1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  However, even this is not a totally French success story. The fact is that Champollion wouldn’t have got anywhere without a Brit called Thomas Young, who translated the demotic script on the Rosetta Stone, revealing a text celebrating the first anniversary of the coronation of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. Young then made a start on the hieroglyphics, but got bogged down because he didn’t realize that the hieroglyphs paraphrased the other texts rather than giving a word-for-word translation. In reality, Champollion expanded on Young’s work rather than doing it all himself, and actually had to correct one of his articles about the transcriptions when Young pointed out key errors.

  So Napoleon’s legacy only became possible thanks to an Anglais. Sorry, Monsieur l’ex-Empereur, but did you really expect to enjoy even a posthumous moment of triumph without British interference?

  * Strange, perhaps, that so many British World War One commanders would put the same blind faith in cannons in the same Belgian mud before sending their troops to get mown down by machine guns.

  * Not that it did him much good. Six months later Ney was found guilty of treason by the Royalists for going over to Napoleon’s side and executed by firing squad in Paris. Courageous to the last, he refused a blindfold and gave the order to fire.

  * When the Prussians did arrive, Wellington prevented them from expressing their high spirits by dynamiting key parts of Paris, including the pont d’Iena, named after Napoleon’s victory against the Prussians in 1806. The French might not like the English Duke, but he protected their capital for them.

  19

  Food, Victorious Food

  The worst thing about wars is that they don’t stop for lunch.

  No, obviously that’s not true at all – the worst thing is that people can legally kill each other. But wars do disrupt dining habits. The combatants have to eat the rations doled out to them in open-air canteens, with neither a tablecloth nor a clean glass in sight (except for the officers, of course). And civilians have to make do with whatever doesn’t get requisitioned by the government or stolen by marauding troops.

  Peace, on the other hand, can liberate the palate. As soon as the fighting stops and lingering food shortages have been overcome, borders open up and people move around, bringing their culinary ingredients and ideas with them.

  This is exactly what happened after the Napoleonic Wars. The victorious nations, especially the Brits, Prussians and Austrians, poured into France as both tourists and occupiers, and began to lap up the world-famous French cuisine.

  Or so the French would have us believe. In fact, the visitors found certain things lacking and had to import their own foods – and some of these proved so popular with the French that they adopted them and are convinced that they invented them. But as we saw with Champagne in Chapter 9, these claims really must be taken with a pinch of salt (plus a little pepper and maybe even a soupçon of English sugar), and three staples of French everyday cuisine are in fact foreign imports.

  It’s a steak-out

  In the early nineteenth century, the richer Brits used Paris as a kind of second home, and introduced many elements of upper-class British life into France.

  Horse-racing started in earnest, and large meetings were held on the Champs de Mars, outside Napoleon’s old school, the École militaire. Famous British horse trainers moved to France, and a stud farm and racecourse were set up near the chateau of Chantilly just outside Paris to take advantage of the high-quality turf there. Soon Epsom-style race meetings were all the rage with the Parisian upper classes and their new British friends.

  At the same time, the first mounted fox hunt in France started harassing animals in the forests around Pau, near the Pyrenees, which had been adopted by the Anglo-Scots as a spa resort. The practical French had always hunted for food, and (like Oscar Wilde later in the century) must have thought the Brits slightly stupid for trying to catch something so inedible, but what they failed to understand was that that was exactly why foxes were hunted – to show that you were too posh to have to run after your dinner.

  It was also in Pau that the Scots baffled locals with their habit of digging holes in the ground and hitting little white balls at them.

  All of these activities were eventually taken up by the French and are still the preserve of the country’s upper classes today. Cricket didn’t have so much luck, probably because it involves throwing a hard ball at the batsman’s testicles, and that is one risk that a Frenchman won’t take.

  At the same time, food fashions also crossed the Channel. British cakes and puddings started to appear in bakeries and cafés, while British soldiers introduced Paris to a slightly barbarous but tasty way of cooking beef.

  Beef, of course, is inescapably associated with the Brits in the French mind. A slightly old-fashioned nickname for the Anglais is ‘les rosbifs’, a phonetic transcription of ‘roast beef’, and the original French name for what they now call le steak was le bifteck, or beefsteak.

  The French have been grilling meat ever since the Neolithics found out what they could do with fire, of course, but until post-Napoleonic times, the fashionable way to cook beef in France was to boil it or stew it in a sauce.

  Apparently, this all changed when redcoats came to camp in the Tuileries gardens. It seems that the Parisians were distracted from their promenades by smells of soldiers grilling beef, and were tempted to try the simple but effective recipe for themselves.

  The writer Alexandre Dumas, famous not only for The Three Musketeers but also for a Dictionnaire de la cuisine, got his first job in Paris just after the Anglais arrived, and in his dictionary’s entry for Beef-steak ou bifteck à l’anglaise, he reminisces: ‘I remember seeing le bifteck arrive in France just after the campaign of 1815, when the English stayed for two or three years in Paris. Until then, our cuisines had been as different as our politics.’ He says that at first the French were suspicious of this British import, but soon, ‘being a nation without prejudices, we gave the bifteck a certificate of citizenship’. He gives a drooling description of how best to grill the meat, and concludes: ‘Every time I go to England, I eat it with renewed relish,’ regretting only that the Brits don’t know how to make gherkins to go with their steak.

  The origin of the frites, or French fries (as the French don’t call them), that accompany le steak is lost in the fatty mist of culinary history. Everyone claims to have invented them, though it is pretty safe to say that the method of cutting potatoes into long sticks when deep-frying them probably didn’t exist in France at the time they adopted the steak. Dumas’s dictionary, like other cookbooks of the time, suggests cutting the potatoes into slices, not sticks.

  Anyway, at the very least, one half of France’s national dish of steak-frites is British in inspiration – a nice historical irony on a linguistic level because the word ‘beef’ originally came from the French boeuf.

  The French stick baguettes down their trousers

  All cultures have their creation myths, and the French are no different. Their theory about the creation of the baguette ranks amongst one of the funniest.

  They tell a story about the long stick loaf first being baked for Napoleon’s soldiers. Before then, it is alleged, bread had always been round – after all, the word boulanger comes from boule or ball. But Napoleon, who oversaw every part of his soldiers’ lives, wanted a loaf that was easier to transport when his armies were on the march, as they often were. He therefore asked his bakers to make a long bread stick that the troops could carry in a pocket in their trousers. Why this method of transport is more efficient than putting a round loaf in their backpack is not explained. Anyway, it is almost certainly a complete myth, and as the French-language Wikipedia page on the baguette very rationally puts it, ‘the baguette would have inconvenienced the soldier during the day and probably arrived in bad condition.’

  The French do insist that baguettes date from about this time, however. The flour company Retrodor has a website which suggests that the baguette was invented after post-revolutionary b
akers were no longer forced to make coarse ‘bread of the people’ and were allowed to bake white bread. At the same time, so the company’s website says, beer yeast was introduced into the baking process, making it possible to create a lighter dough, perfect for the slender stick loaf. What they seem to be saying is that the baguette is entirely French.

  However, less patriotic food historians agree that the baguette isn’t really French at all, or at the very least avoid the subject.

  In her book A History of Food, the French author Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat doesn’t mention the development of the baguette. She describes the evolution of bread in the ancient Greek, Jewish and Roman civilizations, talks about Joan of Arc dunking ‘sops’ of bread in wine, and pinpoints the location of the baker’s oven in medieval French towns (not too close to the neighbour’s wall). But she steers clear of the origin of the baguette.

  In fact, the archetypal French bread seems to have originated chez one of the allies who occupied Paris after 1815 – and the light, fluffy texture referred to by English bakers as ‘Vienna bread’ gives us a clue to which ally this might be.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the Austrians developed a new type of gas-fired oven fitted with steam injectors. The oven could be heated to over 205 °C, and the steam jets made the crust expand before it was baked, leaving the inside of the loaf light and airy. The highly efficient oven was soon being fitted in boulangeries all over France.

  What’s more, far from being a centuries-old French tradition, the baguette only became really fashionable in the 1920s, for two reasons. First, at the end of the First World War, many of France’s bakers and apprentice bakers were lying buried under the mud of the Somme and other battlefields, so there was a labour shortage, making the easy-to-prepare Vienna-style bread an attractive proposition.

  Secondly, a new French law made it illegal for bakers to work before four in the morning, so that the baguette became the only loaf that they could be sure of having ready for breakfast time.

  It had another advantage for the boulanger too: it only stays really fresh for about half an hour. (OK, a bit longer, but an hour or so after cooling it will start to dry up just under the crust and give a less pleasant crunching sensation.) If customers want fresh bread, they throw their ‘old’ baguette away and come back for a new one. It’s a great business plan.

  So in the 1920s everyone was happy with the baguette, and the Austrian loaf became a symbol of France just as evocative as its giant metal cousin, the Eiffel Tower.

  Since then, the French stick’s reputation has drooped slightly. In recent years, its sheer whiteness has caused diet-conscious France to move over to healthier breads made with wholewheat, cereals, bran and rye. The baguette has been forced to evolve, and practically every boulangerie now sells a baguette de tradition, which has a softer crust and a darker dough with less yeast, and is usually slightly wonky, so that it looks as if it has been made by a half-blind medieval baker. But it is a misleading name, and in fact it is the fluffy, unnaturally white baguette with the golden crust that is de tradition. And that tradition is Viennese.

  The twisted history of the croissant

  The croissant, the ultimate French breakfast (and breakfast-only) food, isn’t French, either. Like the baguette, it is Austrian. This is no surprise – Austria is a country founded on pastries, and a visit to a Viennese coffee shop makes you wonder how a nation that devotes so much energy to producing its dizzying variety of delicious Kuchen and Torten could ever have done something so hideously uncakelike as support Hitler in 1938. And one thing’s for sure – the Austrian corporal didn’t get enough of his country’s cakes when he was a boy, otherwise he could never have turned into a genocidal dictator.

  Crescent-shaped cakes have been made in Europe for centuries. The crescent is, after all, a strong symbol associated with the moon and the Orient. Legend has it that the Austrians first started making what we call croissants after the siege of Vienna in 1683, when the Turks began burrowing tunnels under the city walls and were heard by bakers working in their cellars at night. As a reward for alerting the authorities rather than trying to sell an early breakfast to the invaders, the bakers were granted the right to make pastries reminiscent of the crescent on the Ottoman flag.

  That is one theory. Others say that the Austrian croissant, or Kipfel, has been made since the thirteenth century, which doesn’t really contradict the siege story. It probably amused the bakers who saved Vienna to see that their traditional Kipfel cakes looked like the crescent on the Ottoman flag.

  One thing seems certain, though – the croissant in its modern form came to France from Austria.

  Romantics say that it was introduced by Marie-Antoinette, who was of course famous for her interest in bread and cakes. More pragmatic historians are sure that it was imported by an Austrian, a soldier turned businessman called August Zang, who opened a Viennese bakery in Paris in 1838 or 1839. His Boulangerie Viennoise at 92 rue Richelieu, near the city’s National Library, started the fashion for croissants and inspired the development of the pain au chocolat and pain aux raisins, the other pastries that the French still call collectively viennoiseries.

  French writers make no reference to the croissant until 1853, when the chemist Anselme Payen published his highly ungastronomic Des substances alimentaires, in which he talks about croissants and English muffins in a section on ‘fantasy or luxury breads’.

  By 1875, croissants seem to have become more standard fare, because in a book called Consommations de Paris (which could be roughly translated as Paris Food and Drink), a writer called Armand Husson refers to croissants and coffee as an ‘ordinary’ as opposed to a ‘luxury’ meal.

  Today, of course, croissants form the centrepiece of the continental breakfast, and are as French as the peculiar breed of waiters who serve them. And they are for breakfast only – almost no café will have any left after ten o’clock in the morning. Not because they will have gone off, but because practically no French customer would ask for one so late in the day.

  Which is why the French were rather confused when in the 1990s, the Anglo-Saxons started eating them for lunch, stuffed with all sorts of unsuitable fillings. I was living in Glasgow at the time, and remember the sudden invasion of trendy ‘continental’ foods when the city became European City of Culture. Suddenly cafés were brasseries or bistros, pubs were wine bars, and the city’s food menus became decidedly un-Scottish. Out went deep-fried pizza (in the cafés I went to, anyway) and in came ciabattas, paninis and stuffed croissants. I was working for a bilingual publisher, and can remember my French colleagues frowning at the croissant I bought myself at a city-centre brasserie one lunchtime. Not only was it twice the size of a French croissant, it was pasty white and – the ultimate heresy – overflowing with spinach and Gruyère cheese.

  They stared in amazement for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing at the absurdity of eating this breakfast food at lunchtime. One of them was also mystified at the perversion of his national food.

  ‘The cheese is French,’ I defended myself, but this didn’t win him over.

  ‘There are some things you can’t do with another nation’s cuisine,’ he lectured me. ‘What would you think if we started putting cheese in tea or English beer?’ (Which is something that a trendy chef has no doubt done since.)

  In his defence, I should add that this was a long time ago, when people thought they were living on the cultural edge by putting pineapple on pizzas, and hadn’t even dreamt of mango sushi.

  But what I would have loved to answer, if I’d known it back then, was ‘Actually, mon ami, it’s not your cuisine at all. Has no one ever told you where France got le steak, les baguettes and les croissants? They were all imported by Napoleon’s enemies after we sent him to St Helena.’

  Though on second thoughts, it was probably a truth that he simply wouldn’t have been able to digest.

  20

  The Romantics: The Brits Trash

  French Art

&n
bsp; In the early nineteenth century, the French thought they had the world sussed. Descartes and Voltaire had described it (albeit with a little help from Sir Isaac Newton); dramatists like Racine and Corneille had idealized it; Napoleon had encoded it in his laws; and Jacques-Louis David had painted it, turning contemporary people and situations into the stuff of Greek and Roman history. The world was classical, symmetrical, logical and governed by strict rules. In short, it was French.

  All of which was highly ironic, because France itself was in total upheaval.

  French artists and writers really should have got the message much earlier. David, for example, was forced to abandon his giant painting of the Serment du Jeu de paume, the ‘tennis court oath’ at which breakaway democrats had vowed to write a new constitution in 1789, because by the time he had finished sketching it out, half the oath-takers had been declared traitors.

  France’s artistic establishment resisted change, though, until the fall of Napoleon, when the country was suddenly flooded with British painters and writers and their new chaotic ideas. Romantics like Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, Wordsworth and Turner came swooning and posturing across the continent, raving about passion and nature and heroism, and generally infuriating France’s cosy cultural elite.

  The most infuriating thing of all was that the Brits all claimed to have been influenced by the raw energy of the French Revolution, whereas the savagery of the Terreur was something that France was trying to forget. Rioting, mass hysteria and blood in the streets? Nothing to do with us logical French – you must have made an erreur!