French Lessons

French
Lessons

Adventures with Knife, Fork,
and Corkscrew

PETER MAYLE

Vintage Departures

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New
York

For Jennie

Hors d’Oeuvre

The preparation of this book has been an education, made possible by the help of many people. While I can’t really thank them adequately, I would like to record my great gratitude to the kind souls who were so patient with my questions, so generous with their time and knowledge, and so hospitable.

In particular, Yves Rousset-Rouard, who took me under his wing during the truffle Mass at Richerenches; Marcel Loisant, the frog king of Vittel; the Lauzannes, who made me feel truly at home in Normandy; the Beuttlers, my friends and guides in Saint-Tropez; Sylvie Cazes-Régimbeau at Pichon-Longueville; Jean-Louis Laville and René Jacqueson in Burgundy; Régis and Sadler, two trusty companions with world-class appetites; and Alain Arnaud, the guardian of Michelin’s secrets. To them all,
un très grand merci.

My thanks also to Ailie Collins and Robin Massee, who did their invaluable best to make sure I was in the right places at the right times.

I can’t pretend to have done more than scratch the surface of French gastronomy. But it has been an endlessly interesting, rewarding, and enjoyable scratch, even if I never made it to the turkey fair, the cabbage festival, or the homage to the herring. Perhaps next time.

P. M., January 2001

The Inner
Frenchman

The early part of my life was
spent in the gastronomic wilderness of postwar England, when delicacies of the
table were in extremely short supply. I suppose I must have possessed taste
buds in my youth, but they were left undisturbed. Food was fuel, and in many
cases not very appetizing fuel. I still have vivid memories of boarding school
cuisine, which seemed to have been carefully color-coordinated—gray meat,
gray potatoes, gray vegetables, gray flavor. At the time, I thought it was
perfectly normal.

I was in for a pleasant shock. Not long after I
became the lowliest trainee in an enormous multinational corporation, I was
instructed to accompany my first boss, Mr. Jenkins, on a trip to Paris as his
junior appendage. This was the way, so I was told, to start learning the ropes
of big business. I should count myself lucky to have such an opportunity at the
tender age of nineteen.

Jenkins was English and proud of it, English to
the point of caricature, a role I think he took some pleasure in cultivating.
When going abroad, he announced his nationality and armed himself against the
elements with a bowler hat and a strictly furled umbrella. On this occasion, I
was his personal bearer, and I had been given the important task of carrying
his briefcase.

Before we left for the great unknown on the other side
of the English Channel, Jenkins had been kind enough to give me some tips on
dealing with the natives. One piece of advice was a model of clarity: I should
never attempt to get involved with what he referred to as “their
lingo.” Speak English forcefully enough, he said, and they will
eventually understand you. When in doubt, shout. It was a simple formula that
Jenkins claimed had worked in outposts of the British Empire for hundreds of
years, and he saw no reason for changing it now.

Like many of his
generation, he had very little good to say about the French—an odd lot
who couldn’t even understand cricket. But he did admit that they knew
their way around a kitchen, and one day he was graciously pleased to accept an
invitation from two of his Parisian colleagues to have lunch; or, as Jenkins
said, a spot of grub. It was the first memorable meal of my life.

We
were taken to a suitably English address, the avenue Georges V, where there was
(and still is) a restaurant called Marius et Janette. Even before sitting down,
I could tell I was in a serious establishment, unlike anywhere I’d been
before. It smelled different: exotic and tantalizing. There was the scent of
the sea as we passed the display of oysters on their bed of crushed ice, the
rich whiff of butter warming in a pan, and, coming through the air every time
the kitchen door swung open, the pervasive—and to my untraveled nose,
infinitely foreign—hum of garlic.

Jenkins surrendered his hat and
umbrella as we sat down, and I looked with bewilderment at the crystal forest
of glasses and the armory of knives and forks laid out in front of me. The
trick was to start on the outside and work inward, I was told. But the correct
choice of cutlery was a minor problem compared to making sense of the elaborate
mysteries described on the pages of the menu. What was a
bar
grillé
? What was a
loup à l’écaille
?
And what in heaven’s name was
aioli
? All I had to help me was
schoolboy French, and I hadn’t been a particularly gifted schoolboy. I
dithered over these puzzling choices in a fog of almost complete ignorance, too
timid to ask for help.

Jenkins, quite unconsciously, came to my rescue.
“Personally,” he said, “I never eat anything I can’t
pronounce.” He closed his menu with a decisive snap. “Fish and
chips for me. They do a very decent fish and chips in France. Not quite like
ours, of course.”

With a sense of relief, I said I’d have
the same. Our two French colleagues raised four surprised eyebrows. No oysters
to start with? No
soupe de poissons
? The company was paying; there was
no need to hold back. But Jenkins was adamant. He couldn’t abide the
texture of oysters—“slippery little blighters” was how he
described them—and he didn’t care for the way soup had a tendency
to cling to his mustache. Fish and chips would suit him very nicely, thank
you.

By this time, I was already enjoying a minor revelation, which was
the bread. It was light and crusty and slightly chewy, and I spread on to it
some of the pale, almost white butter from the slab on a saucer in front of me.
A slab. English butter in those days was highly salted and a lurid shade of
yellow, and it was doled out in small, grudging pats. At the first mouthful of
French bread and French butter, my taste buds, dormant until then, went into
spasm.

The fish, a majestic creature that I think was sea bass, was
ceremoniously presented, filleted in seconds with a spoon and fork, and
arranged with great care on my plate. My previous experience of fish had been
limited to either cod or plaice, heavily disguised, in accordance with the
English preference, under a thick shroud of batter. In contrast, the sea bass,
white and fragrant with what I now know was fennel, looked curiously naked. It
was all very strange.

Even the chips, the
pommes frites,
didn’t resemble the sturdy English variety. These chips, a golden pyramid
of them served on a separate dish, were pencil-slim, crisp between the teeth,
tender to chew, a perfect foil for the delicate flesh of the fish. It was lucky
for me that I wasn’t required to contribute to the conversation of my
elders and betters; I was too busy discovering real food.

Then there
was cheese. Or rather, there were a dozen or more cheeses, another source of
confusion after years of having only the simple choice of Cheddar or
Gorgonzola. I thought I recognized a vaguely familiar shape, safe and
Cheddar-like, and pointed to it. The waiter insisted on giving me two other
cheeses as well, so that I could compare the textural delights of hard, medium,
and creamy. More of that bread. More signals of joy from the taste buds, which
were making up for lost time.

Tarte aux pommes.
Even I knew
what that was; even Jenkins knew. “Excellent,” he said.
“Apple pie. I wonder if they have any proper cream.” Unlike the
apple pies of my youth, with a thick crust top and bottom, the tart on my plate
was topless, displaying the fruit—wafers of apple, beautifully arranged
in overlapping layers, glistening with glaze on a sliver of buttery
pastry.

Too young to be offered an expense-account cigar and a balloon
of brandy, I sat in a daze of repletion while my companions puffed away and
considered a return to the cares of office. I was slightly tipsy after my two
permitted glasses of wine, and I completely forgot that I was responsible for
the all-important Jenkins briefcase. When we left the restaurant I left it
under the table, which demonstrated to him that I was not executive material,
and which marked the beginning of the end of my career in that particular
company. But, much more important, lunch had been a personal turning point, the
loss of my gastronomic virginity.

It wasn’t only because of what
I had eaten, although that had been incomparably better than anything I’d
eaten before. It was the total experience: the elegance of the table setting,
the ritual of opening and tasting the wine, the unobtrusive efficiency of the
waiters and their attention to detail, arranging the plates just so, whisking
up bread crumbs from the tablecloth. For me, it had been a special occasion. I
couldn’t imagine people eating like this every day; and yet, in France,
they did. It was the start of an enduring fascination with the French and their
love affair with food.

It is, of course, the most whiskery old
cliché, but clichés usually have their basis in fact, and this
one certainly does: Historically, the French have paid extraordinary—some
would say excessive—attention to what they eat and how they eat it. And
they put their money where their mouth is, spending a greater proportion of
their income on food and drink than any other nation in the world. This is true
not only of the affluent bourgeois gourmet; where food is concerned, interest,
enjoyment, and knowledge extend throughout all levels of society, from the
president to the peasant.

Nature must take some of the credit for this.
If you were to make a list of the ideal conditions for agriculture, livestock
and game, seafood and wine, you would find that most of them exist in one part
or another of France. Fertile soil, varied climate, the fishing grounds of the
Channel, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean—every natural advantage is
here except for a tropical region. (Although, such is the luck of the French,
they have Guadeloupe and Martinique to provide them with rum and coconuts.)
Living in the middle of such abundance, it’s not surprising that the
Frenchman makes the most of it.

The other major national gastronomic
asset is an army of outstanding chefs, and for this the French have to give
some credit to one of the more grisly periods in their history. Before their
Revolution, the best cooking was not available to the general public. The most
talented chefs sweated over their hot stoves in private for their aristocratic
masters, creating multicourse banquets in the kitchens of mansions and palaces.
And then, in 1789, the guillotine struck. The aristocracy more or less
disappeared, and so did their private kitchens. Faced with the prospect of
having nobody to cook for and nowhere to cook, many of the unemployed chefs did
the intelligent and democratic thing: They opened restaurants and began to cook
for their fellow citizens. The common man could now enjoy the food of kings,
prepared by the finest chefs in France.
Liberté,
égalité, gastronomie.

More than two hundred years
later, the common man still does pretty well, despite what pessimists will tell
you about times changing for the worse. It’s true that traditions are
under attack from several directions. For a start, more than 50 percent of all
food bought in France is now provided by supermarkets rather than small
specialty stores (a statistic that doesn’t seem to apply to those
faithful Parisians who line up every day outside the Poilâne bakery in
the rue du Cherche-Midi; I’ve bought bread there several times, and the
wait has never been less than ten minutes). Then there is television, eating
into mealtimes and often competing successfully with a proper dinner. And
le fast food
is working its insidiously convenient spell, with Big
Macs on the Champs-Elysées and pizza stands in every town market. All in
all, the future of traditional French cuisine, with its hours of shopping,
preparing, and cooking, followed by further hours of eating, doesn’t look
too promising—not, at least, if you believe some of the gloomy
predictions made by those wise men who claim to see the writing on the kitchen
wall.

I am more optimistic, perhaps because I tend to compare France
with other countries instead of comparing the France of today with the France
of yesterday, with all the rosy distortions of nostalgia. At any rate, I see
encouraging signs that some traditions are healthier than ever, and that
gastronomy is holding its own against what Régis, my friend the glutton
in chief, calls “industrial food.” Here are just a few
examples.

The star chefs, men like Ducasse and Guérard and Bras
and Troisgros, enjoy a level of celebrity and popular prestige reserved in
other countries for the gods of sport and television. If any of them were to
open a new restaurant, it would be national news. If, God forbid, their
standards should ever slip, it would be a national catastrophe, a
tremblement de terre,
an earthquake, probably marked by sorrowful
editorials in
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro
. And the clients of
these top chefs are not all millionaires, cabinet ministers, or expense-account
cowboys. Monsieur Dupont, the average Frenchman, is prepared to invest in his
stomach, saving up to eat at the best restaurants, often traveling considerable
distances to do so. But, to borrow a phrase from the Michelin guide,
ça vaut le voyage.
It’s worth the trip.

One can
say the same about more modest restaurants with lesser-known chefs. Some of
them can be found in the back streets of provincial towns, like l’Isle
Sonnante in Avignon: small, charming, and delicious. Others are buried so
deeply in the countryside that you might think their only clients would be the
local postman and his wife, or travelers who had lost their way, something that
happened to me one summer’s day a couple of years ago.

I had
taken a shortcut—always a bad idea for a geographically challenged person
like myself with a severely limited sense of direction—and found myself
lost. Even worse, it was lunchtime. It was hot. The back roads into which
I’d strayed were deserted. The signposts bore unfamiliar names. I was
irritated with myself for not staying in Aix for lunch.