FRENCH SPECIAL
How their food lost its edge
Digby Anderson
MY first memories of eating in France are of a picnic in 1957, by a lake near Montreuil at the back of Le Touquet. It was a proper picnic in courses, each of six families providing a course: I remember langoustes, ducks, I think asparagus and lots and lots of tartes. Streams fed the lake, and suspended over one of them was a privy with no bottom, the seat a simple bench with a hole in the middle and you sat and dangled your legs. One family lived in Boulogne and I can still taste the Lotte a la portugaise they made that evening — and there was salsify.
Compared to food in England at that date, it was a constant feast and adventure, though for France it was tame. The Pas de Calais does not in fact have the worst food in France. That distinction is generally awarded, except by the Bretons, to Brit- tany — perhaps the reason so many English people go to gites there now. But soon the north was replaced by Lyon and the restaurants of the Rue des Marroniers, Ardeche, with little hard goats' cheeses and salami and bottles of mare which peasants buried in the garden, then Avig- non — a civet de porcelet I can still smell, Montpellier — a brandade, Sete — violets, Marseilles, Nice and Nimes. That was during the year 1961-2, some say the last year of the Old France. Certainly it was still a foreign country. Everything was different: the lavatories, cars, churches, men who were neither artists nor pretend- ing to be, in corduroy trousers, cigarettes with paper mais, drinks and disinfectants which smelt totally unfamiliar.
Ladies called Clothilde, shutters, berets, goats; grandmothers quite unlike English ones — even in affluent families they could be seen, in black, rooting in the garden for wood for the range on which the soup (hors d'oeuvre at lunch, always soup in the evening) simmered continuously, grand- mothers assisted by moronic looking peasant girls brought in to be maids from the mountain who spoke largely patois and had to be taught French but always got pregnant before much progress was made.
The books all needed the pages cut, except the new, glossy livres de poche, French people suffered quite different diseases, mal au foie, grosse fatigue, angine and minor varieties of typhoid. Indeed they tried to suggest I did when I was there: the doctors listened to one's stomach. Even the body temperature cons- idered normal was different. And the food: never had one seen such trouble taken over simple things, a cauliflower vinaigrette, pot au feu, purées of spinach with poached eggs. Sheer quantity, admittedly for larger families, 20 dozen oysters arriving in a wicker basket packed with seaweed, hun- dreds of snails, huge tureens and vast black frying-pans. At the coast, in the village of Bouzigues, enormous mussels stuffed with pork and bound with cotton, bass, bour- ride always of baudroie, and oursins. It was not just a regional France but one where traditions varied from village to village: 'We don't cook sardines like that here,' said Grand'mere, 'but they do in Meze' (three miles away). On another occasion, she, in Languedoc, looked deeply shocked at the idea of using herbs as in Provence. Beer in Lyon, at the Brasserie Georges, but not in Languedoc — there pastis.
The change came. It came anyway but the General invited it to Languedoc with new development. Lots of Germans eating early dinners, demanding pitchers of rosé and swimming competitively. The oursin, not unreasonably, fled; there are now next to none in the sea lake. The olive oil disappeared from ordinary restaurant tables. Beer came in everywhere: pastis went up. And so a retreat to the country, Aveyron, which resisted progress for a few more years. M.et Mme Poulet — he was called Ismael Poulet for obscure reasons, — down the road had three cows (for cheese), ducks, hens, vines and a wine press, apples and a cider press, a wine vinegar crock (always topped up at full moon), two pigs for charcuterie, a pond with carp, and a still, or rather, use of a peripatetic still, all coal-fired copper caul- drons and wheels, a bit like a fairground organ. Few houses had indoor lavatories; some not even privies. Monsieur l'Abbe still used the old rite in defiance of the local
FRENCH SPECIAL
conference of bishops, wore peasant boots under his soutane, and cuffed the servers — in albs and gum boots — when they forgot to genuflect. Dinner started with soup, but for men only. Men ate soup for breakfast. Dogs ate soup all day.
As the Poulets died, their houses were taken over by relatives as second homes.
The local market town was invaded by trendies practising artisanal crafts, no doubt on a grant. In the 15th-century square they sold clogs, macrobiotic garlic, Marx translated into Occitane and henna.
Tourists came. M. l'Abbe was, we think forcibly, retired and a hideous young man who looked like a dentist employed to shout at the congregation through banks of unnecessary microphones. It was not that you couldn't get the things of the old France, but that they were now specialist produce. Good cheese was still to be had but in specialist cheese shops and sold by snooty assistants dressed like nurses to couples in matching track suits.
The Poulets were the last generation to have licences to distil — marc and eau de vie de prunes and poires. With their death and that of the licences, the old France was finally buried. And buried too by competi- tion. While most English cooking remains frightful, the variety of raw ingredients available here has improved enormously.
There is no need to go to France for aubergines and red mullet. Several Euro- pean countries offer more exciting food than the French: the market at Barcelona puts most southern French markets to shame, and the produce typical of a peasant culture — the offal, home-made cheeses and charcuterie and bread — are often better now in Portugal, Italy and Spain. The country which today has the feel nearest to that of Languedoc in the early Sixties is Calabria.
By now the gastronomes will be seething and waving their Guides in rage. But that is the point; in the old France you did not need a Guide. The good things were everywhere and a normal part of everyday life. Had you asked 20 years ago where to go to get bread they would have looked at you in blank amazement. Of course, one can find stunning restaurants —"the French are still best at a whole meal, something the Italians have never mastered. You can find good bread, cheese and non-industrial charcuterie but you have to search about, to know where to go and when. Vast tracts of not only the Midi but also the Dor- dogne, Lot, and Loire are impossible in certain seasons and the roads to every- where else are blocked by caravans. Good food is increasingly becoming a hobby for specialists — Guidistes. Nothing could be further from its traditional place in French culture.
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