FOOD Rose Prince
I KNEW the on-off relationship between France and England was off again when I switched on the television during my third visit to France this year. During the commercial break, an advertisement played out a scene in which a typical English gent lectured a crowd on the goodness of Cheddar cheese. Dressed in Harris Tweed, speaking with a truly appalling French accent of the 'mon ancien haricot' style, he barked his appreciation of the only English cheese the French have ever heard of — until the climax. Suddenly, his image was wiped from the screen, the camp, yapping voice was silent, and the screen was filled instead by the logo for Roquefort, the favourite blue ewe's-milk cheese of France.
The television commercial was plainly offensive, and any other nationality would have described its message as racist and demanded it be banned. But we have become accustomed to our nation and its culture being put down by the blinkered conservatism of the French, in spite of the admiration we hold for theirs. I don't suppose matters will improve now that they have been caught out and condemned by the courts for their lack of fair play over the British beef import market — an eminently safer product than French beef.
Do the producers of English Cheddar buy prime-time space to slag off Brie and Camembert? Maybe they should, but we do not feel the threat. Our island curiosity grasps anything it can from other shores; consequently, French cheese is everywhere in Britain. We buy a massive 6,700 tonnes of cheese from the French each year; only a minimal amount of block Cheddar and Stilton can be found in French hypermarkets. We import 100,000 tonnes of fresh produce from France, but when did you last see a Cox's apple in a French market?
The anti-Britishness of the Roquefort commercial ebbs and flows: now they like us, most of the time they don't. The current surge in French national pride at the expense of the British cheese industry fits well with their forthcoming integration into Europe. Drawing around a comforting cloak of French pride might be what's needed for that most culturally protective of countries.
Launching Britishness on to the French is not easy. My friend Judy Gifford moved her family to France and started a marmalade business. When she first took the marmalade to the various food shows that you must attend if you are going to make it on the artisan provender circuit, the onlooking public viewed it as a dangerous substance. They had to be reassured about the acidity. That was eight years ago, and it has taken every bit of that time and not a little tenacity on the Gifford family's part for their marmalade to find its place on the shelves of the dpiceries. At the beginning, the Giffords offered scones with the marmalade. The untraveled soda buns went down very well indeed, but there was a seemingly insurmountable problem: 'But when do you eat them?' they said. The idea of stopping for 'tea' is an anathema to the methodical French. Lunch is taken at midday and dinner in the evening. Anything in-between is viewed as ruinous to the appetite. Likewise, sweet shops and chocolatiers are gift shops — no one pops in for a bag of pear drops to take the edge off a hunger pang.
The Giffords live in the Nord, the area that encompasses Calais, the Somme and that peculiar hybrid of a town, Le Touquet. The town gets its look from a period of heightened Anglophilia. With its faux halftimbered houses set in pine forests, Le Cottage is a chic address; even the French have their Dunroamins.
But Le Touquet is the exception. We patently love French food markets, wine, their countryside, buildings and beaches — the whole French way of life is a dream pursued by the ten million British who visit France each year. Added to that are the owners of the 25,000-30,000 French properties sold to the British annually, who can be found six-deep at the cheese counters in the Tarn and the Lot. But the French fantasy is not reciprocal: the French do not yearn for a cottage in the Cotswolds or a place on the Norfolk Broads.
In January, the third Vive la France exhibition was held in London, organised perhaps not surprisingly by Michael Hese!tine's Haymarket Exhibitions. All the regions were represented and a large section of the show was devoted to buying property in France. But can Parisians look forward to Vive l'Angleterre? Not likely. Why should the French dream about abandoned hill-farms costing tuppence in unspoilt areas of depopulated English countryside when they have millions of hectares of their own to fill?
The French may make clumsy jokes
about British culture, but in fact they know very little about it. Few travel to Britain to hunt down a weekend of culture, Britishstyle; although a large contingent of French live in Kensington — their children attend the local lycee, the Bute Street butchers cut meat the French way, local clothes shops sell petit-bateau pyjamas for the children and those quintessentially neat little leather ballet pumps for their mothers.
Given the recent wholesale improvement in British food — especially the growth of outstanding farmhouse cheesemakers and beef with real provenance — it would appear that our European neighbours are downright ignorant of the finer things in British life. To live in France is to live without tea — they offer a filthy apology, Lipton's. Pies, pasties and iced buns are out; decent sausages, Marmite, kippers and potted shrimps also. Cheese goes without pickle, forget bacon sandwiches and especially brown sauce. Beef must be eaten with French mustard — no Colman's, no horseradish.
What is it about us that the French love? They enjoy a bizarre obsession with the Windsors: Paris Match was recording royal trivia long before Hello! arrived on the scene. They agree that horseracing is smashing entertainment, there is a niche market for Barbour jackets, and the Jack Russell is the chic dog breed of the moment — Jack Russell races are now regularly held in Deauville. Classic English gardens with their soft perennial foliage and faded pinks are revered in lifestyle magazines. But all these tastes revolve around a marginal Britishness reminiscent of those days when Le Touquet was a holiday destination advertised on an Art Deco poster.
The single most popular British invention happens to be the one for which the French are best-known in Britain: the restaurant. The Larousse Gastronomique admits that the French copied the idea of serving food chosen from a menu at set times from our late18th-century London pubs. The first restaurant of any note in Paris was named La Grande Taverne de Londres, and opened in 1782 on the Rue de Richelieu. Admittedly these tavemes received a vital injection of French gastronomy; later aided, it is said, by hordes of jobless chefs from noble households that had fled the Revolution. Custard, too, was kidnapped and given a new identity — lies flottantes could never have set sail without their sea of crème anglaise.
The French will never deepen their interest in Britain beyond dog-breeding unless they loosen the order of their society and adopt our piratical nature. La France remains impeccable, an attribute that will not serve it well as it becomes accustomed to losing the franc. But, to coin a phrase, there's a whole world out there, to be studied with interest and not with contempt.
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