Where does one begin when it comes to the origins of French cuisine, often regarded as the pinnacle of high gastronomy? It might be with the biography of Antoine Carême, considered the patron saint of all chefs, who rose from being an abandoned child to cooking for French royalty, including baking the wedding cake for Napoleon III. Carême was so committed to his craft that he died for the cause – of carbon monoxide poisoning, the result of a lifetime of cooking in unventilated kitchens.
A few decades later, The Belly of Paris was written by Emile Zola. It’s worth plodding through this sappy tale to read firsthand accounts of the astounding market of Les Halles in all its gastronomic richesse, where magnificent French cheeses, charcuterie and produce converged from across the country, creating what was the world’s most thrilling marketplace in the centre of Paris for nearly 1000 years.
Weighing in at over seven pounds, nearly twice what a jumbo loaf of pain Poilâne clocks in at, Larousse Gastronomique provides an encyclopedic overview of l’art de la cuisine française. First published in 1938, it gave concrete definitions to French cuisine. It’s still in print and is considered the standard when it comes to defining and explaining the myriad classic sauces, techniques and culinary terms that are de rigueur for professional cooks to know and master. If one has a question about a recipe or technique, from whipping up a simple mayonnaise to mastering a mousse-like marquise au chocolat, Larousse gets the final say.
All these are culinary classics, but change is in the air. Les Halles was demolished in the 1970s and all the merchants were moved to a grey, soulless warehouse out by the airport. The latest edition of Larousse has blurbs by – mon dieu! – British cook Jamie Oliver, potty-mouthed US chefs David Chang and Anthony Bourdain, and American home cooks Martha Stewart and Ina Garten. Even the two French chefs who lend their words of praise, Jacques Pépin and Daniel Boulud, both live and work across the Atlantic – in America.
The French have not completely turned their backs on their treasured men in toques, however; in recent years, chefs Paul Bocuse and Alain Ducasse have been honoured by the Musée Grévin in Paris, which replicated their images in la cire (wax). Still, unlike those métro tickets you’re saving from your last trip to Paris, which will work for all of eternity, other things in France don’t last forever, and when three-star chef Bernard Loiseau (who completed the trilogy of French chefs honoured at the waxworks museum) committed suicide in 2003, allegedly because of a rumour that he was going to lose his hard-earned third star, French chefs went on high alert that something had gone amiss. Although Michelin later revealed it had no intention of demoting Loiseau from his three-star status, his passing made many starred chefs question the point of doing what they were doing. All were spending enormous sums of money, racking up debts of hundreds of thousands of euros in the hope of getting, and guarding, that final star that sealed their success. Once anointed, they’d be considered le top du top in the culinary business, part of an exclusive club, a privileged handful selected annually by a roving band of anonymous inspectors who dined alone and never revealed their identities nor their exacting standards of inspection.
(This reminds me of my visa appointments, where they give you some vague idea of what documents you need to bring, but fail to provide a concrete list so you can properly prepare for it. I, too, have considered ending it all by plunging myself into the Seine after each of my annual appointments at Paris’s fearsome préfecture de police.)
Even before the time of Loiseau’s death – though many admitted the trend was accelerated because of his suicide – many French chefs were getting out of the luxe business, yanking the smooth linen tablecloths off the tables, trashing the whisper-thin wine glasses, and dressing down the waiters to jeans and T-shirts rather than constrictive tuxedos. Tables were set with stiff butcher’s paper, wine was to be drunk out of supermarket-quality wine glasses and, perhaps most telling, the classic French bistro accoutrement, pots of Dijon mustard, were proudly back on the table.
The bistro gastronomique movement was born, and instead of paying €33 for a bowl of soup or a slice of cake, guests could eat quite well on a three- or four-course prix-fixe menu for less than the price of the long-cooked tomato dessert at L’Arpège – which might have you simmering too, when you found out it cost over €50. (Actually, two could dine for the price of one of those tomatoes, which seemed like a pretty good idea to me too.) The success of the gastro bistros that opened in Paris during the 1990s was proof that guests didn’t care all that much about having a tufted Hermès stool brought to the table for their handbags, and that they preferred a meaty slab of pâté de campagne and a crock of cornichons to a team of waiters standing behind you monitoring your every mouthful, ready to pounce in case you needed a bit more bread or wanted guidance to the restroom.
It was a win-win situation: guests got to eat well, enjoying traditional French fare prepared with high-quality ingredients, served at reasonable prices. A lot of chefs were happy about it too; many noted that they were relieved of the stress of no longer having to have four cooks spend their entire shift peeling peas, or making sure the soap in the restrooms had perfectly shaved ninety-degree corners, lest the Michelin inspectors make a stop in the can. They could just prepare hearty French dishes, using inexpensive cuts of meat that benefited from long braising, and instead of stocking a wine cave filled with exceptional vintages, a hand-written chalkboard could make the daily announcement of which wines were on offer, sold inexpensively by the carafe. I happily ate in a lot of these restaurants, and except for how difficult it became to get a reservation, it was hard to find fault with them.
Well, apparently not everyone thought things were going well. In 2000 a movement with undoubtedly the most unfortunate name in French culinary history – or all culinary history, for that matter – was founded: Le Fooding. The idea seemed like a good one, I suppose, though I’m not so sure because no-one seemed to have a concrete idea of what Le Fooding was. Even the founders.
They issued a statement that they wanted to ‘make a statement’. But as with many things the French do, it was hard to decipher the circular logic and figure out what the rationale was. What statement were they trying to make? The Spanish had come up with molecular gastronomy, Americans were embracing regional cooking, and British chefs were doing their best to erase unpleasant memories of boiled steaks and mushy grey peas.
What were the French doing? The only thing I could come up with was that the French love organising and categorising things, like the annual meetings we foreigners must endure at the préfecture, or city hall, where you need to show up with a minimum of seven dossiers that include the last five years of bank statements, photocopied in triplicate, proof that you’ve indeed been paying your electricity bill (because, lord knows, they don’t want anyone not living with electricity) and your original sixth-grade report card, professionally translated and notarised back in your home country. No photocopies accepted.
The French also like ‘movements’. A strike or demonstration is a mouvement social, which are those special times when the French get to exercise one-third of their national motto: liberté, fraternité et égalité. So they march in fraternité and in solidarity with their brethren down the boulevards of Paris, somehow forgetting about any égalité with their brethren when squashed together on the métro, packed so tightly that you’d better not get an itch on your nose because you can forget about making any sort of mouvement with your arms. And I know a few women who’ve told me that at times they’d like a little liberté when men have tried to become a little too social with them when the subway is that packed.
So an organisation and a movement was off and running, and a bunch of restaurants in Paris became part of the Le Fooding Guide, an annual magazine that boasted ‘864 restaurants de style’. I was immediately leery because I’ve found that restaurants that boast ‘style’ usually mean they have attractive yet completely disinterested hostesses who greet you as if they’d rather be doing anything than checking
to see if your name is in the reservation book. And you can be sure at such stylish establishments that at least one corner of each plate – square, of course – will be dusted with some sort of powder that may, or more likely may not, have anything to do with the dish.
Trying to stir things up, some of these chefs started to do all sorts of audacious things. Cumin became de rigueur. I remember sitting through a three-course meal at a stylish wine bar in the 5th arrondissement where each course had at least a tablespoon of it either mixed in or featured somewhere on the dish. One day, a package arrived with a generous sample of a French chocolate riddled with the stuff. When I pried the lid off the container and took a whiff, I had a true Proustian moment: I was transported right back to my high-school locker room, to the canvas bin where we tossed our stinky jock straps and gym socks after running around the sports field for a few hours. Peeling off those sweaty clothes was, I’ll admit, a pleasant memory. But not necessarily one I wanted to recount over a bowl of steamy soup.
One chef in Paris, testing the limits of his imagination and our stomachs, held an event called ‘Les Incorrects’ and politically incorrectly served raw horsemeat pounded as carpaccio. Another cooked up a rabbit stew with tagada. If you’re not French, tagada may sound like an exotic, elusive spice to you, which might go well with a lovely plat du jour of braised hare. Except tagada are bright red, artificially flavoured strawberry marshmallows, best appreciated by folks under the age of seven. The cheval-spurring chef dared guests to eat his horsemeat, announcing that people should stop thinking about where food comes from and just eat it. Oddly, this announcement was pretty much in contrast to the rest of the world, where many people had been taken ill because they hadn’t sufficiently cared about where their food had come from, and as a result, food safety scares were becoming commonplace, prompting massive recalls of produce.
Around the same time, I tried horse milk, which I saw at the swank La Grande Épicerie supermarket. I reported about this on my website and then made a casual mention that because it’s sold in France, I should probably give horsemeat a try as well. Almost immediately, someone who raises horses in North America, where the horsemeat in France comes from, strongly cautioned me that I should take a pass, as those horses aren’t raised for consumption and are injected with all sorts of hormones and hazardous chemicals. In that case, pass the marshmallows.
The whole incident struck me as arrogant compared to what chefs elsewhere were doing, which was sourcing food locally and becoming more keenly focused on how food is grown and produced. Eating locally became popular and a vast network of farmer’s markets flourished across America, including one in the middle of the most urban city in the world, Manhattan. Surrounded by skyscrapers, one could find dazzling vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes, clusters of organic grapes with the morning dew still clinging to them, and fantastic handcrafted candies made of just-tapped maple syrup, which would dissolve in your mouth, making you feel as if you were melting into a pool of buttery maple syrup.
Back in Paris, chefs were hunched over their countertops filling glasses called verrines, mixing things like soon-to-be-extinct bluefin tuna with popcorn, and baking up foie gras chocolate éclairs. In America, online foodies would have taken to task any chef who dared to mix strawberries, gelatine and rabbit parts. But where was the outrage in Paris? French chefs always waxed about how their cuisine was the best in the world. I heard not a peep of criticism. In protest, I cancelled my cable subscription to Cuisine.tv, France’s food network, because I was tired of the focus being on les tendances, the trends, and seeing hyperactive women layering food into glasses and shrieking in delight at their cleverness, rather than promoting the beautiful cheeses, chocolate and charcuterie that France was known for.
(In their defence, change just doesn’t come naturally, or easily, in France. The numerous bloody and violent revolutions over the course of French history can attest to that. Even today, anyone who has tried to get a shopkeeper or cashier to give them change for a €50 note knows that change still comes reluctantly to the French.)
Though already considered passé in Spain, foams had been discovered by French chefs, and it wasn’t unusual to be served Caesar salad bouchons (mouthfuls) in one-bite portions on porcelain spoons. At this time, a reader – after dining around town on a trip to Paris – wrote to me, ‘What the hell is up with all those little dishes they serve food in?’ And I was sure that I’d missed the decree suddenly banishing bowls in France, since it appeared obligatory to serve soup in glasses, each serving invariably topped with a dab of crème fraîche and, uh oh, ground cumin.
I’m not against layering foods in glasses: things like tiramisu and spoonable desserts, custards and gelées are beautiful and easier to eat when served in a deep vessel. But the sudden proliferation of cookbooks in France with nouveau-style recipes for everything from soup to squid to spaghetti and meatballs meant no dish was off limits from being crammed into a glass. I imagine that if Carême had served Napoleon his wedding cake in a glass, he most likely would have met his fate a bit sooner, at the guillotine.
(One year during this period, I proposed to some French friends that I serve Thanksgiving dinner in a glass, stratifying layers of mashed potatoes, chestnut stuffing, chopped turkey and gravy in there, then topping it off with a mound of sweet potatoes. I stopped before I got to the part about finishing it with the classic, all-American topping of toasted marshmallows, because it wasn’t obvious to them that I wasn’t serious about putting it all in a verrine and they started nodding in agreement.)
I guess I’ve become more French than I thought, since I am proposing the once-again revolutionary idea of using drinking glasses for what they were intended. That is, for drinking. I’ll take my salad back in a bowl, not a spoon. And call me a right-wing lunatic, but I’d like to propose a ban on cumin immigrating across the border from Mexico and North Africa into France.
But lest you think I’m joining the naysayers who say French culinary innovation is dead and there’s no future for la cuisine française, I’m not counting the French out quite yet. I’ve lived in Paris for over a decade and have experienced a raw-milk brie de Meaux that was so good I was tempted to pass my American passport through a shredder. To my mind, the French have spent centuries perfecting their recipes and classic techniques, and once they figure something out, they should stick with it. Monsieur Ladurée put a dab of butter cream between two meringues and the Parisian macaroon was born; this dainty delight hasn’t changed much in 150 years, and doesn’t need to. I hope La Maison du Chocolat never changes their Rigoletto noir: dark chocolates filled with caramelised butter mousse.
Yet this doesn’t mean the classics can’t be updated. New flavours and sensations often delight by surprise. Consider the oval-shaped chocolates made by Jean-Charles Rochoux: they astound when you pop one into your mouth and the impossibly thin chocolate shell dissolves away, leaving you with a mouthful of minty, herbal Chartreuse liquor. Traditional caramels get a thoughtful update from Jacques Genin; his bite-size pain d’épices caramels each taste like a full stick of butter was reduced into a small rectangle, their richness offset by a mix of spices, which include star anise and cinnamon. And thankfully, no cumin.
Although nothing comes easy in France, I think change will happen. (Unless you’re trying to break a €50 note. Good luck with that one.) When I moved to Paris in 2003, I shocked friends by wanting internet access in my apartment in Paris; it was nearly impossible to find service at that time. Now the city is completely wired, free Wi-Fi is available in all the public parks and government buildings, and iPhones and le Blackberry have become standard accoutrements along with those pots of mustard on dining tables. And like the shock of taking a bite of a Chartreuse-filled chocolate, Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the least-appealing men in France, surprised us all by marrying Italian model Carla Bruni just a few weeks after his ex-wife split for New York. The French continue to surprise and adapt.
Sure, France is the fastest growing market
for McDonald’s in the world, three cheeses disappear each year, and it’s rumoured that some of the three-star restaurants are serving Starbucks because the French brew isn’t up to snuff. (Apparently even snooty Michelin inspectors like their nonfat soy lattes, non?) And one might find it a little odd that the two most sought-after reservations in Paris at the moment are at Spring, which is owned by an American chef, and at Frenchie, owned by a French chef who named his restaurant after the nickname he was given during his culinary training – in New York.
But I’m confident that the next generation, the génération coincée of young, ‘cornered’ cooks who feel trapped by old culinary conventions, will see the light. Drinking glasses will go back to being used for drinking. You won’t see any Seabiscuit steaks. And marshmallows will be used for what we Americans know they’re supposed to be used for – topping puréed vegetables. Bien sÛr.
Peanut Butter Summer
EMILY MATCHAR
Emily Matchar is a food and travel writer occasionally based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. When she’s not eating her way around the globe as an author for Lonely Planet guidebooks, she writes for magazines like Men’s Journal, Gourmet and BBC History. She hopes her story will not be taken as a slight against peanut butter, which she actually adores.
Peter and I were young, adults only by technicality. It was summer. We were in love and in Europe.
A Moveable Feast Page 18
