Spanish 'Biryani' For The Indian Palate

By Roger Alexander

As Indian holidaymakers discover Spain at long last, can Spanish food be far behind in becoming the flavour of the season. Definitely not for Indian palates, since Spanish cuisine has a lot in common with Indian food.

The mainstay of the cuisine is rice, bread, and lentils. Saffron is an important ingredient and their national dish, the paella (pronounced pa-ye-ya) is suspiciously like a seafood biryani and, like Indian cuisine, tomatoes and chillies, although inseparable from Spanish cuisine, actually came much later after Columbus’s discovery of America.

Curiously, despite the fact that Spanish cooking is on the minds of gourmands around the globe - with El Bulli, the legendary restaurant near Barcelona, continuing to capture the spotlight and tapas having spawned an explosion in wine bars - paella, one of Spain’s most beloved dishes, hasn’t found a place on many restaurant menus. Indeed, here in India you can get it only at a Spanish food festival. But it’s catching on.

Not only does paella make a stunning visual statement – see yummy images above - it’s unbeatable for that dramatic entrance but it also takes care of itself for the last half hour of its cooking time, leaving you free to toss together a salad or put the final touches on a platter to serve as a starter. And you can even make it on the grill.

When you hear “paella”, you automatically think of seafood paella. However, the original paella doesn’t involve seafood at all. It comes from Valencia and involves rabbit, snails, sometimes chicken, never seafood; it’s an inland dish, the rice cooked in the paella pan with a very simple seasoning sauce. Even adding onion is something of a heresy, say experts. But there are no hard and fast rules.

Indeed, in the pantheon of great international party dishes, paella is probably the most misunderstood. A delightfully flexible meal, the only required ingredients are rice, water and olive oil, everything else is fair game. So if you shun meat, there’s vegetarian paella just for you.

As you can see in the pictures, pine nuts, potatoes, cauliflower, red pepper and other vegetables can be used to recreate the authentic taste.

What defines paella is the pan: The word comes from the Latin patella, a shallow pan. The pan absolutely has to be a paella pan, or it’s not paella. The whole idea is it needs as much surface heat on the bottom as possible so it cooks properly.

The paella pan always has two handles and come in different diameters, much like our own shallow kadhais. When you buy one, it’ll need to be seasoned; then after you cook with it and wash it, dry it thoroughly and wipe it with vegetable oil.

It’s important to use a pan that’s the right diameter for the amount of rice you’re cooking, as the layer of rice shouldn’t be very deep; ideally, no more than half an inch.

Though it’s not the original dish, seafood paella is extremely popular on the Valencian coast, where it’s served at seaside seafood shacks.

In Valencia and Alicante, the two regions paella rules in Spain, meatballs, pork, sausages and pine nuts are used, as well as potatoes, cauliflower, chard, red pepper and other vegetables.

Here you can use any of the vegetables and meats available in the high-end food stores or whatever looks great at the local greengrocer’s.

But whatever you embellish it with, the important thing to remember is paella is all about the rice.

The short- to medium-grained white rice (not basmati) is the best ones to use for paella for you want it to absorb as much flavour as possible, and cooked just enough to retain a somewhat firm texture, with the grains keeping their integrity. And the seafood or meats and vegetables shouldn’t overwhelm the rice.

The technique for making paella is simple. Start with the meats and vegetables, sautéing them in olive oil. Push them to the edges of the paella pan, and add a little more olive oil to the centre of the pan, along with some crushed garlic or onion, cooking just till it’s fragrant.

Next, add fresh tomatoes that have been grated on a box grater. That’s the seasoning sauce, or sofrito. (Grating the tomatoes is easier than it sounds, and results in a quick, fluffy pure; discard the skins.)

Stir the tomato into the oil and garlic or onion and cook it six or seven minutes until it’s reduced and thickened.

Combine the meats or seafood with the sofrito, add the rice and stir to coat it. At this point, you can stop the process, and time the rest to when you want to serve it. That’s actually good for its flavour.

About 40 or 45 minutes before you want to serve it, resume cooking. Heat the rice again, and add simmering stock or broth into which you've added a generous pinch of good saffron threads that you crush with your fingers. The proportion is important: For 1 3/4 cup rice, add 4 cups stock. (You can adjust the stock up or down depending on how much rice you use.)

Cook it on high heat for seven or eight minutes until the liquid is almost level with the rice, but the rice is still soupy.

Now put it in a hot oven, uncovered, or on a grill, for 15 minutes. Remove the pan, cover it with foil, and let it sit five minutes, then uncover it and let it stand another 5 or 10 minutes.

Grasp the paella pan by its two handles and bring it straight to the table. A group swooning is guaranteed.

(Adapted from The New Spanish Table by Anya von Bremzen)

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Mount Roraima: The Lost World

By Roger Alexander

This is the ultimate holiday destination. From the moment you set eyes on the towering sandstone cliffs rising steeply from of the rolling pampas of Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, it is impossible to banish thoughts of imaginary Jurassic inhabitants.

Arthur Conan Doyle populated Mount Roraima in Venezuela with dinosaurs, strange vegetation and animals in his book, The Lost World, based on the accounts of British explorers Everard Im Thum and Harry Perkins who were the first Europeans to ascend Mount Roraima in 1884.

Subsequent explorations and modern day climbers and trekkers find no dinosaurs, fossils or traces of prehistoric life on the top of the tepui. But they do find a fantastic world of crystal valleys, gorges, sandy beaches, mists and fog, fissures, rock formations, pools and waterfalls. That doesn’t mean you should not get there.

Mount Roraima is the tallest and most famous (thanks to Conan Doyle) of the table mountains called “tepui” and is located in the southeastern corner of Canaima National Park, near the borders of Brazil and Guyana.

Formed by the erosion of sea-bed sediment when Africa and South America drifted apart, they are among the world’s oldest geological formations. More to the point, if anywhere on Earth looks like the home of a long-lost line of dinosaurs, this is it! Indeed, to this day they still excite the imaginations of even the most experienced travelers.

Sir David Attenborough has a painting of Roraima on his living-room wall: “That mountain haunted me for 40 years,” he said in 2002, after finally realizing his dream and setting foot in the lost world. Standing at sunset on Roraima’s summit, with a view that stretches for nearly 322 km, it isn’t hard to see why.

Just a few feet away, the cliff walls drop 2,000 feet beneath. No lips, no ledges - just straight down. And as the setting sun performs miracles in the sky, it is easy to imagine a time when Roraima, indeed the world itself, was young.

There are no direct flights from Caracas or other large cities to the closest town with an airport, the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén. Many visitors fly to Ciudad Bolivar and take a smaller aircraft there. Some come in from Brazil.

From Santa Elena, it's about a two hour drive to the small Indian village of Parai Tepui, or Paraitepui, where you'll pay an entrance fee to climb the tepui, arrange for guides and porters (who are limited to 15 kg), if not already provided by a tour agency. You can also arrange for a guide and porters in San Francisco de Yuruaní, about 69 km north of Santa Elena on the main road. If you’re on your own, arrange for transportation back to Santa Elena at this time.

Plan to be in Paraitepui before noon, since no one is allowed to leave after two PM, as it's at least a five hour trek across the “sabana” to the first camp site. You can camp overnight in Paraitepui, but buy all your food in Santa Elena.

It’s about a 12 hour trip to the top of the tepui. The trip is broken by an overnight camp either along the Río Tek or the Río Kukenan, 41/2 hours from Paraitepui. If you have enough time, you can also push another three hours uphill to the base camp.

The next day is the four (or more) hour climb up the ramp, through cloud forest, waterfalls and rock formations to reach the top of the tepui. You'll camp in one of the sandy areas called ‘hoteles’ protected from the weather by rocky overhangs. Everything you take up, you must bring down, including used toilet paper. However, you may take no souvenirs from the tepui.

If you have only a day, you can take many of the trails leading from the camps, but to properly explore the black, craggy surface of the tepui, you should allow yourself at least an extra day.

Your guide leads you to the Valle de los Cristales to see the colorful crystals; through gorges and fissures looking like alien worlds; to pools called ‘jacuzzis’, but don’t expect hot water. You’ll see strange plants, birds and animals, even a tiny black frog that protects itself by curling up into a ball.

The descent from tepui Roraima takes about ten hours to reach Paraitepui. (If money is not a problem, an alternate way to see tepui Roraima is by helicopter, allowing two-three days on the summit.)

When you arrive at the top after a three-day walk in - two days crossing the rolling grasslands followed by the same grueling route up the cliff face first taken by the explorer Everard Im Thurn in 1884 - the barren, craggy summit seems something of a disappointment. Fret not, for its wonders are soon unveiled.

Soon you discover a weird landscape of gullies and hidden valleys, some as barren as a volcano, others lush with lichen, moss and stunted trees or covered in carpets of white sand. As you look up, you see Tolkienesque shapes silhouetted against the sky - a winged turtle here, a petrified palace of the winds there. It seems like the home of the gods.

Over the aeons, the summits of the tepuis, sometimes dubbed the Galapagos of the Skies, have evolved unique ecosystems - as many as 50 per cent of the species of plant and animal that live here are found nowhere else! You discover a rare orchid, a Catherine wheel flower on its spiky stem, a carnivorous pitcher plant or an ebony-black toad an inch long (Oreophrynella quelchii is older than the dinosaurs and can neither hop nor swim).

After a hard day of walking, bathe in crystal-clear rivers and wash away the grime under waterfalls. On the summit, you can find your own whirlpool bath set in a bed of quartzite crystal.

Some of these pools are sinkholes formed by the collapse of underground caves and lead to measureless caverns. The translucent gold water makes it look as though you are luxuriating in a Turkish bath even though the temperature is only a few icy degrees above zero.

In the middle distance you can see your starting point, the Indian village of Paraitepui, where you hired a team of Pemón Indian porters. On paper, the distances covered do not seem that great - a round trip of about 55 km - but the steepness of the terrain (particularly the knee-crunching descent), the remorseless attentions of the puri-puri bugs and the tropical heat of the grasslands should not be underestimated.

The tepuis are part of Venezuela’s Canaima National Park and environmental protection rules are strictly observed. There are three fixed sites for camping en route to the tepui and all food and drink is carried in. Latrine pits are dug at the camps, but from Roraima itself all waste is taken back out. On the summit, home is a cliff overhang at the entrance to an underground cave system.

With a clear drop of 2,684 feet (818m), Angel Falls is nearly eight times higher than Victoria Falls and 16 times higher than Niagara Falls. And it was on Auyan tepui, from which they plunge, that the Canadian gold-prospector and adventurer Jimmy Angel crash-landed his Flamingo monoplane in 1937, thereby discovering the falls to which he later gave his name.

From your jungle camp directly opposite, you can watch the cliffs change from red to orange and then pink as the sun rises in the sky and vultures, strangely graceful in flight, soar in front.

After your adventures on Roraima, the day trek through the jungle to the base of the falls is a stroll in comparison, but the reward is equally compelling. To bathe in water that has just plunged more than half a mile from a summit is a mind-boggling experience!

By this time you become so immersed in the otherworldly atmosphere of the tepuis that scientific explanations for their existence begin to pale alongside the powerful local legends and you look up at the surrounding mountains to see, in the rocks, the perfect outline of an Indian’s head! It is there. This is indeed the lost world.

FACT FILE

When to Go
You can climb Mount Roraima any time of the year, but most people prefer the dry season between December and April. However, the weather is changeable at any time, and rain and mist are a constant. With rain, the rivers swell and crossing may be difficult.

What to Take
Be prepared for hot, steamy days and cold nights on the top of the tepui. You’ll want reliable rain gear, tent, and sleeping bag, if not provided by your tour company. A foam mat adds comfort. Additionally, you'll need good walking shoes or boots, sneakers, a bathing suit, sun protection/sun blocker, hat, knife, water bottle, and a flashlight. A camera is a must, as is a cooking stove and food.

If you’re on your own, take more food than you'll need in case you want to spend an extra day on the tepui. Take plastic bags to carry your garbage out. Take a big supply of good insect repellant. The sabana is home to a biting gnat, jején. commonly referred to as la plaga, the plague.

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Haute Horologerie: Opus 8 from Harry Winston

(If you're into watches, the Opus 8 from Harry Winston, the celebrated New York jeweller, is an innovation - a digital watch with a complicated mechanical movement!)

By Roger Alexander

Neither a watchmaker nor a designer by trade, Frédéric Garinaud came up with an idea five years ago to invent a hybrid timepiece that would bring together complicated mechanics and digital electronics. Around the same time he first learned of the Opus concept developed by Harry Winston and began dreaming of an innovative timepiece to bring to the brand that was recently unveiled as Opus 8.

Known as ‘Magician’ by those he has worked with, Garinaud’s avant  garde designs challenge traditional precepts within the industry. While watchmaking is his gift, this untiring creative also has a passion for ethology, cars, and even the sun…In fact, he dreams of one day breeding horses!

Indeed, at the heart of Garinaud’s work is unbridled creativity and pure emotion. A modest man with extraordinary talent, Garinaud’s passion and visionary style has already made an impressive impact on high-quality watchmaking.

As the adage goes, hunters work in pairs. And Harry Winston, always interested in developing his hybrid idea, met with Garinaud in early 2007 and presented him with a new challenge to transform the hybrid display into a digital format. Garinaud immediately returned to his design table to create a prototype. Eventually, at Basel 2007, armed with rolls of design drawings and his team from the Cellule des Spécialités Horlogères, the Magician - as reverential fans and peers call him - revealed his latest tricks, presenting his preliminary plan for Opus 8.

This was not a new development for Harry Winston had earlier launched a programme in 2001 to encourage a new interest for unlimited freedom and innovation in technical watchmaking, partnering with independent watch makers. Indeed, even now the Opus programme develops rare timepieces neither seen nor imagined within the industry.

Though Harry Winston was initially unconvinced, Garinaud continued to work his innovative magic. Ten days later, he received an important and enthusiastic call: Harry Winston had accepted the plans; the Opus adventure had begun!

Not surprisingly, in the end, the Opus 8 utilizes hand-wound mechanical movements to create a modern, digital time display. Inspired by pin art games, which create 3D impressions of objects pressed against them, the numbers in the display will only appear ‘upon request’, activated by a bolt on the right hand side of the case. Nothing appears until the mechanism is wound.

A plate joins together small segments, both mobile and fixed. Just underneath is a disc driven by the movement, which turns independently in real time. When the mechanism is wound, the pieces adjust to display the time. As the plate descends, the small segments remain visible, “blocked” by the crystal, allowing the hour to be read for 5 seconds. Technically, all functions are related, enabling everything to be displayed on demand – the minute hand turns the hour that then turns the AM/PM function.

The dial’s microbead blasted coating is similar to that of a calculator, while the segments are made of black anthracite with polished sides. As innovative in materials, as in mechanics, the sides of the segments are crafted of amorphous carbon. A material more commonly known in Formula 1 racing, Garinaud’s team successfully adapted it to use for watch microparts. The specialized material has an extremely low friction coefficient and highly resistant coating. Wear, blockages and material discharge become almost non-existent.

In addition to a modern, sophisticated technique, Opus 8 features a strikingly original dial display. On the left is a four-digit hour display – two for the hour and two for the time of day (am/pm). When it is 20 hrs, the watch will display 08 pm. On the right is an innovative minute counter, with a layout and display from bottom to top. Set in 5 minute segments (precision being secondary), the 5 minute indicator is an arrow-shaped ring. The hour and minute numbers recalls the symmetrical hexagonal typography found in liquid crystal mechanics.

With its imposing rectangular dimensions – 43mm wide, 41mm long, 13 thick – Opus 8’s bold, graphic shape resembles a retro-style television set. The case front has a resolutely digital display with its 4mm-thick domed crystal blocking the segments. With the display winding bolt located on the right and the winding crown on left, the mechanism has a movement rotation of 180 °.

The display of the hour is not possible during winding. In the middle, an opening allows us to admire the heart – the balance. The movement’s back is decorated like a printed circuit, with lines leading to the various time elements like at the top the hours (H), and the minutes (M). On the left, the periods of the day (AM/PM), and on the right, the 48-hour power reserve indicator (PRI). At the bottom, two lines indicate the co-designers of the watch - Garinaud & CSH (Cellule de Spécialités Horlogères) - and the serial number.

Rooted in the Pop Art moment of the 1970s, digital art and technology has revolutionized our way of life and continue to influence contemporary art and culture that allows artists to create works of extreme complexity, these same advances in digital technology have also transformed the art of modern watchmaking. And, armed with the avant-garde and innovative spirit that defined this decade, Opus 8 represents a continuation of this technological and artistic (r)evolution!

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Tech Details

Movement type: Mechanical, elliptical, with mechanical digital display module, Manual winding

Display: Hours, minutes (every 5 minutes), AM/PM.

Frequency: 3 Hz

Main Diameter: 35 mm

Display Module: 35.5 mm by 22.5 mm

Jewels: 44

Components: 437

Segments: 138

Power Reserve: 48 hours

Functions: On the face: Digital display indicated by segments: Hour (AM/PM) and

Minutes (every 5)

On The Back: Digital display indicated by discs: Hour (AM/PM) and

Minutes (every 5); Power Reserve also indicated on the back of the watch

Case: Material - White gold

Dimensions: Width: 45.8 mm; Length: 33.5 mm

Left: Crown for setting the time and winding

Right: Winding bolt for digital displays

Dial: Display module: black anthracite segments with polished sides; side of segments crafted from amorphous carbon ; hours, minutes and letters in digital form

Crystal: Anti- reflective Sapphire, 4 mm

Watchstrap: Leather

Water Resistance: 30 metres

Limited Edition: 50 pieces

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Model T: A Revolution On Wheels

By Roger Alexander

Henry Ford invented neither the automobile nor the assembly line, but recast each to dominate a new era. Indeed, no other individual of the last century so completely transformed the way people go from Point A to Point B.

By improving the assembly line so that the Model T could be produced ever more inexpensively, Ford placed the power of the internal combustion engine within reach of the average citizen. He transformed the automobile itself from a luxury to a necessity.

The Advent of the Model T seemed to renew a sense of independence among Americans who had lost their pioneer spirit to industrialization. Yet the methods that Henry Ford devised for producing his car so efficiently advanced that very industrialization.

Like its inventor, the Model T represented both high ideals and hard practicalities.

In the 1890s, any mechanic with tools, a workbench, and a healthy imagination was a potential titan in the infant industry. Even while continuing his career at Edison, Ford devoted himself to making a working automobile.

By rights, Henry Ford probably should have been a farmer. He was born in 1863 in Dearborn, Michigan, on the farm operated by his father, an Irishman, and his mother, who was from Dutch stock.

Even as a boy, young Henry had an aptitude for inventing and used it to make machines that reduced the drudgery of farm chores. At the age of thirteen, he saw a coal-fired steam engine lumbering along a long rural road, a sight that galvanized his fascination with machines.

At sixteen, against the wishes of his father, he left the farm for Detroit, where he found work as a mechanic’s apprentice. Over the next dozen years he advanced steadily, and became chief engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company.

At twenty-four, Ford married Clara Bryant, a friend of his sister’s; he called her ‘The Believer’ because she encouraged his plans to build a horseless carriage from their earliest days together.

In 1891, he presented his wife Clara with a design for an internal combustion engine, drawn on the back of a piece of sheet music. Bringing the design to reality was another matter, but on Christmas Eve1893 he made a successful test of one of his engines, in the kitchen sink.

The engine was merely the heart of the new machine that Ford hoped to build. On weekends and most nights, he could be found in a shed in the back of the family home, building the rest of the car.

So great was his obsession that the neighbours called him Crazy Henry. However, at 2:00 a.m. on June 4, 1896, Crazy Henry punched a large hole in the wall of his shed, and emerged at the wheel of an automobile - his automobile. In the weeks that followed, Ford was often seen driving around the streets of Detroit.

In 1901, Henry Ford poured his expertise into a pair of big race cars, one of which he entered in a ten-mile match race against a car built by Alexander Winton, a leading automaker from Ohio. The race took place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and Ford’s car won.

Because of the victory, the coal merchant Alexander Malcomson agreed to back Ford in a new business venture. In 1903, they formed the Ford Motor Company, in association with about a dozen other investors.

In 1903, Ford’s 125 workers made 1,700 cars in three different models. The cars were comparatively expensive, and their high profit margins pleased the stockholders.

Insisting that high prices ultimately slowed market expansion, Ford decided in 1906 to introduce a new, cheaper model with a lower profit margin: the Model N. Many of his backers disagreed. While the N was only a tepid success, Ford nonetheless pressed forward with the design of the car he really wanted to build. The car that would be the Model T.

“I will build a motorcar for the great multitude,” he proclaimed. Such a notion was revolutionary. Until then the automobile had been a status symbol painstakingly manufactured by craftsmen.

However, Ford set out to make the car a commodity. “Just like one pin is like another pin when it comes from the pin factory, or one match is like another match when it comes from the match factory,” he said.

In the winter of 1906, Ford had secretly partitioned a twelve-by fifteen-foot room in his plant, on Piquette Avenue in Detroit. With a few colleagues, he devoted two years to the design and planning of the Model T.

Early on, they made an extensive study of materials, the most valuable aspect of which began in an offhand way. During a car race in Florida, Ford examined the wreckage of a French car and noticed that many of its parts were of lighter-than-ordinary steel.

The team on Piquette Avenue ascertained that the French steel was a vanadium alloy, but that no one in America knew how to make it. The finest steel alloys then used in American automaking provided 60,000 pounds of tensile strength. Ford learned that vanadium steel, which was much lighter, provided 170,000 pounds of tensile strength.

As part of the pre-production for the new model, Ford imported a metallurgist and bankrolled a steel mill. As a result, the only cars in the world to utilize vanadium steel in the next five years would be French luxury cars and the Ford Model T. A Model T might break down every so often, but it would not break.

The car that finally emerged from Ford’s secret design section at the factory would change America forever. For $825, a Model T customer could take home a car that was light, at about 1,200 pounds; relatively powerful, with a four-cylinder, twenty horsepower engine, and fairly easy to drive, with a two-speed, foot-controlled ‘planetary’ transmission.

Simple, sturdy, and versatile, the little car would excite the public imagination. It certainly fired up its inventor. When Henry Ford brought the prototype out of the factory for its first test drive, he was too excited to drive. An assistant had to take the wheel.

“Well, I guess we’ve got started,” Ford observed at the time. The car went to the first customers on October 1, 1908. In its first year, over ten thousand were sold, a new record for an automobile model.

In 1909, mining magnate Robert Guggenheim sponsored an auto race from New York to Seattle in which the only survivors were two Model T Fords. “I believe Mr Ford has the solution of the popular automobile,” Guggenheim concluded.

On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the fifteen millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan. Since his “universal car” was the industrial success story of its age, the ceremony should have been a happy occasion.

Yet Ford was probably wistful that day, too, knowing as he did that the long production life of the Model T was about to come to an end. He climbed into the car, a shiny black coupe, with his son, Edsel, the president of the Ford Motor Company.

Together, they drove to the Dearborn Engineering Laboratory, fourteen miles away, and parked the T next to two other historic vehicles: the first automobile that Henry Ford built in 1896, and the 1908 prototype for the Model T.

Henry himself took each vehicle for a short spin: the nation’s richest man driving the humble car that had made him the embodiment of the American dream.

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The Second Coming Of Marie Antoinette

By Roger Alexander

211 years after the revolutionary Republicans in France beheaded Marie Antoinette – she of the (in)famous “Let them eat cake” quote – present day French nobility (yes, they’re back) is all set to toast her memory on Tuesday, September 21, 2008.

The occasion is the formal reopening of the Petit Trianon chateau in the Versailles Palace grounds, Marie Antoinette’s favourite hideaway, after restoration. (image above) The chateau, which had fallen into an advanced state of disrepair, has been restored by a generous grant from Chairman of the Swatch Group and Chairman and CEO of Manufacture Breguet, Nicolas G Hayek.

Montres Breguet’s 5 million Swiss francs patronage encompassed the restoration of the Petit Trianon, the Belvédère and the Pavillon Français. In exchange, the Manufacture has got the right to host promotional events on this historic site. That time has now come. And Hayek is using the occasion to present to the world an exact replica of the world’s most famous watch – the Marie Antoinette created by the celebrated French watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823) as a monument to the glory of 18th century horology.

Only a man like Hayek, driven by passion for art and a sense of history, could have dared to make a replica of the Breguet watch No. 160, better known as the Marie-Antoinette after the last Queen of France for whom it had been ordered by an admirer, a Swedish officer of the Queen’s Guard named by historians as Count Axel de Fersen, in 1783.

All in all, it is an incredible story in keeping with the mysterious destiny of this prestigious timepiece, which experts concur, is the world’s most valuable watch. Rarely has so much been written about a timepiece as for Breguet’s Marie-Antoinette watch.

The French queen, a Hapsburg actually, was driven by a truly passionate desire for Breguet watches. Keen to possess any auspicious novelty, she had acquired a number of timepieces, including a perpetuel watch embellished with a self-winding device developed by Abraham-Louis Breguet at the Quai de l’Horloge on the Ile de la Cite in Paris. According to Hayek, Marie-Antoinette was a true admirer of Breguet’s work, “so much so that she mounted the scaffold in 1793 with one of his watches in her hand.”

Whilst commissioning the watch ordered from the workshops in the Quai de 1’Horloge, De Fersen wanted a watch incorporating the entire body of horological science of the time – perpetual calendar, repeater, thermometer, chronograph, power reserve and parachute - as a gift to the queen.

The Neuchâtel watchmaker was no stranger to Louis XVI’s court. Fascinated by objects of value, Marie-Antoinette already owned one of Breguet’s perpétuelles, a watch with a self-winding rotor mechanism, invented by Breguet himself. Clearly enamoured, the queen’s suitor contacted the watchmaker in 1783 with an unexpected proposal: to make the most spectacular watch ever seen.

With no limitation of time or expense, Breguet had free rein to create a watch that must leave Marie-Antoinette speechless with admiration. In fact, the order specified that gold should, wherever possible, be used instead of other metals, and that the complications should be both multiple and varied. There were to be no limits to the original price, Breguet was simply told to make the “most spectacular” watch possible. Unconstrained by limitations of cost or time, Breguet had a free hand.

Marie Antoinette knew nothing of this extraordinary gift. Nor did she live to admire it. When she mounted the scaffold in 1793, the watch was still at Breguet’s Parisian workshop. It was not finished until 1827.

It took a full 44 years to complete the watch, proof indeed that it is a work of art. This stunning piece features the greatest watchmaking complications known at that time. One of Breguet’s perpétuelles, the Marie-Antoinette watch includes a minute-repeater, a full perpetual calendar, an equation of time (that is, the difference each day between solar time and mean time indicated by clocks and watches), a power-reserve indicator, a bimetallic thermometer, a large independent seconds hand and a small centre seconds hand, a lever escapement, a gold balance spring and a parachute anti-shock device. This profusion of technological wonders was housed inside a gold case with a rock crystal dial through which the movement could be admired.

However, neither De Fersen nor the queen saw the watch in its final glory. The Marie-Antoinette pocket watch was completed in 1827, 34 years after the queen was guillotined and four years after Breguet’s death. (see pic)

Owing to its origins and complicated engineering, the watch quickly became a legend. Indeed, its roots and story, as fabulous as it is epic, have haunted the watchmaking world and the minds of collectors for more than two centuries

The watch continued was ready only in 1827. But there was no one to buy it. According to Hayek, a certain Count Marquis de la Groye purchased it and brought it back (to Breguet) for repairs but never returned to collect it. Funnily, the company didn’t have his address and it was never returned to him.

Finally, the surviving members of Breguet family sold the business and it went through different hands. It was finally acquired by Chaumet, a big jeweller in France. He in turn sold it to a big fund investor. Eventually, the watch was sold to the Mayor of London who, incidentally, was the first Jewish mayor of London.

After his death the watch was bequeathed to his daughter who donated many objects of art that her father gave her to the LA Mayer Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem. It was from there that the watch was stolen in 1983 along with 40 items from the original collection of 100 watches and clocks, one of the most important in the world.

Hayek says he wanted to advertise and pay for the watch, but was advised against it, as the museum would seek its return. Besides, he did not want to deal in stolen property even though it was an important part of Breguet’s history. Therefore, in 2005, he decided to make a new Marie Antoinette that would be a replica to the last detail.

(In the meanwhile, even as the new Marie-Antoinette was being created, the stolen watch reappeared under dramatic circumstances and was offered to Hayek who refused to buy stolen property. The Jerusalem museum had no compunction in buying it back from the thief and its back there but not on display but in its vault. In fact, the museum wanted millions to let Breguet examine it, but Hayek would have none of it.)

Three years later he unveiled only the second example of the gold pocket watch (Ref 1160BA/40) at the Baselworld watch fair earlier this year. “When we decided to make this watch ourselves, it was a hell of a challenge,” Hayek told Watch World. After all, none among the watchmakers at Breguet had even seen the original when the team embarked on the task of recreating the watch!

All they had were drawings and technical details archived in museums including Breguet’s own. Comparative examinations of contemporary antique watches, notably the Due de Praslin watch, revealed new factors concerning the styling and watchmaking techniques of the period.

With only a few rare documents, which gave no details of the complications, to guide them, Breguet’s watchmakers spent long months reproducing this exceptional timepiece’s ultra-complicated movement. The research also brought to light skills that have vanished and enabled the watchmakers to produce a timepiece that is in every respect faithful to its predecessor.

Indeed, Breguet’s watchmakers pulled off an extraordinary feat to create an exact replica of the original watch, which is proof of their immense talent. Their research even uncovered a complication that had never before been mentioned in relation to the Marie-Antoinette, namely the jumping hours, yet another of Breguet’s inventions.

The Hayek Marie-Antoinette stands out as an extraordinary work of art, in every way true to the original with its myriad complications including jumping hours, full perpetual calendar, minute-repeater, thermometer and equation of time and reveals a host of complications. According to Hayek, “In appearance it’s the same but now we have much better gold and much better steel. The quality of the materials is better.”

Each function and every decorative feature was minutely analysed. In the coachwork of the watch for example, the yellow gold of the 63mm-diameter case was cast in a special, more coppery alloy in order to match the period hue. The glasses for the dial and the case, made of rock crystal, allow the movement to display its finery and the marvels of its finish.

As a self-winding watch with a minute-repeater striking the hours, quarters and minutes on demand, the Hayek Marie-Antoinette has all the makings of a work of art. A full perpetual calendar displays the dates, the day and the months respectively at 2 o’clock, 6 o’clock and 8 o’clock. The equation of time at 10 o’clock proclaims the daily difference between solar time and the mean time told by watches.

In the centre, the jumping hours - invented by Breguet - and the minutes are joined by a long independent seconds hand, while the small seconds are shown at 6 o’clock. The 48-hour power-reserve indicator 10:30 balances a bimetallic thermometer at 01:30.

The self-winding, ‘perpetuel’ movement comprises 823 outstandingly finished components. The baseplates and bridges, the smallest gear-wheels in the trains for the underdial work, the dates and the repeater are fashioned in pink gold polished with wood. The screws are in polished blued steel; the points of friction, holes and bearings, set with sapphires.

The smallest details demonstrate perfect execution and have been finished by hand. This masterly and unprecedented mechanism is furthermore fitted with a particular type of natural-lift escapement, a helical balance-spring in gold and a bimetallic balance-wheel. The anti-shock device - a double pare-chute, another Breguet invention - gives protection against blows and shocks to the balance staff and to the shafts of the winding weights.

Even as the Hayek Marie-Antoinette was getting ready, Hayek learnt that the queen’s favourite oak tree in the royal palace of Versailles outside Paris was about to be felled. He offered to buy the wood to make the box for the pocket watch but Versailles offered the tree at no cost. In appreciation, Breguet donated 5.0 million euros (7.85 million dollars) to the restoration of a section of the palace called Petit Trianon - where Marie-Antoinette spent most of her time.

For Hayek, to take wood from the queen’s favourite oak tree in Versailles to make a box that houses the replica watch is an ultimate tribute to her.

The box is a composition of 3,500 pieces, sculpted from the royal oak’s wood. The exterior is an exact reproduction of the parquet floor inside the Petit Trianon.

It opens to reveal a second, smaller box, the top of which could be mistaken for a masterpiece in oils. It is in fact a handcrafted marquetry of over a thousand pieces depicting Marie-Antoinette’s hand holding a rose, inspired by a famous portrait of the queen. As for the watch itself, nestled inside, it is as imposing for its size as for its myriad complications and, of course, for all that it represents for eighteenth-century French culture.

In as much as in those days Breguet intended to make this watch into a monument to the glory of 18th century horology, the brand has in 2008 performed a feat of prowess by bringing a legend to life and anchoring it in the 21st century. And Hayek insists it’s a piece of art and not for sale, upping the desirability quotient of the most awaited watch even more.

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The Hayek Pocket Watch Marie-Antoinette (Ref 1160BA/40)

Specifications

Case round in a special alloy of 18-carat gold. Glasses of back and bezel made of rock crystal. Diameter: 64mm. Winding-crown without ratchet key with bolt for hours, quarter and minute repeater.

Dial in rock crystal. Hours and minutes at the centre. Central independent seconds hand, small-seconds at 6 o’clock. Power-reserve indication at 10:30. Equation of time at 10 o’clock. Perpetual calendar with month indication at 8 o’clock, date indication at 2 o’clock and day indication at 6 o’clock. Thermometer at 1:30. Chapter ring with Roman numerals, open-tipped Breguet hands in blued steel.

Movement, mechanical self-winding called perpetuelle, is composed of over 823 spare parts. Main plate, bridges and gear-wheels in rose gold polished with wood. Screws in blued polished steel, Numbered and signed Breguet. Power reserve of 48 hours. Perpetual calendar, equation of time, minutes, quarters and hours repeater, independent seconds hand, jumping hours, thermometer. 26'/2 lines, 63 jewels. Natural-lift escapement, cylindrical gold spiral. 2.5Hz bimetallic balance-wheel. Adjusted in all the positions.

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