail price of $21.95.
by CNB