The Gourmet Hunt

The disappearance of the Duke of Montguise in Italy caused little concern at first, for it was his custom to travel alone and he rarely bothered to inform anyone of his whereabouts.

As weeks went by, however, troubled looks began to appear on the faces around the tables of the two or three restaurants in Paris where it was still possible for a civilized man to eat a decent meal. Montguise had been absent for longer periods in the past, it was true, and yet his friends were becoming increasingly anxious. To them, Italy was a barbaric land, full of perils. The duke himself was far beyond the age when new adventures could be lightly undertaken. Suppose something happened to him? Not only would that be a personal tragedy, it would be a calamity, for Montguise was in his own person virtually a national monument. He possessed the greatest stomach in France.

He was, that is, the finest of gourmets. Centuries of breeding had been required to produce the fastidiousness of his taste. So keen was his olfactory sense that he could identify any dish merely by its aroma, and from just one mouthful, he could tick off its ingredients not merely in their precise proportion but in their order of admixture as well.

Although he modestly avoided any display of his virtuosity, Montguise had on one famous occasion met the challenge of the Marquis of Degne, who had rashly wagered 50,000 francs that the duke would be unable to determine, from Degne's breath, the courses that Degne had just eaten for dinner that night at Maxim's. Montguise had coolly accepted this dare, and so the two noblemen had squared off as in a duel before a rapt audience in that splendid restaurant, the marquis arrogantly exhaling into the duke's face, while the maître de stood by as judge, a marked menu in his hand. Great was the awe of the onlookers when Montguise not only correctly named all eight courses (in reverse, as he sniffed his way through the various layers of the marquis' glottal emanations) but also criticized the cervelle de veau en matelote as being slightly underdone ... and then calmly proceeded to announce what Degne had eaten for lunch that day.

In recent months, the duke had betrayed great uneasiness and gloom. He kept complaining (continued on page 190)gourmet hunt(continued from page 181) that no true chefs existed any longer and that even at the finest restaurants, the food was just so much swill. "We'll end by starving," he morosely predicted and, in fact, he himself had shed some of his corpulence, although he was still the size of two ordinary men. He announced his trip to Italy as a farewell tour--a farewell not because he was aging but because he was convinced that Italian cooking was about to enter the regions of eternal darkness, under the pressure of commercialization and general ignorance, and he wanted to have one final taste of it. His friends had urged him not to go. If he wanted to enjoy his melanzane al funghetto and his zampone, why not go to an Italian restaurant in Paris? Montguise had been inflexible. It was one of his dicta that good food did not travel. In order to obtain the full values of his melanzane, he would need to hunt it down in its native surroundings (preferably, Calabria), while the zampone could be truly savored only in Modena. Eat Italian food in Paris? What nonsense! So, true to his principles, the duke had departed Paris on March third.

"Someone should have gone with him," said the Chevalier Dessoix uneasily, when the month of April had come and gone with no word from the duke. "We should never have allowed him to go off alone." But everyone knew that this would have been impossible. Montguise would not have permitted it. Good manners would have forced him to invite a traveling companion to his table, and this he could not abide. The presence of others at his meals he found noxious, for the aroma of the food they ordered interfered with his appreciation of his own. The exquisiteness of his gustatory apparatus had for some years required him to dine alone and in private rooms, and in these only after they had been thoroughly aired. Even then, the belch of a passer-by in the corridor might be enough to ruin everything.

"At the very least we should have followed him," said Lord Harmsby (who had not permitted a morsel of his native British cooking, to pass his lips for 60 years but was still occasionally disturbed by childhood recollections of boiled cabbage). "We should have sent someone on his trail. Just think. What if--" He broke off, distraught, paling above his vichyssoise. His fellow diners manifested similar signs of concern. They all knew the risks Montguise was running. Suppose he had been struck down by a treacherous cacciucco or laid low by an insidious fonduta napoletana? Worse, suppose he had then fallen into the hands of Italian doctors and--horrible to contemplate--had been confined to a bed in an Italian hospital, too enfeebled to resist the administration of greasy brodo and gluey risotto?

"It isn't too late," declared Comte DeSalles, pushing aside his moules au beurre d'escargot untasted. "I'll go after him myself!" He rose to his feet, his wineglass held high, and the others rose with him, joining him in his pledge. They vowed to go, too--a round dozen of the greatest palates in Europe, all the way from the aged General Saint-Just-Robespierre, who needed two valets to lace him into his corsets each morning, to the young Earl O'Hara of Cork. Graf von Goethe-Weimar was among them, as was the Baron of Battipaglia, and also the ex-heir to a Scandinavian throne who had fled to Paris, a culinary exile, rather than reign and eat fish. There was a moment of solemn dedication. Then glasses were drained and smashed, hands were clasped, plans were made.

The idea of requesting police assistance was rejected immediately. The police were, first of all, incompetent. And then, suppose they found Montguise while he was at the table (a not unlikely possibility, as the duke spent the greater part of his waking hours in the exercise of his special genius)? The thought of that sublime digestive process' being interrupted by a pair of rude carabiniéri, reeking of onions and garlic, was too unsettling to be entertained. No, the search for the missing duke had to be undertaken solely by his fellow gourmets, as a matter not only of discretion but of tactics, too. What other body of men was so well fitted to detect his gastronomic trail through the hundreds upon hundreds of cities, towns and villages of the Italian peninsula?

They set out at once by various means and conveyances. General Saint-Just-Robespierre thundered off in his staff car, taking both valets, plus ample hampers of roast goose, chicken, pâtés, duck, wines, etc., prepared for the possibility of a lengthy campaign. Comte DeSalles flew down in his two-seater plane, the Scandinavian prince tore away on his motorcycle and the Chevalier Dessoix and Colonel Mendoza de Cordoba journeyed together by train. Others went by car: Graf von Goethe-Weimar drove his Duesenberg, Lord Harmsby his Rolls, the Baron of Battipaglia his Ferrari and Prince Hapsburg-Hohenzollern his Mercedes, while the Laird of Forth and the Grand Duke of Smolensk chose a commercial airline. Earl O'Hara of Cork, temporarily short of funds, hitchhiked.

It was at Bologna that they all reassembled--or, rather, 11 of them did, for the Scandinavian prince was hors de combat, having misjudged a curve south of Lyons. Bologna had been chosen on the assumption that Montguise, a methodical man, would have begun his tour in the north, dining in a southerly direction, so by this time he undoubtedly would have eaten his way through Piemonte, Lombardy and the Veneto.

After a stupendous feast at a great Bolognese restaurant, the 11 gastronomes spread maps and guides on the table and plotted their next moves. The problems they faced were complex, for the territory to be covered was vast. It was, for instance, highly unlikely that the duke was simply proceeding from one provincial capital to the next. More probably, he was shunning them, on the assumption that the famous restaurants there had been blighted by tourism. He might well be nosing his way along the secondary roads, stopping at humble trattorias in unspoiled villages. But, of course, there were dozens of such roads and scores of rustic eating places in Emilia-Romagna alone, and farther south lay many hundreds more. It was clear that the duke's friends would have to separate, each to follow a different route. Thus, maps were marked and distributed, schedules were agreed on and communications arrangements were made--all rather hazily, it must be admitted, for the diners had washed down their pasticci di tortellini in pasta sfogliata and filetti di tacchino with wines somewhat more potent than those they were accustomed to (and, in fact, Graf von Goethe-Weimar was forced to withdraw altogether as a consequence of this meeting and was shipped by rail to Baden-Baden that night to begin a cure).

The ten remaining epicures set off early the next morning on their various assigned lines of travel. Their method of inquiry was relatively simple. At each likely looking osteria they came across, they asked the proprietor if he had, in recent weeks, been host to a rather well-upholstered and elderly French gentleman with particular, not to say finicky, dining requirements. There were many false leads, for the Italians considered most Frenchmen to be in this category; but on May 11, in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, Earl O'Hara of Cork (who had taken over the fallen Graf's Duesenberg) learned that none other than Montguise himself had dined at a little hotel there a month before--or that he had sought to dine, for (as the story was recounted by the family that ran the place) the duke had no sooner addressed himself to his capretto arrosto than his phenomenal nasopharyngeal equipment informed him that it had been cooked on charcoal produced from olive wood and not laurel, and he had leaped up in a fury and stormed out.

O'Hara of Cork communicated this news by telephone to General Saint-Just-Robespierre at Ancona, so that it could be recorded on the general's master map. In return, Saint-Just-Robespierre (continued on page 268)gourmet hunt(continued from page 190) passed along the discouraging information that the search party had been reduced to nine. The hot-tempered Laird of Forth, it seemed, had been insulted in Assisi because of his kilt and, as a result of the ensuing imbroglio, had been escorted to the nearest frontier.

Further evidence of Montguise's route was laboriously gleaned during the following week. He had passed through Siena, Perugia and Viterbo in mid-April (the crestfallen chefs in restaurants there vividly remembered his blistering denunciations), zigzagging his way down the peninsula. In an attempt to cut him off in the south, Saint-Just-Robespierre sent Prince Hapsburg-Hohenzollern speeding down the autostrada to Naples, but the unfortunate prince was disabled shortly after his arrival, when an overindulgence in anguilla revived an old liver complaint--and the very next day, in Urbino, the Grand Duke of Smolensk consumed four piquant portions of porchetta at one sitting and was borne away howling from gout.

The seven survivors pressed on--and they soon became six; for in Rome, the delicate nerves of the Chevalier Dessoix broke completely when a careless waiter served him an American hamburger instead of the saltimbocca he had ordered, and he was led off to a rest home, sobbing and twitching by turns.

Bypassing the Eternal City, O'Hara of Cork sped south in the Duesenberg. Of the remaining searchers, he was hottest on the duke's trail. Every day he discovered fresh proof of Montguise's vain attempts to obtain an Italian meal equal to his standards. In each case, the young Irishman ordered, was served and ate the same dish that had been rejected by the great gourmet. He did this because he was hungry and had to eat something, but it was also an act of homage to the duke. "I will suffer as he suffered," O'Hara would tell himself as he munched his costata alla pizzaiola or devoured his fiori di latte. But. much to his shame, he didn't suffer. He found everything delicious, in fact, and often requested second helpings. "I'm unworthy of that great man," the earl reproved himself, as he tucked zestfully into his vermicelli alle vongole. "I've obviously got a second-rate palate and hardly any standards at all." And he would glance guiltily about at the steaming and aromatic plates being served at other tables in the place and make mental notes that at his next meal, he would try this dish or that one. At times he so forgot himself as to go back to the kitchen and congratulate the chef. His only problem, indeed, was financial, and this he solved by selling certain of the Duesenberg's accessories, such as the klaxon, lap robe and Von Goethe-Weimar's alligator racing gloves, meticulously noting down the prices, so that he could later make repayment in peat futures.

From Potenza, as prearranged, O'Hara once more telephoned General Saint-Just-Robespierre, who had arrived, as scheduled, at Foggia. One of the general's valets was called to the phone and it was from this servant that O'Hara learned of the fate of three more comrades. The fiery Comte DeSalles had broken a waiter's nose in a dispute over his bill at Bari and had been forcibly repatriated; while at Caserta, Colonel Mendoza de Cordoba's allergic susceptibilities had been so galvanized by a garlicky spezzatino that he, too, had withdrawn. The Baron of Battipaglia, meanwhile, had been trapped in a Rome traffic jam and was not expected to be freed for at least a month.

"What about the general?" O'Hara inquired.

"Ah, monsieur...." The valet, struggling against his emotion, told the terrible story. That very day, in the hotel dining room, Saint-Just-Robespierre had so gorged himself on ravioli that his corsets had split, subjecting his uniform to such a sudden pressure of flesh that his buttons and war medals had gone whizzing like bullets through the room, winging two guests and the wine steward. The general himself had been the most cruelly wounded. His own Croix de guerre, ricocheting off the chandelier, had struck him in the mouth, breaking his dentures. The two valets now had no choice but to stuff the old warrior into the back of the staff car and return posthaste to Paris to his orthodontist.

O'Hara's hand trembled as he replaced the telephone receiver. One by one, the gallant had fallen. Of that bright band that had so bravely set forth from Paris a few short weeks ago, only he and Lord Harmsby remained. But where was Harmsby? Nothing had been heard of him since May 15, when he had reached Gubbio in time for tea. Probably Harmsby, too, had been claimed by misfortune--and, if so, then he. O'Hara of Cork, was the only one left, and the responsibility of finding and saving the duke was wholly his. Apprehensive and shaken, O'Hara hurried on his way.

He arrived at the toe of the Italian peninsula on June first. There, at the water's edge, he saw a familiar and heartening sight. It was the lean figure of Lord Harmsby, pacing back and forth beside his parked Rolls, casting nervous glances out at the Strait of Messina from time to time. The Briton greeted O'Hara gloomily. "They told me at a restaurant in town that Montguise passed through two weeks ago," he said. "They served him mostaccioli alla calabrese."

"Well?"

"He refused it. He told them they'd cooked it five seconds too long." Lord Harmsby hesitated. "Well, it's supposedly their specialty, so I tried it myself."

"How was it?"

Lord Harmsby averted his gaze. "Magnificent," he muttered unwillingly. "It was absolutely magnificent." O'Hara noticed that he was not nearly so lean as he had been before and that, in fact, his midsection was now graced by a mild paunch. "But, in God's name," the peer added, "don't breathe a word about it to the duke, if you find him."

"If I find him?"

"He's in Sicily now, you see." Harmsby gestured out at the strait, where ferries undulated on the choppy waters. "You must follow him alone, O'Hara, for I cannot. I'm no sailor," he explained. "The mere sight of the sea sometimes--" He said no more but turned away unsteadily and climbed back into the Rolls. "Good luck," he called out queasily. Then he backed and turned the car and sped away.

Thus, through Sicily, Earl O'Hara of Cork searched alone.

He pursued his noble quarry first through the restaurants of the leading cities, where he discovered many a delectable dish and a rich variety of invigorating wines but no word of the duke. Pausing in Palermo only long enough to market the Duesenberg's hubcaps, radiator ornament, spare tire and, indeed, everything else that could be profitably pried loose, O'Hara directed his attention to the towns and villages. He drove through lush valleys and up sun-baked coastal hills, his eye alert for every rustic establishment where Montguise might have stopped. But his inquiries were in vain. It was as though Sicily itself, which had absorbed so many foreign conquerors, had digested the invading duke as well, leaving not a trace of him.

On June tenth, a tire went flat. Since he had sold the spare, O'Hara could do no more than pull over to the side of the road. There he locked the car, pocketed the keys and went on by foot, comforting himself with the reflection that he soon would have had to do so in any event, for his explorations had carried him into primitive zones, where only the mules could travel with ease. The road had, in fact, become little more than a haphazard assemblage of stones. Farther on, it narrowed to a track, then to a path, and finally to a mere rut before it vanished altogether, leaving the earl bemused, footsore and hungry--but not without hope of some lunch, for he perceived a village some few hundred yards ahead, not far from the sea.

He hastened toward it. On the outskirts, he encountered a peasant, whose redolent respirations vividly answered at a distance of ten full paces the question O'Hara had been about to ask--namely, whether there was, in that hamlet, a place where food might be obtained. The earl strode eagerly ahead. What the peasant's exhalations had so clearly promised was ever more unmistakably proclaimed with every step. From the kitchen of that lowly country osteria he was approaching, there wafted such fragrant and enticing aromas that O'Hara fairly panted in the anticipation of tasting the foods that produced them.

He passed through the open doorway, salivating heavily. Inside, he was momentarily shaken by a terrible thought--was it possible that he was too late for the midday pranzo?

Praise God, he was not. The proprietor, a jovial countryman, ushered him to a rough table and set before him a basket of fresh bread, the mere feel of which gave him goose flesh.

Then the pasta course was served. It was, to all appearances, an ordinary maccheroncini con le sarde. The earl addressed himself to it hungrily and popped the first forkful into his mouth. He chewed, he swallowed--and sat as though poleaxed in his chair. It wasn't simply good. It wasn't just excellent. Nor was it merely superb. It was miraculous. Having recovered from the shock of that first mouthful, he took a second, a third, a fourth. Each ingredient, potent in itself, had been deftly counterbalanced by another, and the whole dish altogether was a masterly orchestration of flavors that made his palate ring with delight. He ate on in mounting wonder. It seemed to him that he had discovered what it was to eat well for the first time in his life. Tears of rejoicing rose to his eyes. He carefully wiped them away, not wanting them to fall onto his plate and adulterate that marvelous sauce.

After that, he was served a farsumagru, followed by arancine and a country salad so fresh it fairly glowed on his plate, and then, for dessert, a cassata of such delectability that the first taste made his head swim. Each course seemed better than the one before, raising the earl to barely tolerable heights of gustation. Despite his youth, he had supped at the finest restaurants in the Western world, but never before had he tasted such magnificent fare. What stunning luck he'd had! Here in a remote corner of Sicily that was untouched by the modern world (and, indeed, only superficially affected by the medieval one), he had stumbled onto a cookery that in its ancient and unspoiled purity was nothing short of divine!

When he had finished, he sat tranquilly digesting for a while. In but a few hours, he reflected, dreamily picking his teeth, it would be time for supper! And why not? He deserved some time off, he decided. He really ought to stay the night and then leave the next day--after lunch!

It was purely from habit that the earl made his customary inquiry about Montguise, and he was startled when his host returned an affirmative answer.

"Yes, signore. The French lord was with us for several days." The proprietor sighed, his expression clouded by the same gloom O'Hara had seen on the faces of others who had fallen short of the duke's discriminating standards.

"But surely he ate your dishes!"

The proprietor sighed again, deeply. "We tried everything, signore. But always there was something not to his liking. A pinch of salt too much, an onion too finely chopped, the brodo served a fraction of a degree too cool...." He winced at the memory of the duke's meticulous requirements.

O'Hara sank back marveling in his chair. Had the duke scorned the offerings of even this greatest of kitchens? Here was an extreme demonstration of the grandeur of his taste!

"I tried to persuade him to return to France, signore," the proprietor continued, "but he was horrified at the very thought. He told me that it was impossible to eat in that country any longer. In fact, he confided to me that he had fled to Italy in the hope of obtaining a decent meal."

"Tell me," asked the earl, "how long was he here?"

"He departed, signore, a week ago."

"In which direction?"

"Ah, that I cannot say."

"Perhaps someone else witnessed his departure?"

"Yes, signore. Let me take you to him."

The proprietor escorted O'Hara through the village to the church, where they found the priest.

"The French lord? Ah, yes," said the priest, and his features, too, bore that same rueful look that was by now familiar to the earl. "I confessed him shortly after he arrived. There was a rather unusual problem."

"A problem?"

"Well, he took Communion, you see--or, rather, he didn't take it. He refused to accept the wafer. He said it was overdone."

"I see."

"And when I saw him the following week," the priest went on, "he objected most strenuously to the quality of the holy oil when I sought to anoint his lips."

O'Hara stared at him, aghast. "You mean you administered the last rites?"

The priest bowed wordlessly and led the shaken earl around the church to the cemetery. "You can examine the medical certificate, if you like," he said, as they approached the final resting place of the great gourmet. "It was most extraordinary. The doctor was absolutely flabbergasted."

O'Hara looked at him inquiringly.

"He died of starvation, you see."

For a long time, the earl remained at the graveside, praying for Montguise's soul (which probably needed it. he reflected, for it might well be argued that the duke was a suicide). Then he glanced surreptitiously at his watch and departed at once in the direction of the osteria, not wanting to be late for supper.