WHY FRENCH FOOD REALLY IS FAB
Every time I say that French cuisine is the greatest in the world, I duck. Comments on the website go berserk. “The last steak I had in Paris was tougher than a truck,” they shout. “You’re joking, right?” “Do you get paid for this sort of treachery?” And so they continue. But, they are wrong. 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. There are Strasbourg bierstuben (beer bars), where the eating of choucroute, with its cardiacarrest festival of pork cuts, requires replete diners be hoisted from the table.
There’s the beach-bar terrace in Provence with a grand aioli, a bottle of rosé, and no obligations until next Tuesday. And the hotel Le Haut Allier in the remote Allier gorges, where eating lamb in olive sauce may cede to the tasting of every verbena digestif ever made.
While the cuisines of other countries enjoy their revivals, French food has never needed a revival because it never went away. It’s 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 beards.
My French friends can talk about olive oil, guinea fowl or snails until you long to hit them with a blender. Combing forests for mushrooms is as popular, and as potentially lethal, as adultery. And 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 in the farmyard.
This demonstrates merely that the cuisine is deeper and richer than any other, with a wider variety of what counts as food and firm grasp of the notion that the food chain doesn’t start, vacuum-packed, in the hypermarket freezer but growing or grazing in fields and slithering about the deep.
It’s no real revelation, then, that, according to OECD figures, the French spend longer at table than any other nation: 2hr 13min a day. The only surprise here is that the figure is so low. I’ve been to dinners that bumped into breakfast.
All right, you will say, but France has more McDonald’s outlets than anywhere in Europe bar Germany: 1,442. In 2017, they spent à5bn on Big Macs and similar. So French cuisine is going down the tubes? Hardly. Disneyland Paris in no way devalues Notre-Dame cathedral or the Louvre. Fast food is not so much replacing gastronomy as it is adding to the choice. There’s no contradiction in eating a burger today and Michelin stars tomorrow.
France’s continuum of cuisine — markets through truck stops and brasseries to Michelin stars — remains a central constituent of the culture.
Certainly, the Italians and Spanish would claim something similar. The big difference is in France’s extraordinary diversity.
The French have almost the whole of western Europe, including themselves, in one country. Drive north to south or west to east and you’re crossing several different food traditions per day. In northeastern Alsace, you can tell they’ve been German as long as they’ve been French just by reading the menu. Hotpot meals in the mountainous Auvergne come in suitable heaps, and across the way, Quercy lamb is among the finest you’ve clapped teeth on.
Scallops from, say, St-Malo, just seared in butter, would constitute my last-mealbefore-the-electric-chair.
Over in the Alps, tartiflette is the dish to send you hurtling up glaciers. And the good people of French Flanders have given the world beer and pot’je-vleesh, a terrine of veal, rabbit and chicken served with chips.
In Provence, the diet is so alarmingly healthy — fish, olive oil, veg, fruit — that only proper consumption of pastis and rosé wine gives mortality a chance.
So it is across France. Languedoc has estimable fish dishes; cassoulet is simply feisty southern life in simmering stew form.
All French people ultimately say about their food: “It’s a product which allows us to preserve our roots and identity.”
All French foodstuffs, too, may be fancied up for the carriage trade, justifying £250 menus in places with chandeliers.
They may, these days, be prone to Oriental or new-world influence and they will, certainly, be subject to reams of impenetrable prose, which French chefs are required to reel out by the metre.
In this field, the champion is Christian Sinicropi of the Palme-d’Or in Cannes. In a land of impenetrable philosophers — Descartes, Sartre, Cantona — Sinicropi soars to a zenith of incomprehensibility.
Thus, from an autumn menu blurb: “A dimension of emotion, of sharing, of palliative exchanges superimposed on an initial approach with a title of nobility in two, three or four phases.”
No one on God’s Earth knows what this means. But the French will nod. They will not laugh. Even for fun, their cuisine is a serious business. That’s why it’s the best.
LS
Anthony Peregrine unapologetically introduces his new series on the gastronomic delights of France