French Lessons Read online

  You should ask him to be your guide, because he knows the food better than you do. He himself has probably eaten everything on the menu dozens of times over the past twenty years. He can tell you exactly how each dish is cooked and what would be the ideal combination of courses, light and heavy, savory and sweet. And he is on close personal terms with the cellar, particularly with some small local wines that you may not have come across before.

  Now watch him at work. It seems effortless. There is no furtive wrestling with the wine bottle; the cork never sticks or breaks, but comes out with a smooth turn of the wrist, to be given a brief, considered sniff of approval. Nothing is rushed, and yet all you need—cornichons to go with the pâté, or a good fierce mustard for the daube—is there on your table when it should be. The bread basket is refilled; the glasses are topped up. You don’t have to ask for anything. Your man is telepathic: He knows what you need before you know it yourself.

  I’m sure that waiters like this exist in other countries, but in France there seem to be so many of them—unhurried, calm, on top of their job. It is considered an honorable occupation. I like that. In fact, I have often thought that these superlative waiters deserve some official recognition, and there could be no better place for them to receive it than in the pages of another flourishing French institution, the Michelin guide.

  The guide celebrated its one hundredth birthday in 2000. It was published, as usual, in March—a red-covered tome, bulging with good addresses—and, as usual, it flew off bookstore shelves. Other countries, of course, have their restaurant guides (considerably slimmer than the Michelin), and some of them do very well. But the Michelin does better than very well; it is an immediate national best-seller, year after year. In a later chapter, we shall see some of the discreet workings of the red guide in more detail. I only mention it here because it is another example of a thriving gastronomic tradition, and of the continuing search for exceptional food in every corner of the country.

  Where else would people get worked up about salt? To the rest of the world, salt is a necessary but anonymous part of the diet, about as fascinating as a glass of tap water. But not in France. Here, salt is something that gourmets argue about. Some of them will tell you that the ultimate saline experience is sel de Guérande, the gray crystallized sea salt gathered along the Brittany coast; others prefer the white fleur de sel found in the Camargue. Not long ago, I bought some of the latter to try. It came in a decorative cork-topped pot, and the label featured the name—in this case, Christian Carrel from Aigues-Mortes—of the saunier who gathered the salt. Very good it is, too, particularly when sprinkled on radishes or fresh tomatoes.

  More and more small companies, or individuals like Carrel, are making visible efforts through their labels and packaging to separate themselves from the industrial food business. The chicken farmers of Bresse have been doing it for years; every single bird wears on one ankle an aluminum identification ring, marked with the farmer’s name and address. Now you can find similar detailed information—with its implicit promise of higher quality—on jams and tapenades and cheeses, on sausage and olive oil and honey and pastis. These delicacies are likely to cost more than their mass-produced competitors, but the difference in taste is worth the difference in price.

  More proof that the French stomach is far from being neglected is spread out in front of you every week at any of a thousand markets throughout the country. In Provence alone, there are enough of them to offer you the choice of a different market every day, and they seem to be in no danger of suffering from lack of customers. On the contrary, they appear to be getting bigger and more popular. I remember Coustellet market twenty years ago, when there were no more than ten or twelve small vans in the village parking area. You could buy local vegetables and fruit, some goat cheese, half a dozen eggs, and that was about it. Today, the market has grown until it covers nearly an acre, and in high season it’s packed every Sunday morning.

  It’s not only what the French eat that sets them apart from so many other nationalities but how they eat it. They concentrate on their food, sometimes to such an extent that they put aside the joys of arguing with one another. And they are determined to extract the last ounce of pleasure from a meal, a tendency that my old boss Mr. Jenkins liked to describe as “making beasts of themselves.”

  There is a wonderful photograph taken, I think, in the 1920s, that shows a group of men in suits seated around a table. They are about to eat spit-roasted ortolans—tiny larklike birds that are now a protected species. But before taking that first crunchy mouthful, they must observe the ritual of appreciating the bouquet. This is the moment that has been captured by the photographer. There they sit, these respectable, well-dressed men, each of them bent low over his plate with his head completely covered by a napkin, so that the fragrant steam can be trapped, inhaled, and properly savored. It looks for all the world like a coven of hooded monks saying grace before having lunch.

  No doubt when the ortolans are finished there will be a little sauce or gravy remaining on the plate. Too exquisite to leave, this final treat will have to be dealt with in the correct manner, using a piece of purpose-built cutlery that only a Frenchman could have invented. It resembles a spoon that has been flattened, leaving no more than the hint of a lip along one side. The sole function of this ingenious utensil is to scoop up what is left of the sauce in a genteel fashion (thus avoiding the plebeian habit—one that I love—of using bread as a mop).

  As it happens, there is a socially acceptable way to do even this if the cutlery doesn’t run to a full set of equipment. You take your bread, tear it up into small pieces, and then use your knife and fork to steer the bread through the sauce until you have cleaned your plate. I learned this at a dinner party some years ago, where my host was delighted to instruct me on some of the differences between English and French table etiquette—and, of course, the superiority of the French way of doing things.

  As a boy, I was taught to keep my hands under the table when they were not occupied with knife or fork or glass—a curious habit, my host said, and one that encourages mischievous behavior. It is well known that hands at English dinner parties have a tendency to wander under the table, squeezing a thigh, caressing a knee, and generally getting up to no good. In the best French households, the rule is the reverse—idle hands must be kept on the table. Dalliance cannot be allowed to interfere with food. First things first is the rule, and, during dinner at least, fondling is prohibited.

  Hastily putting my hands back where they should be, I asked if there was a logical reason why the French, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, almost always set the table with the forks facing downward. Was it, I wondered, to protect tender and well-brought-up fingers from being pricked by the tines of the fork? My host looked at me with an expression I’ve seen a hundred times before on a hundred French faces—half-amused, half-puzzled. How could I be so ignorant about something so obvious? Forks are placed like that, of course, in order to display the family crest engraved on the back.

  Learning about food—learning to eat—is a series of edible adventures and surprises. For instance, just when you think you have mastered the potato, that such a basic ingredient could have nothing new to offer, you discover aligot, a velvety blend of mashed potatoes, garlic, and Cantal cheese. Or you are introduced to the unlikely but triumphant combination of tiny wild strawberries served not with cream but with vinaigrette sauce. Then you encounter roasted figs. The education of the stomach never ends.

  And it is normally a most pleasant process. The people who spend their lives making good things to eat and drink are, on the whole, a very congenial bunch, pleased when you show an interest in their work and more than happy to explain how they do it. I have occasionally seen chefs frazzled and bad-tempered at the end of a fourteen-hour working day, and I remember one chef who was so terminally drunk that he fell backward out of his kitchen, cursing loudly. But these were exceptions. On the whole, working with food and wine seems to bring out the better sid
e of human nature. It’s difficult to imagine a misanthrope who is prepared to spend his days doing something that gives so much pleasure to others.

  Enjoyment is contagious, and this is perhaps best experienced during one particular meal of the week. Here you will see children, parents, grandparents, and occasionally the family dog; young couples giving themselves a treat; elderly ladies and gentlemen poring over the menu as if the pages held the secret of life; local families dressed to kill, and visiting Parisians decked out in full rural chic—a mixture of generations and social backgrounds, gathered together to observe another tradition that shows no sign of dying out: Sunday lunch.

  For me, there is one moment in particular that almost makes the meal by itself: Aperitifs have been served—pastis or kir or white wine or, on red-letter days, champagne—and menus are being read with the concentration of a lawyer going through a page of fine print. Suggestions and countersuggestions go back and forth across the tables. The carpaccio of fresh tuna? The soupe au pistou? The asparagus flan? And then what? The cod in a herb crust? The stew of veal and peppers? Or pieds et paquets, the Provençal recipe that elevates humble mutton tripe to new heights?

  In fact, it doesn’t matter what you choose. It is those few moments of anticipatory limbo that are special. For five or ten minutes, conversations are muted, gossip and family matters are put aside, and everyone in the restaurant is mentally tasting the dishes on offer. You can almost hear the flutter of taste buds.

  Lunch progresses at an unhurried pace, as all good lunches should. People eat more slowly on Sundays, and drink a little more wine than usual. They forget to look at their watches. Two hours slip by, often more. Eventually, with appetites satisfied, a drowsy calm comes over the room as the plates are cleared away, the tablecloths are brushed, and coffee is served. A lazy afternoon lies ahead: a book, a doze, a swim. The chef makes a ceremonial tour of the tables, gathering compliments, happy to share with you one or two favorite recipes. Curiously, these dishes never taste quite the same at home, no matter how carefully the recipe is followed, no matter how talented the cook. There is something about Sunday lunch in a French country restaurant that goes beyond food. But unfortunately, ambience doesn’t travel.

  In the course of preparing this book—those long hours with knife and fork and glass that I like to call research—I was surprised by two things. The first was the high level of enthusiasm for any event, however bizarre, that sought to turn eating and drinking into a celebration. The amount of effort put in by the organizers, the stall holders, and the general public (who, in some cases, had traveled halfway across France) was astonishing. I cannot imagine any other race prepared to devote an entire weekend to frogs’ legs or snails or the critical assessment of chickens.

  And while the French take their passions seriously, my second surprise was to discover that those of them who come to these events don’t take themselves seriously at all. They dress up in outlandish costumes. They sing the most unexpected songs—“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” being just one—at the top of their voices and often wildly off-key. They make fun of one another, eat and drink like champions, and generally let their hair down—not at all what one might expect from a nation with a reputation for reserved and slightly chilly good manners.

  For many years, there has been a saying in England that I imagine must reflect a widely held view: “Lovely country, France. Pity about the French.” Perhaps I’ve been lucky. All the French I met on my travels were helpful, good-natured, and sometimes embarrassingly generous. There were the strangers who invited me to stay at their homes when there was no room at the local hotel, the farmer who presented me with a bottle of 1935 Calvados made by his grandfather, and dozens of others who went out of their way to make sure I had as good a time as they were having.

  I hope I’ve done them justice in the pages that follow. To all of them, thanks for the memories.

  For What We Are

  About to Receive

  Twenty-first-century France is not a country in which one feels an overwhelming sense of religion. There are, to be sure, saints’ days by the hundred, each one recorded in the official post office calendar. There are patron saints keeping a protective eye on everything from villages and vegetables to farmers and carpenters (although I’ve looked in vain in the hope of finding the patron saint of writers). There is, tucked away with the weather forecast in the local newspaper, le saint du jour, whose name appears beneath an illustration of an angel blowing a trumpet. There are magnificent cathedrals, abbeys, and convents. There are churches of every age and size. There are also, in many of those stately properties snoozing away the centuries behind high stone walls, private chapels. Places of worship are everywhere. But most of them, most of the time, are empty. Only a handful of the French population—one recent estimate puts it at 10 percent—goes to church on a regular basis.

  “The fact of it is,” said Monsieur Farigoule, the retired schoolmaster who gives regular dissertations from his perch by the village bar on the worsening state of the world, “the plain fact of it is that the religion of the French is food. And wine, of course.” He tapped his empty glass with a fingernail to indicate that he might be persuaded to accept a refill. “We worship the belly, and our high priests are chefs. We would rather sit and eat than kneel and pray. It pains me to say such things about my countrymen, but patriotic sentiment cannot be allowed to hide the truth.”

  He drew himself up to his full height, such as it is, a fraction over five feet, and glared at me, clearly anticipating an argument. He has never forgotten a minor difference of opinion we once had over the tactics of the English rugby team—Farigoule accused them of biting their opponents’ ears in the scrum—and he considers me a dissident, a potential troublemaker. This is a distinction I have in common with everyone else who doesn’t share his views. The great Farigoule is, by his own admission, never wrong.

  In this case, I happened to agree with him. You don’t have to be particularly observant to notice that restaurants in France consistently attract larger audiences than churches, and I said so.

  At that, Farigoule pounced. “Eh alors?” he said. He cocked his head and nodded encouragingly, the patient professor trying to coax an answer from a terminally dim student. “How do you explain this? What could be the reason, do you think?”

  “Well,” I said, “for one thing, the food’s better.…”

  “Bof!” He delivered his most withering look, holding up both hands to ward off any further heresy. “Why do I waste my time with intellectual pygmies?”

  He was on potentially dangerous ground with pygmies, given his height, only slightly enhanced by thick crepe-soled shoes, but I resisted the urge to comment. “As it happens,” I said, “I’m going to church myself on Sunday.”

  “You?” Farigoule’s eyebrows almost took off from his head.

  “Certainly. Morning Mass. No doubt I’ll see you there.” And with that, I escaped before he could start asking awkward questions.

  I was indeed going to church, but I couldn’t pretend that it was entirely for religious or even social reasons. The decision to go had been inspired by food. This, in Farigoule’s eyes, would be yet another nail in the coffin containing my deplorable character; it would confirm my moral turpitude, gluttony, and general worthlessness. So I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I was going to attend the annual messe des truffes in Richerenches, a village northeast of Orange. This was to be a sacred event, under the patronage of Saint Antoine, at which thanks would be given for the aromatic, mysterious, and breathtakingly expensive black truffle. What’s more, such are the blessings that reward the devout, there would be lunch after the service. A lunch that included truffles.

  I had been told to arrive early if I wanted to be sure of a place in the church, and it was just 7:00 a.m. when I left the warmth of our kitchen and flinched at the bitterly cold January drizzle. It was still dark, and it seemed set to be one of those days—only fifty-two of them a year, a
ccording to local mythology—when the sun wasn’t going to shine over Provence.

  Dawn made a halfhearted attempt to break through the murk, but there was nothing even an optimist could call light until I left the autoroute at Bollène and turned east on one of the minor roads leading to Richerenches. This is wine country, and as gloom gave way to gray I could make out the twisted, blackened claws of clipped vines stretching away for miles across the low hills. Trees were crouched low against the wind. Nothing moved on the landscape. Two disconsolate magpies, normally the most dapper of birds, were huddled, heads down, by the side of the road like bedraggled old men waiting for a bus.

  Villages without people appeared through the windshield: Suze-la-Rousse, where a university of wine has been installed in a fourteenth-century château; La Baume-de-Transit, shuttered, dripping, and silent; and then, as the rain died away after a final flurry of spitting, Richerenches.

  The name of the main street provides a whiff of what preoccupies the village during the winter months—the avenue de la Rabasse, or Truffle Avenue, is the setting for a truffle market every Saturday morning from November through March. I’d been there once before on market day, making my way slowly along the line of dealers, each with a modest fortune in fungus displayed in small sacks or plastic bags. Feeling like a novice attending an ancient ritual for the first time, I imitated some of the buyers who seemed to have perfected the correct technique. Like them, I bent to inhale the ripe, almost rotten scent coming from the bags. I made admiring comments about the bouquet, about the impressive size and color and undeniable beauty of the deformed black lumps. And like the others, I was careful to wince in horror at the price per kilo. This information was delivered in a mutter from the corner of the mouth, accompanied by a shrug. Eh beh oui—what can you expect? Good ones, like these jewels here, are few and far between, almost impossible to find.