Half-boiled Notions
The very opposite of this gastronomic ideal is, in the minds of the French, English food. They will swear that the Brits spend their lives chewing mournfully on boiled beef, overcooked swede and plastic cheese, all washed down with lashings of warm, flat beer.
Just after I first arrived in France, I invited a French couple to a ‘typically English’ dinner. As an aperitif, I served weak tea with the tiniest smudge of milk. It looked like a sample of the River Thames. The main course was half-boiled, unpeeled potatoes garnished with a spoonful of raspberry jam. I told them that a joint of lamb had been bubbling in salt water all day, and was just a few minutes away from being properly boiled through.
They sipped politely at the tea, and the woman even tried a bit of potato, though her boyfriend was already looking at me as if to say, OK, I surrender, let’s go to the restaurant now. The thing was, they weren’t completely sure it was a joke, and were trying to find a polite way of asking. I eventually owned up to prevent the woman from having to eat a second hunk of dirty, uncooked spud, and said now I was going to serve the real English food – a vegetable curry.
Which they loved, by the way. The French will eat anything with flavour.
There are lots of British foods that the French adore – cakes, biscuits, Earl Grey, Stilton, fried bacon rashers, and even our thin, triangular sandwiches. I used to work near a Monoprix supermarket in Paris, and was astonished to see that their sandwiches were imported daily from an industrial estate in the Midlands.
However, one thing the French complain about a lot is the quality of food in trendy British restaurants. I agree with them. I’ve been to too many places in the UK that have obviously spent millions on décor, recruited their staff from modelling agencies and hired the poet laureate to write their menus, but fill their designer plates with microwaved trash.
In France, you can usually be sure that even the trendiest eatery will have invested more in the food than it has in the light fittings.
The French have a similar double-edged relationship with American food. It’s all junk, they will say – sugar-filled, genetically modified, mass-produced, over-packaged and tasteless. They even use the English term le fast-food to distinguish it from anything French (although the dictionaries suggest that they ought to be saying la restauration rapide). Despite this, half of France’s teenagers flock to eat le fast-food after school, and whole families chow down on cheap hamburgers as a treat in the middle of their Saturday shopping expedition.
The French may eat a lot of healthy food, but they enjoy the odd fatty, ketchupy binge as much as anyone. And secretly most French people have the occasional fantasy about being American. A quick, guilty chomp on a hamburger makes them feel as though they’re driving along Route 66, rapping on a New York street corner or having sex with the cast of Friends.
A Better Class of Alcoholic
The French have a reputation as a nation of boozers. They will defend themselves by saying that at least their alcoholics do it in style. As the French yachtsman Olivier de Kersauson put it: ‘I’m amazed that the police carry out breath tests to find out how much alcohol people have 18 in their blood without testing for the vintage.’
According to the French medical institute Inserm, there are over twenty thousand alcohol-related deaths per year in France. And this is not counting accidents while under the influence. For a similar population, the UK records only around six thousand deaths.
Even so, the French do generally go in for a more civilized style of drinking than most ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and they always have done. Apparently back in the eleventh century, William the Conqueror’s invading Normans were shocked by the Saxons’ habit of deliberately setting out to get paralytic. Things haven’t changed much since. You will never hear a Frenchman say, ‘OK, let’s go and get pissed’ (or its French equivalent) on a Friday night. They do get drunk, but it’s usually because of heavy consumption during a meal or at a party. Getting sozzled is a by-product of their evening rather than its raison d’être.
This is why there are so many drink-driving deaths – around 40 per cent of French road fatalities are caused by alcohol. At the end of an evening, after a bon dîner accompanied by plenty of bon vin, a respectable middle-class driver will have a quick coffee ‘to clear his head’ and then go and smash his car into an oncoming bus; the theory being that after a good bottle of Château Margaux you can’t possibly be as drunk as some vulgar English beer-drinker.
What’s more, a driver who isn’t yet completely sozzled can drop into virtually any service station and buy alcohol. The French don’t seem to have cottoned on to the possible correlation between selling booze at service stations and drink-driving.
The problem is made worse because French clubbers do not go in for electing one of their number as a teetotaller for the night when they drive to out-of-town discos. Every Friday and Saturday, after a long night of clubbing, carloads of young revellers end their short lives squashed against one of the plane trees that line French provincial roads.
With typical French logic, some regions are trying to tackle this drink-driving problem by (you guessed it) chopping down the plane trees.
Support the Save the Cheese Fund
Charles de Gaulle once said, ‘How can you govern a country that produces 258 sorts of cheese?’ The answer is pretty obvious – you simply dole out 258 sorts of cheese subsidies. And sausage subsidies, olive subsidies, wine subsidies, etc, etc.
It may seem slightly unfair to be paying 40 per cent of the European Union’s budget in subsidies to 2 per cent of the population – the farmers – but the French say that this is necessary to preserve their traditional foods. Which is partly true. Without subsidies, the local producers of cheese so rustic you can see the farmer’s fingerprints on the skin would be swamped by a tide of multinational, clingfilm-wrapped pseudo-Cheddar.
But it would be a mistake to think that these French food producers are all crusty peasants eking out a meagre living on a one-room, one-donkey farmstead. Apart from the fact that France has its own multinational food companies, some of the old paysans I’ve met are as deft with their finances as the best Wall Street trader.
I was once shown around a farm in central France belonging to an old couple who dressed as if they needed clothes subsidies. A barn-shaped nylon dress for her, medieval blue dungarees and a scarecrow shirt for him. They showed me their open chicken run populated by a few scrawny hens, and their three fields, all of them empty apart from four or five bright-orange cows (naturally orange, I should add – they were Limousines). An old Renault was parked in what used to be a chestnut-drying shed.19 You would have thought that they were heading for starvation within the next few months.
But no, not at all. The friend who’d taken me to the farm explained that the old couple, like all their friends and families on similar farms, were very comfortably off. They got European subsidies every year for planting new apple trees, a payment for burning most of the crop and so countering over-production, then a subsidy for ripping out the trees and reducing the national apple-growing capacity. They were also buying up fields all around the village and applying for more grants for leaving them fallow. Starvation was a very, very long way away. In Brussels, perhaps.
Given that any attempt by the French government to reduce subsidies causes blocked motorways and heaps of rotting food dumped outside (and sometimes inside) government offices, it will be difficult to take any of these advantages away from the farmers.
In any case, food is very important to French politicians. President Chirac has been accused of several cases of fraud. Not for simply filling his pockets, though. He was indicted because of his vast frais de bouche (‘mouth expenses’) when he was mayor of Paris. It was alleged that he spent 2.13 million euros of city funds on food between 1987 and 1995 – excluding official receptions. That is 4,500 euros a week on private meals for his wife and himself. The investigating magistrate threw the case out, so apparently this is a p
erfectly acceptable sum to spend on food.
Another accusation concerned using state funds to fly Madame Chirac to attend the making of the world’s biggest mushroom omelette in the city of Brive in 1998. Surely only a French politician would risk discrediting his administration for an omelette.
Food Laws and Rituals
Because the French spend so many hours of their lives at the lunch and dinner table, they are sticklers for food etiquette, and have been for a long time. It was Cardinal Richelieu who introduced the round-tipped knife to European tables in 1669 after he declared that it was vulgar for gentlemen to pick their teeth with their knife points at the end of a meal.
Some of the rules listed below may seem very sexist, but France is still that kind of a place. I once started a job in Paris on the day of the firm’s Christmas party. My boss, a woman, nominated me, as one of the few men there, to open the champagne. She quickly regretted it when I let the cork fly out of the bottle. It bounced off the ceiling and hit her on the head. I and most of the other staff laughed, and it took her three months to start paying my salary.
Here are some more present-day food rituals that must be followed in la bonne société:
• At table, diners must always be seated man-woman-man-woman. This rule must be adhered to even if some guests are gay.
• At the restaurant, women order first.
• At table, there should always be glasses for wine and water. The water glasses should be bigger than the wine glasses. The wine glasses will probably be filled more often, but at least a token gesture towards sobriety has been made.
• Non-French wine should be ordered only in an ethnic restaurant or if all bottles of French wine in the restaurant have been smashed and/or drunk by visiting rugby fans.
• At a restaurant, waiters will ask who is going to taste the wine. Men usually do so.
• At home, the first few drops of a new bottle of wine should be poured into one’s own glass (in case there are any cork remnants). After that, women’s glasses are filled first, then men’s.
• When opening champagne, hold the cork and turn the bottle. Don’t let the cork go, and don’t try to sabrer le champagne (cut the top of the bottle off with a sabre blow) unless you are a fencing expert, otherwise the room will be full of champagne spray and flying glass.
• Before touching your food, it is polite to say ‘Bon appétit.’ And men should not start eating until the women have taken their first forkful.
• It is polite to discuss food at the table, but not (for too long, anyway) what you are actually eating. At the restaurant you should, however, ask your fellow diners what their food is like.
• There is a new fad in Paris that involves eating using only a fork that you hold like a pen or a chopstick. Obviously it doesn’t work if you’ve got a hunk of meat on your plate, but when eating anything lighter, like a salad or a plate of vegetables, it seems to be considered more refined to leave your knife on the table. When using the knife to cut meat, some French people hold the fork vertically like a skewer. Parisians think this is vulgar and (even worse) provincial.
• Knives should never be crossed – on the table, on worktops or in the sink waiting to be washed. This symbolizes conflict (probably about who’s going to do the washing-up).
• Meat may be served when almost raw (or in the case of steak tartare, totally raw). It will cause offence to send bloody, red-centred roast beef back to the chef saying it is uncooked. So remember the different stages of cooking when you are asked ‘Quelle cuisson?’ (‘How would you like it cooked?’) From raw to well done, they are: bleu, saignant (‘bloody’), à point and bien cuit. If you want it cooked all the way through, it might be best to say ‘Très bien cuit, s’il vous plaît.’ Some waiters might cheekily add an à l’américaine option, meaning as hard as a cowboy’s boot sole.
• Salad without dressing is not salad, it is a pile of ingredients. Even grated carrot needs at the very least a few drops of lemon juice. It is usual to make the dressing in the salad bowl, then tip the salad loosely on top. Don’t toss the salad until the last minute or it will go soggy.
• Never cut lettuce on your plate. This is because, long ago, when cutlery was made of iron, the vinaigrette made the lettuce taste of metal.
• Obviously you never cut oysters or mussels. Oysters should be loosened from the shell using the little fork provided, then slurped down whole. Mussels should be picked out of the shell using a mussel shell as tweezers. The French have no qualms about eating shellfish with their fingers. Seafood platters involve hours of tearing, twisting, picking and snapping, and that’s what the finger bowls (rince-doigts) or (in less chic places) towelettes in a sachet are for.
• Only eat shellfish in months that contain an ‘r’. This rules out the summer months when the sea is relatively warm and storage difficult. Most people ignore the rule when they’re eating by the sea, but eating oysters in Paris in August is for tourists with lead-lined digestive tracts.
• Never put a loaf of bread upside-down on the table. This is bad luck.
• If you want to wipe your plate (there is a verb for this – saucer, pronounced ‘sossay’), then use a piece of bread skewered on the end of your fork. It is not really the done thing to push the bread around the plate with your fingers, though people do it.
• Similarly, you are not supposed to dunk croissants or tartines (buttered bread) into your coffee at breakfast, but it seems a crime not to. No one will look askance if you do this in a café.
• When having a cheese fondue, don’t drop your bread into the saucepan. Anyone doing this will have to do a forfeit (gage), such as hopping around the table three times or (worse) doing all the washing-up.
Finally a couple of rules that are less about etiquette than about understanding the food put in front of you:
• Remember that a small furry animal is not cute – it is a meal in waiting. Comments like ‘poor little bunny’ will only provoke laughter and/or scorn.
• Just because something smells like poo does not mean it will taste like it. Reblochon cheese, for example, can smell faintly (or not so faintly) of a urine-soaked sock. But grilled over a dish of potatoes it is sublime. If you are served a particularly ripe-smelling cheese or sausage, breathe through the mouth and take a bite. You might well get a pleasant surprise. If you get an unpleasant surprise, remember that in France, one spits to the right.
Mouton Dressed as Lamb
The French have few scruples about calling a spade a spade, or a brain a brain, when they’re talking about food. For a start, in French porc, boeuf, mouton and veau (calf/veal) are the names of the animals, so when talking about the relevant meat, the actual furry four-legged creature automatically springs to mind (as it does with lamb in English, of course). This, coupled with their taste for unusual parts of the animal, can produce some graphic-sounding translations.
15 Admittedly, this lack of public epidemics may have more to do with France’s love of secrecy – see the Seventh Commandment.
16 Allergie aux arachides (‘al air-djee o’zarasheed’). Ideally, if they had enough breath left, the patient would say, ‘J’ai une allergie aux arachides et je suis en choc anaphylactique’ (‘djay oon al air-djee o’zarasheed ay dje swee o’shock anna flak teek’), basically explaining that they have this allergy and can’t breathe very well.
17 The arrondissement’s menus are published monthly on its website. Go to http://www.mairie4.paris.fr/mairie4/jsp/Portail.jsp?id_page=86 and click on one of the links under the heading Menus de la Caisse des Ecoles.
18 This, by the way, was the sailor who once claimed to have been slowed down during a round-the-world race by a sixty-foot squid clamped to the hull of his boat.
19 The cows have nothing in common with the luxury cars except their name. Apparently limos are so named because the first cars with an enclosed section for passengers had roofs shaped like the hoods of cloaks worn in Limousin, not because they looked or drove like cows.
/> A French invention that was not adopted by the rest of the world,
the long-distance suppository applicator.
THE
4TH
COMMANDMENT
Tu Seras Malade
THOU SHALT BE ILL
THOU SHALT BE ILL
IN 1673, FRANCE’S GREATEST COMIC DRAMATIST, MOLIÈRE, wrote a play called Le Malade Imaginaire – The Hypochondriac – about a man who is so obsessed with his health problems that he wants to marry his daughter to a doctor to save on medical bills, and threatens to banish her to a convent if she refuses. It was supposed to be a satire, but the French seem to have decided that he is a role model rather than an anti-hero.
In this they are aided and abetted by the state. The French social-security system may be cutting back on expenses, but it is still one of the most generous in the world, and this encourages the French to get ill as often as possible.
It’s always surprising to go to a pharmacy in a seaside resort in midsummer and see masses of people there. And they’re not just buying sun cream, condoms and insect repellent. It’s as if on holiday they have time to realize how ill they really are and decide to try out all the remedies. And although the French have been saying for at least the last decade that their health service is about to collapse, it keeps going strong. Partly because the government commits so much money to its public services, but also because there is cash in the system. Patients pay out and are then reimbursed. This cash pays doctors and pharmacists, and keeps things turning over.
At first, it can feel strange to give your doctor a cheque at the end of your appointment, but the discomfort is relieved when 70 per cent of the price is refunded by the social security. And if you work and have a good mutuelle (private health top-up scheme), the refund can be 100 per cent of your costs, even for things like capped teeth and glasses.
Talk to the Snail Page 5
