French Made Easy

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes,  March 21, 2004

>>From Gauls to Ducasse, French Made Easy
By ANN PRINGLE-HARRIS

IN the beginning, the French created food. The neighborhood bistro, the
brasserie, the literary cafe and the three-star restaurant quite naturally
followed. That's more or less how I might have summarized the development
of French cuisine before I attended classes in la gastronomie Franaise at
a language school in Paris last summer.

My goal was to achieve true fluency, to move past the stage of
simultaneous translation of English thoughts and into the realm of
spontaneous French speech. I reasoned that approaching the language
through stimulating subject matter - through the palate, for example -
might take me further than more conversation-plus-grammar courses. I
longed for the ease and eloquence the French have when they talk about
food. I yearned to rhapsodize over confit d'oie, chanterelles and fraises
des bois. I hoped to overcome my neurotic dependency on the proper tense
and the appropriate idiom.

After a bit of investigation I found a two-week course in the development
of French cuisine at l'Institut Parisien de Langue et de Civilisation
Franaises, in the 15th Arrondissement, that seemed to offer what I was
looking for. (The hours for the course have since been reduced to 6 from
15.)

On the first morning of classes we were a group of about eight students,
from England, Japan, Spain and the United States. The Spanish contingent,
under the mistaken impression that they would be preparing French meals,
withdrew when it was explained that they would be surveying the rise of
French cuisine from the Gauls to Alain Ducasse. We then had a
companionable group of four, plus Nadia Zanon, our instructor. We gathered
in a large, simple classroom, with plenty of windows but, unfortunately,
no air-conditioning. Journal articles, excerpts from classic texts, and
some slides and film clips provided a basis for Nadia's lively, informal
lectures and for class discussion - entirely in French.

The few facts I thought I knew about French gastronomic history proved not
to be facts. "Dishes in the early Middle Ages were very highly spiced,"
Nadia told us. She paused, and I jumped right in: "No refrigeration. They
had to disguise the taste of meat that had gone bad." I was sure I had
read that somewhere.

Not, apparently, in the correct scholarly texts. According to food
historians, medieval cooks had a specific system for producing tasty,
edible, healthful meats: "faire faisander la viande,'' which involved
aging the flesh until it reached the stage of near-decay, then purifying
it through a boiling process designed to destroy the bacteria. Why, then,
the quantities of cinnamon (cannelle) and other seasonings that records
show were added?

The answer seems to be that diners of that day simply liked spicy food.

As to the evolution of restaurants, the first and basic stage was street
food. Scholars say that the earliest commercial food service, in European
countries as well as in Africa and Asia, was a rolling cart stocked with
prepared edibles. In France, this medieval fast food was generally hot
bouillon, eaten by peasants and artisans who worked long hours out of
doors and away from home. Essentially a meat-and-vegetable pure, the
bouillon was taken to restore oneself: se restaurer.

Hence the word restaurant.

Having my misinformation corrected and my bits of knowledge expanded upon
in a friendly but rigorous classroom setting not only loosened my tongue,
it also gave me new words and a broader understanding of those I already
had.

"Un petit devoir," announced Nadia one morning. Normally we had no
homework to speak of, but on that day we were asked to look up the word
"entremets'' in whatever dictionary or other source we had at hand. To me,
entremets was something light, sweet and delicious, specifically a sherbet
I had eaten at age 3 when my parents took me out to a fancy restaurant in
St. Louis. I remember wondering why I was allowed to eat dessert in the
middle of dinner.

Entremets in medieval France was something altogether different: an
elaborate show in which singers, dancers and jugglers cavorted about in an
effort to entertain diners impatient for the next parts of their meal.

Those parts weren't yet courses. The practice of serving meals in courses,
according to Nadia, didn't take hold until the 17th century. Before that,
meals were organized around four to six large tables presented one after
the other, each one filled with dishes of all types and tastes and
seasoned in paired complementary flavors (parfums): sweet-salty,
bitter-mild. Diners chose small quantities, like tasting portions, of each
dish. We would call it grazing.

PEOPLE grazed with their fingers. Formal eating utensils came to France
via Italy. Catherine de' Medici, a woman I associate more with palace
intrigue than with tableware, is said to have introduced the fork - la
fourchette - to France at the time of her marriage to the future King
Henri II in 1533. Earlier, the French had simply scooped up their food
onto hunks of bread called tranchoirs. This word took me again back to my
childhood, to a set of infant silverware passed down in my father's
family. It included a knifelike utensil called a trencher, or a pusher,
apparently used to push food from the dish onto a small spoon or fork.

All tourists in France have seen them in urban and provincial restaurants:
parents, children and grandparents dining en famille, enjoying their meal
as they engage in conversation, the children behaving well while still
behaving like children. How do French families do it? Nadia introduced us
to the views of the historian Jean-Robert Pitte, who writes that from the
beginning - at any rate from the time of the Gauls - the pleasure of
eating was linked, in France, to the pleasure of conversation and
discussion, and the notion that children should be seen and not heard
apparently never caught on.

The cafe as a place of political and intellectual exchange obviously did
catch on. The first one, Le Procope, near the Thtre de l'Odon, opened in
Paris in 1686 and is still in operation. I was surprised to find, though,
that the exclusive, expensive, sought-after restaurant - the kind that
visitors to France book months, or years, in advance - owes its existence
to the French Revolution, and was in part inspired by the English.

In the 17th century, Nadia told us, London was famous for luxurious dining
establishments, called taverns, that were favored by English lords when
they lodged in London instead of languishing on their country estates. The
Revolution in France left unemployed the chefs of many aristocratic French
families whose members had lost their chateaus or their heads or both.
With no landed gentry left to cook for, the private chefs went public.
They looked to the London tavern as a model for their new establishments
because there was a vogue at the time for "le style Anglais."

By the end of classes, we students were conversing like old friends. I was
eager to practice my new skills in places I had been to on my first Paris
visit, when my aim was over the moon and my oral fluency in the basement.
At the Deux Magots, the Left Bank cafe facing St.-Germain-des-Prs on one
side, outdoor tables on a mild evening were filled with handsome young
French men and women, just as they had been for decades. I couldn't pick
up much from their conversations - too many were going on at once - but I
had the sense, possibly wishful, of being at home in their language.

Later, I met a friend for dinner at Lipp, the celebrated brasserie that I
recalled as specializing not only in Alsatian foods but also in dour,
intimidating matres d'htel who in years past had reduced my French to
mumbled monosyllables. The one on duty that night fit the mold, but I
plunged in and made known our presence and our seating preference: a table
downstairs instead of one in nowhere-land upstairs. When we were shown to
an excellent downstairs table, I allowed myself a moment of pride and
self-congratulation on my new and improved French - until I saw the matre
d' and my friend exchanging a hearty handshake.

"It's wonderful, he never forgets," said my friend later. It seems that
she, a former United Nations translator, taught English to his
brother-in-law.


ANN PRINGLE-HARRIS writes frequently about travel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/travel/21french.html