Music on Sunday
By M. F. K. FISHER
THE best days in Dijon were Sundays. Then Papazi, an apron over his pin-striped trousers and his skullcap set somewhat more jauntily than usual on his smooth pink head, made a tart for the grandchildren.
On feast days, on the innumerable birthdays, he worked alone in the kitchen. He created now a diplomate au kirsch, now a bombe Nesselrode or a dozen coupes Dame Blanche. He worked in a controlled frenzy, if such there be: his mustache, when we peeked silently at him through the one dim window into the courtyard, vibrated like a small, pale crescent moon above his tight mouth, and his little fat hands flicked aspishly, with delicate dead reckoning, from the bowls to the bottles to the jars and back again.
It would have been impudence raised to the celestial degree to interrupt him then. He was inviolate, a Jehovah en cuisine.
Sundays were different. They were really more fun. We could approach him, always with respect, but on that holy day with a kind of affectionate curiosity. He opened the heavenly doors and for a short time after church allowed us to watch while he threw together something completely simple, he insisted—something we were perhaps capable of understanding and one day even copying.
Papazi had been a Lutheran for fifty years in Alsace, not so much from conviction as from a melodramatic hope that he might have to fight for his “faith,” or perhaps even be stoned. Now, in Dijon, he stalked through the Sunday streets with an exalted glare on his round old face, praying, I am sure, for a little Catholic persecution.
He never got anything but most respectful nods, of course, from all the other retired pastryand candy-makers and their wives, but by the time he returned home and tied the Sunday apron over his pin-stripes he was in a state of quasi-religious elation.
“Hah,” he would mutter above the sound of the symphony coming from Berlin on the radio. “Hah! We Protestants are a small sect here. I hat I admit. Small but strong! We can fight when provoked! Separate burial grounds! Hah!”
And Plume and Doudouce and I, and the eldest brother Dédé and his roommates down from SaintCyr now and then, would huddle in awe in the dark corners of the room, watching Papazi grit his strong teeth (teeth that had lived for almost eighty years in a constant sweet syrup of his own concoctions!) while he tossed together the Sunday Tart.
It was almost always a tart. Occasionally, if the symphonies were too good to be listened to without both his ears, he would wait until about an hour before supper and make some kind of fritters. They were of apples or cherries or cheese, and he piled them like small, dark clouds on the big platter in the center of the supper table, and we ate perhaps a hundred of them and slept deeply and sweetly through the night.
We always liked it a little better, though, when he started to work as soon as Radio Berlin or Prague came on. That would be in the middle of the afternoon. The music would swell and thunder through the stuffy dining room into the miserable cramped, dark kitchen, and Papazi’s nose under his skullcap would shine cheeringly in the glare from the one dangling light-bulb, and his little hands would dart into the making of the Tart.
It was always the same kind. It always looked exactly like the last one. It always tasted like what it was: the most delicious tart in a whole land famous for them.
Papazi made the pastry first, with a nonchalance I’ve only seen in one other cook, a colored woman named Bea, who threw flour and shortening into a bowl at least three times a week and pulled out the lightest, tenderest soda biscuits ever to be baked and eaten. There was the same airy, almost unconscious concentration about both people, the old, fat confiseur in Dijon and the young, smooth, laughing woman in California.
Papazi talked while he mixed and rolled, and then flipped the delicate sheet of dough into the wide, flat baking tin he’d brought with him from Alsace. It was the conventional French shape, with steep, short sides, and about two feet across. He twirled it on his hand and slashed off the hanging dough, and then quickly put it out on the window ledge to chill, in winter, or in summer tossed it to Doudouce to run proudly with it down into the wine cellar.
And then he, and sometimes Plume if the impish child had not been too monkey-like that week at the Lycée, would peel apples from Normandy, and cut them into thin, even half-moons, and toss them into a bowl of white wine to keep bright and crisp. When only two more apples were left, and Papazi judged Plume could cope with them, he jumped up, humming and dancing to the music from the radio, and beat eggs and cream and nutmeg into a custard. He flicked an egg white over the chilled pastry with one of his innumerable brushes. He poured the custard in. It filled the shallow pan just half full.
He took the apple slices from the bowl one by one, almost faster than we could see, and shook off the wine and laid them in a great, beautiful whorl, from the outside to the center, as perfect as a snailshell. We said not a word. The music trembled in the room. The light burned down. Papazi shuffled the thin pieces of fruit like a wizard or a little fat god, and they seemed to fan out from his hands and fall rightly into place. He did it as effortlessly as a spider spins a web.
Then he poured thin apricot glaze over the whole, shook it gently, and slid it into the oven. He stood for a second looking at the shut door, and laughed sadly, like any man, either earthly or celestial, after the final pang of creation. We stirred in our dark corners. He looked straight at us, for the first time since the beginning of the pastry.
“You see?" he said. “It is the Tart, the simplest form of patisserie. I admit it is also one of the most complex. It takes years of careful behavior, like — like being the one Protestant in a nest of papists! It takes guile!”
And he flung off his apron, shook it once professionally, and put on his cutaway. We followed him silently into the dining room, to listen to the end of Radio Berlin and wait for the Tart to be baked for our Sunday supper.
