La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (24 page)

We moved to a round table under an umbrella in the garden. “Champagne!” Savoy commanded. “The glasses! Where are they?”

He served a simple salad with lettuce picked that morning, full, delicate leaves that folded easily under the fork. The lettuce generated excitement. “Oh, I adore this lettuce,” he said. “The lettuce has real taste—the leaves, so tender!”

“At ten this morning,” his mother chimed in, “the lettuce was still in the garden.”

The andouille came out of the oven. “The real andouille,” said Savoy. “The real, from here! It’s the real thing here!”

It certainly was real andouille. He sliced and skinned it. It drooled juice onto the platter and gave off a rich, carnal smell. The thick rounds stayed firm, patterned like textured mosaics in brown, red, and beige.

The potatoes were small ovals, their brown skins taut over their flesh and glinting in the sunlight. “A potato!” Savoy said. “It’s the meal of the countryside. It’s pure simplicity. Mama, do you know where the corkscrew is?” he asked, holding a bottle of 1998 Bâtard-Montrachet.

We ate the andouille, whose taste was milder than its smell and tempered by the sweetness of the potatoes. Savoy wanted us to have more andouille and served himself a second and then a third helping. “You still want a little more? Another small piece, Elaine?” he asked. I knew there was a lot more food to come, but how could I say no to the real andouille?

The conversation shifted to his mother’s
buvette
in Ruy. Savoy bragged that she had run it alone while he needed twenty-five people to run his restaurant. It was “nothing at all,” she said, and then described it. She started her
buvette
with a dozen glasses and two big bottles—one that she filled with beer, another with lemonade. Gradually, she offered plates of cured sausages and ham, omelets,
fromage blanc
. Then she got the reputation for serving simple, honest, fresh meals. She raised trout in a concrete basin at the side of the house and made coq au vin, escargots, gratins. She worked from 4:00 a.m. until late at night on weekdays, and on Sundays she made fruit tarts, ice creams and sorbets, chocolate mousse, and
oeufs à la neige
. Her
buvette
had no name, but the regulars called it Chez Maman. Two of her regulars bought her a dressing gown as a gesture of appreciation.

Guy Savoy learned cooking by necessity, because his mother needed help in the kitchen. She kept working to the point of exhaustion, and her children forced her to quit when she was in her sixties. “Her passion engulfed her,” he said.

A large
côte de boeuf
was now displayed and sliced. It was served with morels and shallots sautéed in butter that merged with the juices of the meat. Then came a bowl of green peas that looked like tiny shimmering balls of jade and a 1998 Château Léoville Poyferré Saint Julien. The peas were soft-skinned and slippery with hazelnut oil; they burst in the mouth with the sweetness of honeyed candy. The beef was so tender its flesh quivered under the knife.

“
Les petits pois, les petits pois
”—the peas, the peas—Savoy said softly, over and over, like a mantra. The morels, with their pungent odor and firm texture, excited him even more. “The morel for the mushroom gatherer is like the woodcock for the hunter,” he said. “When I walk in the forest and see mushrooms that we can eat, it’s an emotional experience. Even today, when I find a beautiful mushroom, my heart beats faster.”

The joy was in the sharing, and when I asked if the green peas were from her garden, mother and son answered in unison. “Of course! The carrots, the spinach and—” said Marie Savoy.

“The shallots, the lettuce, the tomatoes,” her son said, finishing her sentence.

For dessert, thick blocks of raspberry and vanilla ice cream were passed around, followed by
fromage blanc
made by a woman who lived on a small farm nearby. Savoy scooped piles of the creamy cheese into deep bowls. It was not enough. He drowned them in heavy cream and sprinkled white sugar on top. His mother brought out a rusty, dented tin that she has used to store cookies since the days when she taught her son how to make them. It is fifty years old. Out of it came meringues whose crusty shells melted on the tongue and crisp hazelnut cookies to dip into the strong black coffee.

When lunch was over, it was time to prolong the pleasure by recovering. Marie Savoy and I talked about marriage, children, and getting older. Her son took off his shoes, stretched out on the living room sofa, and fell into a loud-snoring sleep. Louis Savoy picked a chaise longue in a shady spot in the garden for his nap. When they awoke there was more discussion of the excellence of our meal and then long good-byes.

As Savoy and I made our way back to Paris by train, the meal was still in his mind. “
Les petits pois, les petits pois,
” he continued to say. He explained why he had been willing to take a stranger into his mother’s home. “This was a family meal in the countryside,” he said. “There is nothing better than when it is simple. Nothing. I do nothing more than try to cook as well as my mother. I wanted to show you that I invented nothing.”

He told me he had never before taken an outsider to visit his mother. She had been terrified that she wouldn’t make a good impression, and he had to calm her down.

“Why did you do it then?” I asked.

“I didn’t do it for you,” he said. “I didn’t do it for me. I did it for France.”

This was a bit over the top. But Guy Savoy is a showman.

It is not enough for great chefs to satisfy themselves. The artists of food crave aesthetic appreciation, and on a practical level, restaurateurs must seduce their customers. Guy Savoy talked about the day he served a sea bass with sweet tender flesh to the twelve-year-old daughter of a friend and all she could talk about was its bones. “People who don’t want to be happy talk about the bones,” he said. “They don’t talk about the pleasure of the fish. They are permanently negative. What idiocy. To give you an example—take François Simon.”

Simon is the anti-seducer of French cuisine, a dandy with sideburns, flyaway hair, bold tweeds, loud ties, and velvet vests. He regularly proclaims that France has lost its “culinary supremacy” and does his utmost to prove it by slashing and burning the reputations of restaurants. An ordinary-looking man with a fountain pen as razor-sharp as a butcher’s knife, he may be the most feared and most read figure in France’s culinary world. As the food critic for
Le Figaro
for more than two decades, he has skinned, sliced, grilled, and roasted his subjects, indifferent to the impact of his words on them.

I met Simon over lunch one day in an overpriced Paris restaurant attached to an overpriced hotel. When the sommelier started to refill his glass without asking, Simon stopped his hand in midair before a drop could fall. “I like to control the temperature of my wine,” he announced. “In a restaurant, I am horrified by having to obey,” he told me. “I want to be indulged.” He once wrote of sommeliers, “Perhaps we should drown them, to allow us to drink as we please.”

Simon has extended his reach with books, a weekly cable television show in which he hides his face, and a blog that includes his secret video recordings of some of the great and not-so-great tables of France. Not content to pass judgment on others, Simon claims to be an accomplished cook himself. On his blog, he boasts that he can cook a chicken two hundred ways. He once even closeted himself in the kitchen of the tiny Paris bistro Le Cochon à l’Oreille and cooked for the public for five nights in a row. Diners one night described the pumpkin soup as grainy, undercooked, and so dense it stood up in stiff peaks, the spiced chicken plentiful but stingily garnished, the zabaglione thin and runny. Simon had failed to seduce. But at least he tried, and that gave him some appeal.

If Simon is all about attitude, François Durand is all about love of the process. Tell me that French cooking is dead, that its power to charm the diner is exhausted, and I’ll introduce you to him. He is a cheesemaker, but he is also a warrior on the ground who does battle every day to preserve the best France has to offer. There is no improved, labor-saving route, in his eyes, to producing the perfect Camembert to suffuse the dinner table with allure.

Durand took over his family’s two-hundred-acre farm outside the town of Camembert when he was only nineteen and has run it for nearly three decades. With his sixty cows, he claims to be the last dairy farmer in Normandy to be making Camembert commercially from hand-ladled unpasteurized milk. He is delightful in spite of himself, so quiet and unassuming that it is hard to drag words out of him. But seeing him transform milk into Camembert is like watching a dancer. Standing erect, he fixes his left arm securely behind his back. Then he bends and sways as his right hand quickly ladles just the right amount of warm, curdled raw milk from a huge vat into hundreds of small white plastic cylindrical molds.

When visitors come, he welcomes them with perfectly aged Camembert on chunks of crusty bread. The cheese’s white crust is slightly wrinkled and tinged with orange. Its pale yellow insides are neither too dry nor too gooey. The richness comes in its smells—of the farm, the grass, the cows, without the hint of ammonia in the industrially produced variety—and the feel in the mouth, washed down with homemade apple cider. Durand can’t imagine a world without a real raw-milk Camembert. “What a loss that would be,” he said. “We’d be missing a part of ourselves.”

In politics and diplomacy, the preeminence of French food dates back to Versailles in the seventeenth century, when Louis XIV made cuisine an art form to compete with refined language, art, and architecture.

Cuisine became an important tool of French diplomacy, a weapon in the armament of persuasion. Charles Cogan, in his book
French Negotiating Behavior
, called this the “politics of gastronomy.” “For the French,” he wrote, “a meal is part of the negotiation itself in that it is an instrument or an accoutrement, and if France is hosting the talks, a meal gives the French an opportunity to display the sophisticated culinary skills they prize so highly.”

But there is more to it than that. The meal is an instrument of seduction, of loosening the lips and softening the resolve of the adversary by giving pleasure. One of the best guides to understanding the French mastery of the weapons of diplomacy is still
The Art of Diplomacy
by François de Callières, a writer, a special envoy of Louis XIV, and a member of the Académie Française.

An ambassador’s table, Callières wrote, “should be served neatly, plentifully, and with taste. He should give frequent entertainments and parties to the chief personages of the Court and even to the Prince himself. A good table is the best and easiest way of keeping himself well informed. The natural effect of good eating and drinking is the inauguration of friendships and the creation of familiarity, and when people are a trifle warmed by wine they often disclose secrets of importance.”

A century after Callières’s time, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, France had to deal with its defeat on the battlefield and sought to compensate with the power of its culture. The French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, one of the most versatile diplomats in his country’s history, wrote to King Louis XVIII, “Sire, I have more need of casseroles than written instructions.” Food also colored Talleyrand’s view of America, which he described as “a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.”

It is bad form to decline the offer of a diplomatic meal. In 2003 I was one of several reporters accompanying Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin on a grueling two-day trip to Afghanistan. We had flown to Kabul the night before. We started out in a Ministry of Defense jet with buttery leather seats, but only got as far as Tajikistan. There we donned flak jackets, helmets, and sound-muffling ear muffs and switched to a cold and uncomfortable military transport plane. A handful of my colleagues and I had been separated from the escorted French delegation and ended up wandering around Kabul, hot and dusty, for much of the time. On the way back to Paris, after another transfer in Tajikistan, we were bone-tired. I took a sleeping pill and went to sleep. Until the foreign minister’s spokesman woke me up.

“I have good news for you,” he said. “You have been chosen to dine with the minister.”

Three of my colleagues and I were ushered into first class. I was so drugged that the cabin moved every time I blinked. I counted the forks on the white-linen-covered table. Four. Four courses. Four glasses, two for wine, one each for water and champagne. But there was nowhere to hide. I dug my fingernails into my palms to cause just enough discomfort to keep awake.

There were quail eggs topped with caviar and tiny pink shrimp, veal medallions with morels, then cheese, salad, and dessert courses. Villepin told stories to charm us, but his seductive powers were wasted on me. Afterward, my French colleagues told me the wines had been superb.