Whisper it softly, but French food really fab

Anthony Peregrine introduces his new monthly series on touring the gastronomic delights of France

Every time I mention that French cuisine remains the greatest in the world, I duck. Below-the-line comments on the website go berserk. “The last steak I had in Paris was tougher than a truck,” they shout, occasionally in CAPITALS. “Frankly, the Frogs have lost it”; “You’re joking, right?” “Do you get paid for this sort of treachery?” (No – it’s voluntary work in aid of the disadvantaged.)

And so they continue, yard upon yard of invective. But, really. Well. They are wrong. Simple as that. Let me count some reasons.

There’s Stéphane Boucher’s oyster boat on the Bay of Arcachon, where shucking shellfish and drinking white wine enraptures any early evening. Or a Strasbourg bierstub, where the eating of choucroute, with its cardiac-arrest festival of pork cuts, requires replete diners be hoisted from the table with a block and tackle. And then the beach-bar terrace in Provence with a grand aioli (warm cod, veg, salad, garlic mayonnaise), a bottle of rosé, sand beneath the bare feet and no obligations until Tuesday next. Or the Hotel Haut Allier in the wild, remote Allier gorges, where eating lamb in olive sauce may cede to the tasting of every verbena digestif ever made, and the conclusion that they’re all green.

Or... I could go on. I often do. Maybe that’s why people get irritated. But, please, I’m not implying that British food is mediocre. Lord, no. I grew up on it. The following made me the man I am: fried luncheon meat, steamed haddock in urine-yellow water, porridge, boiled ham, tinned potato salad, Tizer, Smith’s crisps with a twist of salt, sago pudding and Heinz spaghetti hoops. (“Do you eat these in Milan?” my grandmother once asked a young Italian visitor. “No,” he said.)

And I’m aware that it has grown far better since I was young. Invariably when I return to the English north country, I eat well and ravenously, as if in the shadow of famine, in pubs and restaurants once devoted to oxtail soup and beef sliced so thin you could read a magazine right through it.

These days, it’s grand. If you can’t find good local food in the Yorkshire Dales or Ribble Valley, you shouldn’t be allowed out. Things are surely similar across the country. Clearly, there’s been a renaissance.

But this is a renaissance fuelled from the top down, by celeb chefs, TV shows, restaurateurs, cookery writers and bloggers. They’re ubiquitous and admirable, but they’re leading rather than responding. By contrast, France has never needed a revival because cuisine never went away. It’s rooted in a base where everyone – hair dresser, truck driver, accountant – reckons he or she is one step from the peasantry, thus an expert. It’s still there, in family-run restaurants in every village and high street; in independent butchers’ and bakers’ shops with food-lust window displays; in markets that have been around for 500 years or more – rather than being recently developed by young fellows with caps, beards and an annoying moral take on root vegetables.

It’s in the depth of interest evinced. My French friends and neighbours can talk about olive oil, guinea fowl or the best way with snails until you long to hit them with a blender. Combing autumn forests for mushrooms is as popular, and as potentially lethal, as adultery. Being all-but peasants, the French don’t do squeamish. They’re used to eating what’s left after the best bits were sold off to the bourgeoisie.

In my wife’s village in the Massif Central mountains, farmers still kill the family pig at year-end, transforming it into joints, pâté, charcuterie, sausages, black pudding and other slippery stuff, right there in the farmyard. A local speciality is manouls, a dish of sheep’s stomach and intestines. It’s like eating your way out from inside a sheep’s bowels. I’m confident there’s nothing as disgusting available in Britain, not even haggis or turkey twizzlers.

But nobody said that all French cuisine had to appeal to British tastes. This demonstrates merely that the cuisine is deeper and richer than any other, with a wider variety of what

FOODIE CENTRALThe town of Colmar in the Alsace region, above; sweet treats in Lyon, right

ON A PLATEOysters, top; centre; andbuckwheat crêpe), bottom, from Alsace