Like so many of us, I didn’t question my parents enough about family stories. The few stories that my mother told me were rather fantastical, so I found them difficult to take seriously. They were more like family myths than family lore.
One of the stories concerns a greatuncle, two or three times removed, who reputedly swam the River Jordan with a cross in his mouth to atone for having killed a man in a fight over a woman.
Another story, that I think may have some truth, is that a great-great-aunt was a tugboat captain on the Hudson or the East River in Manhattan. I don’t know the story of Tugboat Annie; perhaps it was she.
My mother would sit on the edge of my bed and tell my sister and me stories, the same stories that her father told to her. We would always ask for the one about the lady-in-waiting. As my mother told it, a lady-in-waiting was a highborn lady who was picked to make sure that the queen had a companion and someone to carry her long train. My mother claimed that our great-great-grandmother was a ladyin waiting to a queen. She wasn’t sure which queen, but she knew that a lady-inwaiting had to have blue blood. (I remember noting that the tiny veins in my wrist were blue).
My mother said that this long-lost grandmother fell in love with a commoner and the couple immigrated to America so that they could be together. I could tell that my mother wanted to believe the story, but even as a small child I doubted that it was true.
My cousin George, who lives outside Chicago, is the family historian, but he has lost the trail in England and is still trying to pick it up.
Recently I was able to corroborate one of the stories, at least to a point. My mother told us that Henri Charpentier, reputedly the first celebrity chef and the man who created the crepes suzette, was my father’s good friend.
According to my mother, she and my father had a wedding brunch at Charpentier’s restaurant in Lynbrook, Long Island, N.Y., before he closed the place and returned to France.
I Googled Charpentier and lo and behold, an out-of-print book popped up written by him in 1945. I was able to purchase a used copy online and eagerly perused it for any mention of his restaurant, his wife or his friends. (That he would mention my father was a long shot, but you know, stranger things have happened). What I did find out was that he did have a restaurant, The Original Henri Restaurant in Lynbrook, the town next to the one where my father grew up.
The book publisher wrote that over the 25 years the restaurant was open, it attracted the wealthiest and most notable of the world’s celebrities who made the 45- minute trip from New York City. They included Rudyard Kipling, William K. Vanderbilt, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and many others.
The restaurant was almost closed down during Prohibition because even the soup was made with wine. In order to keep his restaurant open, Charpentier had to agree not to use or serve wine, so I rather doubt that my parents and their wedding guests were served crepes suzette, which is made with kirsch, white Curacao and rum.
I believe that my father did know him because my father knew many of the people in the restaurant business on Long Island. I know that because every Sunday afternoon we ate at one of them and the chef or the owner would come out and schmooze with my father.
Charpentier wrote his charming book about his early life and how he inadvertently invented the crepes suzette while cooking for Edward, Prince of Wales, at the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo. He was making French pancakes at the table of the prince and while he was making the sauce in a chafing dish, the cordial that he was pouring into the dish caught fire. He tasted the sauce and found it to be delicious so he plunged the crepes into the flaming sauce. The prince also thought it was delicious and since he was with a woman named Suzette, he asked the 15- year-old Henri to call the dish by her name.
Charpentier wrote in his book, “And so this confection was born and named, one taste of which, I really believe, would reform a cannibal into a civilized gentleman.”
There are people who dispute Charpentier’s story, but it doesn’t make it less charming, just as my mother’s stories charmed us as children.
Both of my parents are gone now. I didn’t find out much from investigating the story of the connection between Henri Charpentier and my parents, but I do have a recipe for crepes suzette.
If Charpentier is right, in these polarized times a little crepes suzette might go a long way toward making people more civil to each other.