The princess and the "bolinhos de bacalhau"
Aristocratic and beautiful, Grace Kelly adored the meal and she repeated it several times
Model of beauty, elegance and class for an entire generation of women, Grace Kelly died in an automobile accident; there is not more than 20 years, moving the world. Officially, the vehicle was driven by the Hollywood's ex-actress and then princess from Monaco. It was affirmed that she had a sudden evil, lost the direction and fell down in a cliff with the old Rover of the family. But rumors never confirmed placed in the steering wheel her youngest daughter, Stéphanie, that would drive drunk. The accident happened in the morning of September 13 in 1982. Grace was taken unconscious to the hospital. She had broken the femur and the head. Didn't resist to the wounds and expired 32 hours after, she was with 52 years. Stéphanie, that was 17 years old, just suffered excoriations and survived.
Some said that the place was the same where, almost three decades before, Grace and Gary Grant rotated, in 1954, one of the famous scenes of the film "To Catch A Thief". Others told a different history. They guaranteed that in that local Grace would have sighted the principality for the first time and asked the screenwriter John Hayes, with the false British accent incorporated in the adult age, she had been born in United States: " What beautiful gardens are those "?
The fact is that, one year after "To Catch A Thief", movie entirely set at Côte D'Azur, she met the prince Rainier Grimaldi III, supreme ruler from Monaco, he was with 32 years old and needed to marry.
If he didn't have heirs, his small and old principality, with just 1,4 square kilometer of area and controlled since 1297 by the Grimaldi's dynasty, it would be incorporated France, in the protectorate condition. Gary Grant demanded the cupid paper, but other people were entitled responsible for the initial encounter. Grace was in Europe to attend the Festival du Cannes. Thanks to her elegance and aristocratic load, she was already considered in the movies a type of princess.
Rainier, dazzled with the beauty and the intelligence of Hollywood's actress, invited her to visit his palace. Grace accepted. It was a brief encounter, but definitive. Little time later he asked she in marriage.
The nuptial ceremony, accomplished in April 19, 1956, lasted three hours. A television program, with 31 minutes of duration, allowed that 3 million people attended it in the whole world. Grace used a wedding gown that had consumed 110 meters of white silk and surrender. It exhibited a veil interposed of pearls. The necklace and the earrings were also of pearls. The press treated the engaged couple as born people one for the other, as protagonists of a stimulant fairy tale. When returning of the nuptial’s' trip, the bride hadn’t time to familiarity with her new attributions - princess's duties made she say good-bye of her artistic life -, because she was pregnant.
The first of the three children was Caroline (1957). Follow by Albert (1958) and the youngest, Stéphanie (1965). The domestic peacefulness lasted until the children turned adolescents. Caroline was unquiet. Albert caused less problems to his parents. In compensation, rebellious Stéphanie provoked them sharps headaches. Mother's task demanded a lot from Grace, but she always found time to help Rainier to govern Monaco, that her husband had inherited of his grandfather in 1949, financial problems. Among other providences, it recuperated the tradition of the "Red Cross Ball", in benefit of Red Cross, attracting ex-colleagues from Hollywood and persons of the high world society. The press didn't stop of speaking about the principality. The deluxe tourism multiplied; the game nationalized in 1957, with the state encampation of the concessionary company, controlled by the Greek trapper Aristóteles Onassis, became a respectable source of income; the financial crisis disappeared. But Grace resembled bored of residing there.
Alleging accompanying Carolina, which studied in Paris, she moved to French capital, where she and her husband acquired from a recently-died banker a small palace. They bought it with everything, including the option of maintaining the employees. In that moment, entered in scene the steward Antônio Clara, a Portuguese born in Canas de Senhorim, a small place close to Viseu, in the area of Beiras, that was in the house 12 years ago and will be our indirect source on a subject that his bosses always avoided to speak: the preferences of the Grimaldi's family on table. Competent professional, soon conquered the trust of the princess. He became the most powerful employee.
He worked with Grace and Rainier for three years, until moved to Lisbon, where he opened a restaurant and granted a precious deposition to the Portuguese gastronomic writer Manuel Guimarães (À Mesa com a História - something like To the table with the history - Colares Editora, Sintra, 2000), that we will use to proceed.
A bricklayer former-servant's daughter, whose talent for the business promoted to a millionaire manager, Grace lived until the 18 years in Philadelphia, her native city and capital of Pennsylvania. Born in a "cradle of gold", she learned how to savor the best foods of the area of her State, especially the soups - not by chance, Campbell's, pioneer of the marketing in great scale of the canned soups, appeared in the neighbor State of New Jersey--and to appreciate anothers typical revenues, to the base of tomatoes, mushrooms and crabs. In 1947, warting the plans of the family, that didn't look upon with favor a family girl to turn actress, she moved for New York. There she familiarized with the Jewish, Chinese and Italian kitchens. She liked to eat, but it avoided excesses, to maintain the silhouette.
When Antônio Clara started to work for the Grimaldis, the princess controlled the menu of the residence of Paris personally, although she never entered in the kitchen. She gave orders to the steward and he transmitted them to the chef.
Was in the phase of the franc-italian cookery. The meal always began with a "consommé" or a soup that Rainier invariably refused. The resistance plates were fish or filé mignon, prepared in several ways, roast beef or meatballs with potato puree, bolognese spaghetti or an patty of vegetables that Grace loved. In each place in the table there was a menu in French. The princess disliked waste. She demanded that the food was enough, but not excessive. Someday, she called Antônio Clara a little before the lunchtime and she demanded "to surrender " the meatballs that would come from the kitchen, because an unexpected visit had arrived. When the steward went serve to table, he came across with Frank Sinatra.
Satisfied with Antônio Clara's acting, Grace allowed that him and the woman, both residents in the small palace, received Portuguese friends' visits freely. The most important of the group was priest Neves, that acted at a parish in Paris. Catholic apprentices, the princess liked the connection between the steward and the priest. The priest talked with the princess on subjects of faith, but it was in a temporary emergency that he helped her. Grace had set time in the hairdresser, placed in Place Vendôme, close to perfected jewelry stores, banks and of the luxurious Hotel Ritz. But her driver had a problem and he didn't appear. She didn't have doubts: embarked in the priest's old Volkswagen, that left in speed and she was punctual in the commitment.
Certain day the steward asked - and he obtained enthusiastic authorization - for the chef to elaborate, under his orientation, a Portuguese classic lunch. It was also it allowed to present a deprived of menu's meal for the first time.
The Grimaldis sat down to the table without know what they would eat. When the plates went arriving the novelties were revealed. Grace always commented the meals, when they finished. She was clear and frank. After the Portuguese lunch, she said that she and her family had accomplished a profitable gastronomic trip. For more curious than it seems, she adored the "bolinhos de bacalhau".
So much that the chef prepared other times the revenue.
Antônio Clara described Grace as a common housewife, worried with the domestic budget, interested in the family, happy with the husband, energetic and at the same time affectionate with the children. But today we knew that her life was not a fairy tale. Endowed with great personality, until childhood she determined to correspond the expectations of the other ones and to maintain the appearances. She adored the coexistence with powerful ones and it pursued the success with obsession. When unmarried woman, only dated important men: Don Richardson, teacher of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and actors Gary Cooper and Clark Gable.
When she won the better actress's Oscar, in 1954, with the film "The Country Girl", she entered in ecstasy. She had identical reaction when becoming the favorite blonde of Alfred Hitchcok and made, in the same decade, three masterpieces of the master of the suspense: "Dial M For Murder", "Rear Window" and the already mentioned "To Catch A Thief". The marriage with Rainier increased the charm of the true royalty. But the problems with the children became Grace in an unhappy person, woman originating from of a traditionally Catholic family of the called American Central Atlantic. Loved by the 32 thousand inhabitants from Monaco, she didn't only conquer the glory of the altars because Vatican was "made itself of deaf" to the beatification requests guided by her subjects.