7. The only quick meal in France is at home or takeaway. If I sit at a table, I kiss one to three hours goodbye, which is fine and delicious if I want to, but not so fine if I don’t. The fastest sit-down eating is at a café, salon de thé, a bistro, brasserie, McDonald’s, KFC, or Domino’s pizza. The only way to eat when I want and what I want is to eat at home.
8. Everyone eats two-handed: fork in the left hand, knife in the right, knife used to cut and shovel, fork to spear and eat. Only I shift my knife and fork back and forth, left hand to right to left. No one makes mention of it, but it feels like a disability or worse, a character flaw.
9. None of the food or dining experiences, in homes or restaurants—even in Michelin one- and two-stars—are anything like those I’ve experienced in fancy French restaurants in New York, San Francisco, or New Orleans. I go to those restaurants and I’m embarrassed by not knowing which knife, fork, glass, or spoon to use; where to put my elbows; when to eat with my fingers; what to order; how to pronounce it; what it is—from the sea, land, air, or Genentech—and where exactly in the body it originated. Even worse, are the waiters: the waiter who never appears, who I have to implore to come to the table, thereby proving he’s superior to me; or the know-it-all waiter, who lectures me in French, Franglish, and heavily accented English, informing me about the restaurant, menu, and chef, telling me all of this as if there’s going to be a quiz at the end of the meal—like what secret ingredient did Maître Charles cook with the quail—in a tone that tells me he doesn’t expect me to pass, thereby proving he’s superior to me. When the food arrives, the meat is too raw, the vegetables too cooked, the desserts too rich, and the coffee too strong. I spend more time trying to avoid what I don’t want to taste, see, or smell than enjoying what I do—none of which happens in France. Eating French food in the U.S., especially in New York City, is intimidating. Eating French food in France is eating. In France, except possibly at state dinners, no one seems to care which glasses or dishes are used, or which cutlery. Waiters don’t lecture me and only ignore me when I ask for the bill. People eat with gusto, shovel food with their knives, eat with their fingers when necessary, talk with their mouths full, make a mess, and never seem to go to the bathroom. Given the prodigious amount of liquid consumed with French meals, this last is what distinguishes me most—not my etiquette or miserable French.
10. Bruno, my next-door neighbor, is devoting his life to teaching me about wine. I’m learning how to drink enormous amounts and not get drunk. I’ve watched amazed, as he sends back wine served by a friend as not the right complement for the food we are eating—at the friend’s house. I’ve seen Monsieur P refuse his own wine as “too young.” Bruno has given me a map of the wine regions of France that identifies the varietals. He’s embedded 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2014 in my brain as the years for great Bordeaux. Since he and Françoise visit Donna and me often, he’s determined I get this right. I am, too—but the bottom line for him is the continuous bang! of the ongoing explosions of taste as he swallows; for me, it’s ten euros a bottle. Between these perimeters, we live.
I Cooked This for You
Eating French food is one thing. Cooking French food is another—and cooking French food for French people is something else. Lesson Number One: you cannot feed a French person the way you’d feed an American.
In the U.S., it’s no big deal to experiment with food on friends. In fact, it’s an honor: LeRoy’s such a good friend, I can cook something new for him. If it doesn’t work, and worse comes to worst, we’ll go out. Not in France. In France, cooking and eating are not about taste and nutrition. They’re a combo of religion and sex. It’s tantric, merging pleasure and spirit, but only if done right—right ingredients, preparation, presentation, and flavors. The result is I approach every meal I cook for my French friends with nervousness and trepidation. More than anything, I want to do this right. I can’t speak properly, wait patiently, dress, act, or look French, but please, God, let me feed them well: bien manger. And, please, please God, let no one leave the table ill or get sick within twenty-four hours of eating at my house. That’s my prayer before I start. Then I plan and prepare like for D-Day.
It begins in the kitchen, my favorite room in the house and also the most dysfunctional. In California, my kitchen is a commuter kitchen, a single-guy kitchen, even after Donna moves in. It is not a room for eating, sitting, visiting, talking, reading, thinking, or hanging out. When people visit, we sit in the living room. In France, it’s the kitchen all the way, with its oak parquet table, soft, leather-covered chairs, whitewashed walls, beamed ceiling, 100-plus-year-old tile floor, and the summertime view through the window of red geraniums, verdant trees, and the river. It’s a room that’s ready for anything—except cooking.
First, there’s the baby fridge: five feet short, as wide as one of the doors of a double-door American fridge, with a freezer the size of a mailbox. There’s also a baby dishwasher and a baby sink. The dishwasher is a Bosch and actually holds a lot. The sink does not. One medium-size pot and it’s full. That, and its back-breaking lack of height and the ridiculously low angle of the faucet, makes it an uncomfortable place to work. According to Margaret Fox, daughter of my friends Harold and Anne Fox and former cook and owner of Café Beaujolais in Mendocino, “It’s the worst-designed kitchen in the world.”
The sink is in one corner, the fridge in another, the stove in a third, and an old English oak cupboard with my dishes, pots, and utensils in the fourth. I’m lucky the room’s not an octagon. My kitchen! This is where the damage gets done.
A Salad
I take six eggs from the fridge, a pot from the cupboard, fill it with water at the sink, and cook the eggs on the stove. Monsieur and Madame P and their son and daughter-in-law, Henri and Renée, are coming to dinner tonight.
It’s unseasonably warm, so I’m going to make a huge garden salad, like I do in the U.S. I wait till after midi and drive to Loscoat to buy the veggies and bread last-minute fresh. I also buy a wedge of Tomme de Savoie and a half kilo of fleur de sel, demi-sel butter—1.1 pounds! It’s France: there can never be too much butter—as long as it’s not sweet. I buy another bottle of Muscadet-Sèvre-et-Maine-sur-Lie, because there can never be too much wine either.
I spend the afternoon washing and shredding red leaf and butter lettuce from Madame P’s garden and cutting, slicing and dicing tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, red and yellow bell peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, radishes, oranges, and cheese; I mince shallots and slice the hard-boiled eggs I made in the morning—and put everything in the fridge to chill. I set the dining room table for dinner and the table on the terrace for apéritifs—the one part of the meal I never fret about, because I do exactly what everyone does—and wait.
They arrive forty minutes late, which is on time in France. I point to the side of the house, and say, “À la terrasse,” and lead them there, because no one will go on his or her own, even though everyone has been there before. As soon as they sit, I start passing bowls of peanuts, Cheeto-like and bacon-bit thingies, sliced dry sausage, olives, and baby, thumbnail-size radishes still warm from the earth of Madame P’s garden; I take orders for drinks and mix black currant or peach liqueur for Kirs, cider for Kir Breton, water and Ricard for pastis, and serve them along with beer, white wine, and red. As long as everything flows and nothing runs out, apéritifs are a success.
After an hour of de rigueur nibbling and drinking, I excuse myself, “Je vais fait le salade,” and go into the house to mix the salad. In the U.S., someone, usually Donna or another woman—out of politeness or self-defense—always offers to help. In France, only Sharon offers—probably because she’s Canadian and has eaten a lot of my cooking. In France, the kitchen is a private space. Basically, there’s an invisible sign on the door that says, “Keep out!” I know, because every time I offer to help serve or wash dishes—as every woman I’ve ever known in the U.S. has demanded I do—I’m stopped. It was five years before I was allowed into Madame P’s kitchen, ten years bef
ore I visited the second floor of her house. I waited three years to use her bathroom, and then only because it would have been worse if I hadn’t . . . So I mix and dress the salad myself while everyone gets in the last of their nibbling and drinking.
I fill two large bowls and set them on the table along with three baguettes, the half kilo of butter, two bottles of water, and three bottles of red. Then I call everyone inside, “Asseyez vous, asseyez vous,” sit down, sit down.
Everyone enters, sits, and looks at me like, ‘What’s this?’ Nobody says anything, and nobody moves—not even to unfold a napkin.
That’s when I remember I’ve never actually been served a salad as dinner in any French person’s home—and I see from the confusion and disappointment on their faces that ninety degree heat and eighty-five percent humidity don’t mean a thing: it’s dinnertime, and they want and expect the full seven courses—which means I’m five courses short.
“Bon appétit,” I say, serve the salad, and hope for the best.
Out of politeness, hunger, or both, everyone digs in, except Madame P. She pokes through the salad, searching for chunks of mushroom, spears them one at a time, and places them on the side of her plate.
“C’est bon,” I say. “C’est frais,” telling her they’re either fresh or strawberries.
“Oui, oui,” she says, and then says something else, the only word of which I understand is champignons, mushrooms.
I look at Henri.
“She says they’re not cooked. Mushrooms have to be cooked. You can’t eat them raw.”
I start to explain that we eat them like this in the U.S., then remember we’re the ones who brought them McDonald’s and Cocoa Puffs, and realize it’s probably not the best argument.
I fork a large chunk of mushroom and put it in my mouth, chew it slowly, and rub my belly, moaning, “Mmmmmmm. C’est bon.”
Madame makes a face like I’m eating poo. Monsieur, making the decision to not get involved, bites through a wedge of tomato. Henri asserts his independence and wantonly eats the mushrooms in public defiance of maman. Renée doesn’t. The following day, Henri tells me no one actually liked them raw, and next time I should cook them. He also tells me cheese does not belong in a salad, and a salad is not a meal.
Madame is teaching me to be French, or at least not to offend the French, especially their taste buds, and most especially hers. The result is I am very careful about what I serve, though often not careful enough.
After numerous attempts to be creative or fanciful or playful—like making a face out of tomatoes and carrots—I understand salad is lettuce. C’est tout. Salad comes after the entrée and before the cheese, is basically a palate cleanser and digestif. That’s it. I’ve got it. What I don’t have is the dressing.
Luckily, I served olive oil and red wine vinegar as the dressing for the garden salad, so that turned out OK. Since then, I’ve made Russian, blue, Thousand Island—even French—and failed with all of them. It seems only oil and vinegar is universally accepted. I get it, but I still can’t do it. It’s like going to 31 Flavors and always ordering vanilla.
I add shallots to the oil and vinegar, and no one removes them, gags, or complains. That’s the test. French people, compliant and accepting of so many things, are very vocal about what they’ll put in their stomachs—or mouths, actually, because I’ve gotten lots of things in their mouths that never made it to their stomachs. Jean won’t eat my green beans. They’re too al dente—he wants them soft. He also dislikes my mayonnaise. He wants me to make it myself with a raw egg and olive oil the way he does, but all I see when he shows me how to do it is salmonella. So I continue to buy my mayonnaise at the store, and he continues to ridicule me.
I add a quarter teaspoon of Dijon mustard to the shallots, which is also OK. I increase it to half a teaspoon, and one third of the people at the table refuse to eat it. It’s too strong, piquant, a word that seems to be the equivalent of “crap”. I switch to mustard “à l’ancienne” and it’s worse. What are those seeds, and why are they in my salad? It’s like I’m running a scientific taste lab or Julia Child’s kitchen, which unfortunately for all of us, I’m not.
The biggest decision is which vinegar to use, because there are zillions to choose from: red wine, white wine, cider, with orange blossom, lemon zest, strawberry, raspberry, thyme, shallots. They all work, until I get to balsamic. First, there’s the color. Why is it black? What’s the trick? What are they hiding—the they now includes me. Madame P approaches it carefully, remembering the mushrooms, I’m sure. She forks a piece of lettuce that is barely coated with olive oil and has a drop of balsamic glistening on the leaf.
“Mmmmmmmm,” I say, “C’est très bonne. Espécial. Italien.” I figure I’d have better luck with that than saying it’s American. She tastes it and gags like it’s poison.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she demands. Her voice full of horror and betrayal—as in, “How could you do this to me!”
“C’est balsamic.”
She repeats it, “Balsamic,” saying it in a way that tells me she never wants to say, see, smell, or taste it again.
I know lots of French people like balsamic vinegar because I’ve eaten it in other people’s homes, and I see it in all the stores—but that’s not the point. This is: if you want to feed all of the people at your table all of the time, you have to do what everyone does, and this is what surprises me most. People in Plobien and Loscoat, French people, are like me—not adventurous eaters. Their range is broader than mine—they’ll eat intestines, brain, horse, gizzard, feet, knuckles, tongue, all the organs, and things that once were family pets—but anything out of their range, like peanut butter, hot sauce, sour cream, and Russian dressing is as alien to them as andouille is to me. Pizza is OK, probably because it comes from the neighbor to the southeast, isn’t English, and is made with flour, tomatoes and cheese, three of the all-time French favorites. The same with paella, which comes from their neighbor to the southwest, isn’t English, and is made with rice, chicken, pig, langoustine, and mussels, all of which are familiar and comfortable to French people. That’s the main point, being comfortable and familiar, not new or different. From the northeast, Belgium, there are gauffres—waffles—which are basically crêpes, only thicker, and not English. When people want to be exotic or brave, they eat Chinese or Vietnamese, which also serves to remind them of their Asiatic colonial past, isn’t English, and has been Frenchified to remove most of the interesting spices and all of the piquant. Couscous, tagine, and merguez sausages are colonial reminders from their North African past. And to remind them of their colonial past in North America, there’s a new McDonald’s, which most people don’t want to be reminded about, which hasn’t made the wedge out of the door any shorter.
I know all this, and still I persist.
Le Barbecue Américain
I invite Madame P and her family to an American-style barbecue even though I know it’s impossible. To start, there are no all-beef hot dogs. No Nathan’s, Vienna Franks, or Hebrew National, or anything like them. This is pig land. There are sausages, but not American sausages like bratwurst, kielbasa, linguica, knackwurst, sweet Italian, or hot links; no designer chicken-apple, garlic, Thai, or jalapeño either. What Plobien has is andouillette, the foul-smelling little sister of andouille, and boudin noir, blood sausage, made from pig’s blood, fat, bread crumbs, and seasonings. The only edible sausages are the finger-thin merguez, chipolata, and herb, but I need to eat at least four of them to be full, and because they’re so thin I usually burn them when I cook them. Hamburger, thankfully, is ground sirloin.
Hamburger, mustard, ketchup, tomatoes, lettuce, and onions, that’s it! There are no buns, baked beans, sour relish, dill pickles—only sweet gherkin-like cornichons—or sauerkraut that I’ve found. This is potato land, but there are no thick-skinned Idaho russets, only thin-skinned boilers and broilers.
The only reason I’m doing this “Barbecue Américain” is corn. It’s one of the foods I miss
most in France: sweet, fresh, buttery, summery corn on the cob . . . There are millions of acres of corn in Brittany, and all of it for animals. Chickens get their corn on the cob. People get theirs in a can from Del Monte. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is and has been for years. Then one day, like magic—the same way Volvic water suddenly disappeared—a cellophane-wrapped package of six ears of yellow corn on the cob appears in the dairy section of Leclerc. I buy two packages and call Madame P to invite her and her family “pour le Barbecue Américain.” It’s a testament to their gastric strength and our friendship that she accepts without even saying, “I’ll call you back.”
Dinner is at 8:00. They arrive at 8:30. The good news is I expected this and haven’t started cooking. The bad news is the charcoal is ash. I replace the briquettes and rekindle the fire.
By 9:30, people are getting restive. So far, all they’ve had is alcohol and chips. To let them know what’s happening, I announce there are no crudités—“Pas de crudités. C’est une Barbecue Américain.”
Madame’s face falls, probably remembering the mushrooms and balsamic. I can see her thinking, “I knew I should have eaten before coming here . . . ” In the U.S., whenever I cook, I feel like Wolfgang Puck. In France, I feel like puck.
Thankfully, Henri and Renée appear to be thrilled by whatever it is they will be eating, and keep repeating, “Le Barbecue Américain.” They have no idea what it is, but they’re willing to try it—and hopefully soon. It’s 10:00, and all they have eaten is chips. Luckily, we’re in France, and everyone is too polite to make up an excuse to leave.
(Not Quite) Mastering the Art of French Living Page 15
