Pardon My French

by Allen Johnson

  Nita and I got a flavor of the French flare for cuisine the first full day we were in the country. I awoke with the sun and walked out onto the Ducros’ terrace. Even at six-thirty in the morning, the sun was warm and bright. Just another day in paradise, I said to myself. I noticed that Jean-Marie was in the open field across the street. He was doubled over, meticulously searching the ground … for what?

  I crossed the street. “Hey, Jean-Marie, what are you looking for?”

  Jean-Marie kept his eyes downcast. “It rained last night,” he said. “That always brings out the escargots. Look at this.”

  Jean-Marie was now bent over an iron fence post. A half-dozen small snails were clinging to the rail. “Wow,” I said, more out of respect for my French host than genuine admiration. Snails are not really my favorite culinary delicacy. In fact, I’d say on the scale of tasty delights, I’d rate escargots right up there with grasshoppers and earthworms. There is something about their little slimy faces with their tiny eyes and those miniature antennas with the balls on top (what’s with that?) that makes me want to look in another direction like, say, directly into the noonday sun.

  That said, I was in France, and, after all, I had made a sacred vow to keep an open mind during our stay. So, I bent over and started dropping what I judged to be the more succulent snails into Jean-Marie’s bucket.

  “Whoa, look at this one!” I said, holding the granddaddy of them all between my thumb and forefinger. The snail’s articulated antennas were flinging wildly in the air like the arms of a drowning man. It was a monster, a gastropod with a coiled shell the diameter of a silver dollar.

  “Size is not always synonymous with quality,” Jean-Marie said, uncharacteristically cryptic.

  I wondered for a moment if he was referring to Americans’ penchant for all things enormous: five-carat diamonds, foot-long hot dogs, and Herculean football players, to name a few. “Oh, I see,” I said, dropping a more unpretentious snail into the bucket.

  “Ça suffit—that’s enough,” Jean-Marie said. “Time for the next step.”

  We crossed the street to the house. Jean-Marie took the garden hose and covered the twenty or thirty snails with an inch of water. “I’ll be right back,” he said, making his way into the house. While he was gone, some of the snails started inching their way up the side of the bucket. I imagined that they were instinctively aware that they were in mortal danger. A moment later Jean-Marie was back with a bottle of vinegar and a box of salt.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’m going to make them baver,” he said. The first meaning of the word baver is “to slobber or dribble.” I don’t know the English equivalent for the second sense, but in French to “faire baver” is to cause the snails to discharge whatever slimy gunk is in their system. For Americans it is not a particularly pretty picture, but the French don’t seem to cringe at the thought.

  Jean-Marie dumped a half-cup of vinegar and an equal dose of salt into the green plastic bucket. Now the snails stampeded up the side of the pail. Jean-Marie scraped them off with the flick of his hand and the hapless fugitives plunged into the fatal brine, traces of bave floating to the surface.

  That was hard. I was starting to feel connected to a few of them—one in particular reminding me of a cocky Steve McQueen on a Triumph, leaping fences in The Great Escape. I couldn’t help rooting for the little guys.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING FRIENDS OF THE DUCROS INVITED THE FOUR OF US—Jean-Marie, Monique, Nita, and me—to a traditional five-course French dinner. The escargots served as our contribution to the affair. Our hosts were André and Nicole. They lived in a lovely stucco villa with a swimming pool in the front yard just inside a six-foot-high walled enclosure. As in most of the fine homes in le Midi, the floor was tile. You hardly ever saw hardwood floors—and never wall-to-wall carpet. French homes are built to last. At one time stone was the preferred masonry. Now concrete block is the material of choice.

  Whenever I commented on the tile floors, I was always told that they were easier to keep clean. I’m sure that is true, but I think a more fundamental allure for the French is that tile will stand the test of time. The French I know do not think like Americans. Americans think a home should be built for a lifetime. The French think a home should be built for posterity, for the next generation and all the generations to come. That is something I found endearing about the French. I think their protracted sense of time and allegiance to unborn descendants encourages a society that is less disposable.

  We were greeted like family, Nicole kissing me on both cheeks and André following suit with Nita. Three is the prescribed number of kisses in the Montpellier region (two in Marseille and an interminable string of four in Paris). However, at the end of the evening, when we were doing our kissing again, I noticed that Nicole only kissed Jean-Marie twice.

  “Why was that?” I asked.

  “Well, in principle, there should be three kisses, but sometimes Nicole gets impatient,” Jean-Marie explained.

  “Oh.”

  We were guided to the living room where we sat down around a large coffee table. André deployed an assortment of bottles on the table like tin soldiers in an imaginary theater of war: wine, whiskey, and liqueur. Serving alcohol was clearly the man’s role. Meanwhile, Nicole offered two bowls, one with pistachio nuts and the other with Jean-Marie’s escargots, toothpicks included.

  Before going to France, I did not drink alcohol. It was a choice I had made as a boy after witnessing the devastation of alcoholism. But explaining that preference to the French—who per capita consume five times as much wine as Americans—can be a bit of a trial. They can’t seem to imagine a grown man choosing not to drink, especially wine. So, to avoid the drama, I decided on this trip that I would enjoy what was offered. At first I took to bubbly champagne and the sweetness of white wine. But by the end of our first year in France, red wine was my beverage of choice. Unfortunately, at this first dinner, I had not yet developed a taste for wine.

  “What will you have?” André asked me.

  I tried to make my tone as casual as possible. “Some orange juice would be terrific,” I said.

  “With what?” André said.

  “Just straight,” I said.

  “Ah, mais non,” André said. “Ce n’est pas possible.” It’s not possible.

  I glanced at Jean-Marie, who knew my drinking preferences at the time. “There is no need to insist,” Jean-Marie said to André.

  “Quand même,” André said. “You must at least have some pastis. It’s from the region.”

  “Some pastis, then,” I said, reaching the limit of my resistance.

  André poured an inch of the yellow liqueur into my glass, topping it off with water. Made from the licorice-flavored seeds of anise, the sweet-tasting pastis is a favorite aperitif among the people of Provence and Languedoc. As for me, I have always liked the flavor of licorice, so pastis was a good choice.

  The escargots were passed around. I noticed that Nita took one and hid it among the pistachio nuts on her napkin, where it stayed undisturbed for the rest of the night. I took three—a tidy sum, I thought. I bayoneted the first one with a toothpick and, trying not to visualize the face of Steve McQueen, popped it into my mouth. It was a little chewy, I thought, with an aftertaste of parsley—not bad but not something I would order in a restaurant.

  After the aperitifs, we were led to an enclosed glass terrace that looked out on a flourishing Mediterranean garden. We sat down around a solid oak dining table where we would stay, eating and chatting, for the next three hours. In typical French fashion, there were five courses.

  First course: Bite-size segments of octopus, coupled with a fresh salad composed of skinned tomatoes, onions, and green peppers lightly bathed in vinegar and olive oil.

  Octopus is not my favorite starter—a little too much like eating windshield-wiper blades for my money—but I accepted a second helping, if nothing else but to prove that Americans were not
total barbarians.

  “Pas mal,” I said.

  “This one is a little tough,” Nicole admitted.

  “Oh, not at all,” I lied, my tongue working overtime on a piece of octopus gristle lodged between a pair of molars.

  The French are big on fish. The annual per capita consumption of fish and shellfish in France is seventy pounds, compared to just under forty-seven pounds in the United States. So it is no surprise that fish is often the first course after the hors d’oeuvres.

  In other homes I have been regaled with shrimp, mussels wrapped in bacon (very tasty), crayfish (not much to talk about there), lobster, and, a personal favorite, stingray. Une raie, one of Monique’s specialties, is a flaky and tender white meat that melts in your mouth. Had Monique not told me, I never would have guessed I was eating stingray.

  It was not my first experience with the winged fish. I once went scuba diving among a school of stingrays in a bay off of Grand Cayman (the dive promoters have called the spot “Stingray City”). The fish were like puppies gliding overhead and through my legs in search of a handful of squid. They were sandpaper rough on the slate-gray topside, and silky smooth, some might say slimy, on the snow-white bottom. Now, did I ever consider throwing one of those puppies in the frying pan for dinner? No way. Would I eat one now? In a minute!

  While we are on the subject of seafood, it’s not a big leap to amphibians and the French delicacy of frog legs. My friend Armelle once served them as an entrée. (I had told her it was something I wanted to try before leaving France. Lesson: Be careful what you ask for.) It is true what they say about frog legs. They taste like chicken, although a little more fatty by my palette. If you can get past the idea of eating a toad, they’re really not that bad, although I prefer lamb chops or just about anything else that doesn’t croak.

  Second course: Stewed rabbit and a side dish of egg noodles.

  The rabbit was tasty, not unlike chicken but a little wilder. The flavor reminded me of pheasant, a bird that my dad used to hunt when I was a boy.

  “What are these kidney-shaped things?” I chirped, trying to make my question more of a children’s game than an accusation.

  “They’re, well … kidneys,” André said.

  “Of course they are, I knew that,” I laughed.

  Monique turned to me. “You haven’t had rabbit kidneys before, have you?”

  “Well, let’s see. Not for a long time. Not since … well, ever.”

  “How do you like them?” André asked.

  “They have a kind of organ taste,” I said authoritatively.

  “Well, if you like that,” André said, “you have to try something really special.”

  Actually, I had not claimed I actually liked them, but I let the assumption pass.

  André leapt from his chair and disappeared into the kitchen. In a moment, I heard the rattling of what I imagined to be carving knives.

  “What is he doing in there?” I asked Nicole.

  “Oh, a little bricolage,” Nicole said, impishly sidestepping the question.

  Bricolage is a word that is often used in French. It means tinkering or doing odd jobs. The word is so rooted in the culture that there is even a chain of hardware stores called Monsieur Bricolage. However, if you live in France long enough, you will learn that there is another nuance of the word: slapdash or jerry-rigged. Jerry-rigging—like attaching electrical wires or plumbing to the outside surface of a wall—is a rooted Gallic tradition, as entrenched as vacation in August. The French make no apologies about the custom. If anything, they are amused. I once spoke to a seventy-year-old French Catholic priest who defined bricolage as “the art of taking bedsprings and making a bookcase.”

  So, when Nicole said that her husband was engaged in a little bricolage, I was not sure what adventure to expect.

  “Et voilà,” André said, emerging from the kitchen with a butcher knife in one hand and a mysterious, leathery creature in the other.

  “Uh, what is it?” I asked, making no effort to disguise my apprehension.

  “It’s a violet,” André announced proudly, separating the two halves of the organism as if opening a clam.

  “And what in the world is a violet?” I asked.

  For the next five minutes, the native francophones exchanged impassioned definitions of the sea creature, none of which made much sense to me. A few days later, I referred to an encyclopedia of sea life in Jean-Marie’s library and discovered that a violet was, in layman’s terms, a sea squirt. As it turns out, it is a rather advanced animal because, like humans, it has a spine (and, unlike humans, both sex organs, which I thought could be pleasantly diverting).

  “Look how clean the inside of the bladder is,” André said, standing over me with sea squirt and blade.

  Sure enough, that was one clean bladder—like a sparkling white porcelain bidet.

  “Here, it’s for you,” André said merrily, presenting the rubbery blob on the end of the butcher knife.

  “Oh, I couldn’t. It’s too much,” I said, surveying the table for someone—anyone—who wanted the sea biscuit more than I.

  Everyone sat stock-still, arms folded, grinning back at me like a chorus of Stan Laurels.

  “I insist,” André said.

  “Merci,” I said, giving up hope of rescue from the beaming quintet of diners. “Somewhere, I’m sure there are just the right French words to properly thank you.”

  “No thanks are necessary,” André said. “It is given with grand plaisir.”

  Grand pleasure, indeed. André’s rascally side-glance to Jean-Marie recalled the day my brother offered me a jumbo jalapeño pepper that barbecued the inside of my mouth for a week. “Eat the whole thing at once,” my brother had advised. “It’s mild. You’ll like it.”

  I sucked the sea squirt into my mouth and began chewing … and chewing. There are Michelin tires that are more tender. Finally, when no one was looking, I cupped my mouth and slipped out a sliver of bone that, as far as I knew, may have been the tadpole’s backbone. “Yum,” I said. “Now, that’s eating.”

  There are worse things to eat than sea squirts. I know; I’ve eaten the worst thing. At a dinner with the Ducros later in the year, the main dish was duck. Now, I’m not particularly beguiled by duck, but it’s not bad, and the French certainly know how to prepare it. So when the dish was served, I was content. But, I have to admit, I was somewhat surprised to see, in the center of the serving platter, the scalped head of the duck staring up at me with empty eye sockets. It was a sad expression, as though the duck were saying, “Gee-whiz, now I’ll never fly south again.”

  “C’est la tête?” I asked, pointing with my dinner knife at the sorrowful duck head. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to have said. A question like that, and it’s open season on naïve Americans.

  “Of course,” Monique said. “It’s the best part.”

  Jean-Marie swooped in for the kill. “Oh, yes, la cervelle de canard—it is a rare delicacy.”

  “Duck brains?” I asked haltingly.

  “Mais oui,” Jean-Marie said, stabbing the head of the duck with his fork. “Let me show you.” With that, he started slicing into the duck’s skull with his steak knife. “You’re going to love this.”

  “You betcha.”

  The skull cracked open, and Jean-Marie scooped out the bird’s brains with his spoon. “Here,” he said, tapping the morsel onto my plate.

  Everyone was looking at me, waiting to see what I would do. I really had no choice. I rinsed out my mouth with a sip of red wine, took a couple of short Lamaze breaths, and eased the ganglion into my mouth.

  I let my tongue and palette savor the tiny organ. It was squishy, rather like goose liver (another Gallic favorite that I have actually come to enjoy, although not nearly as enthusiastically as the French). I just couldn’t help thinking that I was devouring all the memories and aspirations of a feathered traveler: the hatching, the splashing around the pond with the other guy
s, and that interminable flight from Finland to the Mediterranean, year in and year out. (“Whose daffy idea was that?” my duck brain must have thought.)

  “How do you like it?” Monique asked.

  “Well … it’s not my favorite,” I said smiling, “but I suddenly have this irresistible urge to arrange all my peas in the shape of a ‘V.’”

  Third course: The cheese platter comprised of blue cheese, goat cheese, Camembert, and Cantal (a hard, sharp cheese).

  In an election speech General De Gaulle reasoned that no one could unite a country that has 265 kinds of cheese. In the American movie French Kiss, the character played by Meg Ryan grumbled that only France could produce 452 varieties of cheese. That’s a lot of curdled milk, but the largest count I’m aware of comes from Patrick Rance, author of The French Cheese Book, who placed the number at 750. Whatever the exact count, you can be sure that when in France, cheese will always be on the menu.

  I do not know how the passion for cheese began in France, but I will tell you it is real. One of the hikes I took with the Pérols hiking club terminated at a farm that produced goat cheese. There were twenty-five hikers in the group and nearly all of them stood in line at the barn door to buy cylinders of goat cheese the size of a hockey puck for the bargain price of one euro a puck.

  “When was the cheese made?” one of the hikers asked.

  “This morning,” the farmer said.

  “Ooh,” the hikers sang out, like a sacred incantation to the munificent god of the goat cheeses.

  Nicole’s offering was a typical French cheese course. When the platter came around, I took a wedge of two or three varieties, along with a couple slices of bread—my standard routine. And then everyone froze for a moment. I sensed the silence and stopped dead, my mouth wide open, a chunk of bread and cheese at half-mast.

  “What?” I said, looking around the table.

  “That is not correct,” André said.

  Now the adjective correct carries an impact in French that is missing in English. The first sense—as in English—means “without errors.” The second sense means “acceptable,” which is also shared in English. But the third sense of the word only exists in French: decent, moral, and just. When André told me that what I had done was “not correct,” I knew I had crossed the line into cultural impropriety—that what I had done was somehow “indecent.”