French Lessons

by Peter Mayle

  Ignoring the example of the couple at the next table, who had ordered two different types of mineral water, I asked for the permitted glass of red wine, and we set to. There were three courses in that first lunch, and they bear describing in some detail.

  First was a broth made with mussels, carrots, garlic, mushrooms, olive oil, and white wine. The flavor was intense and rich, and I felt sure that someone must have slipped a dollop of cream into the recipe while the chef wasn’t looking. But no; the calorie count was 165, about the same as a small pot of low-fat yogurt. The broth was followed by a vegetable risotto—rice from the Camargue cooked in chicken stock with peas, shallots, baby onions, and white and green beans—a moist and glorious mixture served with a dusting of fresh Parmesan. Calories: 240, slightly fewer than a bar of chocolate. Finally, the most delicate combination of tastes: raspberries, strawberries, and black currants bathed in a light fructose syrup and topped with ice cream made from yogurt and fromage blanc. Calories: 95.

  Including the glass of red wine, the entire lunch added up to fewer than six hundred calories. It had been beautifully presented and served, and it was delicious. But what impressed us as much as anything else was the feeling that we had eaten a satisfying meal. We had no pangs of deprivation, and it was hard to believe that food of this astonishingly high standard was part of a health cure. Here was a diet, my wife told me, that she would be happy to live with for a long time.

  We sat over coffee and looked around at our fellow dieters. They were mostly French, with a sprinkling of Americans, and you could tell where they came from without hearing them speak. The Americans were consulting maps and guidebooks and making notes. The French were studying the menus for dinner (480 calories for the minceur meal of soup, fish, and sorbet, and a tactfully unspecified amount for the five-course gourmet’s delight).

  Over the next three days—which consisted of treatments and consistently superb food and an increasing sense of having left real life somewhere else—I was conscious of a change in my disposition. As a rule, I am terrible at vacations. I run out of books and boredom sets in, and then some faint, nagging echo of my Anglo-Saxon conscience tells me that I should be doing something useful, or at least active. But here, my daily responsibilities were limited to turning up on time at the thermal farm and raising an eager knife and fork twice a day in the restaurant. I was doing absolutely nothing and enjoying it, something that had never happened to me before. Perhaps it was the mud baths and the attentions of all those young ladies in white. Or maybe it was the total absence of any pressure to take part in conventional exertions. Tennis, swimming, cycling, hiking—these were all available, but we happily ignored them, quite content to be idle. And that, I suppose, is the great benefit of a civilized spa.

  As if the rigors of everyday life at Eugénie were too much to bear without a period of recovery, the Guérards decided not long ago to open a rest camp by the sea. Their new outpost, the Domaine de Huchet, is on the Atlantic coast, about an hour and a half from the spa. It overlooks the longest beach in Europe—a wide, unbroken ribbon of smooth, clean sand that extends all the way from Arcachon in the north down to Biarritz. And there at Huchet, we were promised three days of sea air and farniente, or lazing around, after our exhausting time dashing in and out of mud baths and needle showers.

  Despite the map and the detailed instructions we’d been given, we were convinced we were lost as we turned off a road and on to a rutted earth track that disappeared into a dense pine forest. The ruts became deeper, the tunnel of trees closed in, and if the track had been wide enough, we would have turned the car around. We must have made a mistake, we thought. This wasn’t the middle of nowhere; it was the end of nowhere. But we pressed on, and after a mile or so, the trees thinned out and the sky reappeared. And there, perched on a dune, we could see a vast wooden house, immaculately painted in shades of sand and deep, faded red, a model of colonial architecture—low and square, with long verandas on two sides. In the area of flatland in front of the house were two other low buildings the color of driftwood, each with a tiny fenced garden. A pathway made from slatted wood led through the dunes to the ocean, and we could hear the thump of surf as we got out of the car.

  There was a welcoming committee of two. Martine and Max, the young couple in charge of Huchet, showed us around while explaining how we were going to keep body and soul together over the next three days. Every morning, un petit déjeuner copieux would be served in the dining room up until 11:00 a.m. Martine assured us that it would be more than enough to keep us going until 5:00 p.m., when there would be tea. Dinner at 7:30, courtesy of Max. “It’s not minceur,” he said, “but it’s healthy. I do a lot of grilling.” He pointed to his barbecue outside the kitchen door, an iron contraption that looked like the wheelbarrows used in the vineyards of Provence for burning clippings. That night’s choice was either sea bass or breast of duck, with cream of potato and leek soup or foie gras to start and two desserts to finish. We thought we could forgive Max for not being a minceur cook.

  We spent the afternoon exploring. The main house, which had been built in 1859 by a Bordelais baron as a hunting lodge, looked as though it had just been prepared for a photographer from Interiors or Côté Sud—an elegant series of rooms with four-poster beds, unfussy antique furniture, wood-burning fireplaces and stoves, and wide-plank floors of honey-colored wood. It looked beautiful without being precious, and it gave you the feeling that you could actually live in it, which is not always the case with photogenic houses.

  Outside, we followed the wooden pathway down to the Atlantic. We shared the beach with a solitary fisherman, thigh-deep in the foam, casting for bass. Otherwise, we had no company apart from seagulls. We could have walked a hundred kilometers in either direction and still been walking on sand. We could have swam westward toward America. Or, after a brisk half hour, we could have gone back to sit on the veranda, had tea, and watched the sun slide slowly down before dipping into the horizon. Not a difficult decision.

  We had seen no other guests so far. Huchet can only take about half a dozen, and it wasn’t until we went into the dining room for dinner that we met the only other couple staying there. We congratulated one another on our good luck at finding what they called “paradis-sur-mer,” then sat down with a drink at our table in front of the fire. Like the rest of the house, the dining room was a study in comfortable good taste: a floor of putty-colored flagstones, a ceiling with whitewashed beams, the glow of candlelight on crystal glasses, linen tablecloth and napkins, bone china. The attention to detail was an example to any restaurant, let alone a tiny dining room hidden away behind God’s back.

  Looking through the glass door that opened onto a terrace, we could see Max hovering over his wheelbarrow barbecue with two long-handled forks, looking like a xylophone player in a chef’s hat. Martine put another log on the fire, refilled our glasses, and opened the bottle of wine we were having with dinner. All was well with the world.

  Max showed himself to be worthy of his hat, and a virtuoso on the barbecue. The breast of duck, a fan of pink slices on the plate, tasted of the outdoors: gamy, juicy, tender—everything my efforts on the barbecue aspire to but never achieve. Maybe I should use aged wood and pine needles instead of charcoal. Maybe I should invest in a tall white hat. Or maybe I should spend years in Guérard’s kitchens trying to learn what Max learned. He cooks all you eat at Huchet, from soups and flans to desserts and the pound cake served with afternoon tea. My wife wanted to take him home with us.

  Dinner ended with cheese from the Pyrénées, followed by coffee and the favorite local sedative, a generous shot of Armagnac. This has been accurately described as brandy with a rustic character. It has a taste of caramel and a kick like a mule with a velvet hoof, and its immediate effect is eight hours of innocent slumber.

  I was woken up by two seagulls having an argument outside the window, and I remembered that today we were planning to walk at least part of the way to Biarritz before attempting le brunch. The
dunes were coated in the cotton wool of an early-morning sea mist as we went down the path, a mist that muffled the surf the way a snowfall deadens the sounds of the countryside. A fisherman—perhaps the same optimist we had seen the day before—stood with his hands on his hips and the butt of his rod stuck in the sand, gazing intently at the waves, as though sea bass could be enticed out of the water by hypnosis.

  We left the beach to follow a track through the tufts of sea grass and into the dunes, carpeted as far as the eye could see with low-lying green scrub. There were no buildings, no telephone poles, no jarring signs of human interference, and we were reminded how easy it is in France (which has the same population as Britain, and three times the landmass) to find great tracts of land where there is nothing but nature.

  An hour’s march later, the view was still the same green carpet, rolling down toward the Pyrénées. The sun had burned through the mist, and our calf muscles were beginning to ache from trudging through loose sand. We decided that Biarritz could wait. We had earned our breakfast.

  Unlike the British and the Americans, who traditionally see their first meal of the day as a chance to top up their cholesterol levels, the French habitually do little more than nibble. Instead of eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, waffles, and buttered toast, the Frenchman tends to confine himself to the three C’s—coffee, croissants, and cigarettes—conscious of the fact that he needs to be on form for lunch. (There is a theory that this is a poor start to the day, and that insufficient nutrition makes him bad-tempered until noon, but in my experience, this applies only to café waiters and cabdrivers.)

  Breakfast at Huchet was, as Martine had promised, copieux: baked apples and yogurt, eggs however we wanted them, plates of Bayonne ham and cheese, thick slices of grilled country bread, homemade jams from the kitchens at Eugénie, and two warm silver-wrapped packages the size of small loaves—the mother and father of all croissants, a good eight inches from nose to tail, plump, light, and buttery. No chewing required. They melted.

  We rose to the challenge, then walked it off during the afternoon. And that was the pattern of our days at Huchet—sea air, glorious food, farniente. It had been a memorably pampered, well-fed week.

  The morning after we got home, Odile called, curious to know if I had now been converted to the low-fat life.

  “Alors? How was it? How do you feel?”

  “Never felt better, Odile. Like a young sprig of eighteen. It was marvelous.”

  “Did you lose weight?”

  “I never weighed myself. But I’m relaxed, clear-eyed, bursting with health, ready for anything. And we never really felt hungry.”

  “Ah, you see? It is just as I keep telling you. You have more sensible food, you cut out the wine, and, voilà, you are a new man. Tell me, what did you eat?”

  “Duck, lamb, guinea fowl, pâté, cheese, butter, eggs, a little foie gras, potato soup, huge croissants for breakfast …”

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “And there were some very nice little wines, too. And Armagnac. You should try it sometime. Do you the world of good.”

  Odile laughed. “Toujours l’humour anglais. But seriously …”

  Ah well. Sometimes, there’s nothing as hard to swallow as the truth.

  The Guided Stomach

  Advice to the motorist in search of a room for the night:

  Stop at the door of the hotel, and instruct the porter to leave your bags in the car. Make sure you discuss personally with the hotel proprietor the matter of his prices. If you judge them to be fair, but before committing yourself, demand to see the room he wants to give you. It is in his interest to fill his worst rooms first. If you are not convinced by the famous phrase “We don’t have anything else! We’re completely full!” return to your car and make as if to go elsewhere. Nine times out of ten, at this precise moment, the hotel proprietor, smiting his forehead with his hand, will find quite by chance an excellent room that was vacated just an hour ago, and which he has completely overlooked.…

  A new century was dawning. Paris was preparing for the world’s fair, some cars had attained dizzying speeds well in excess of ten miles per hour, hotel owners were notorious for their dramatic habit of smiting their foreheads with their hands, and it was recommended that the comfort-conscious traveler check his room for fleas before settling down for the night. It was 1900, the year of the first Michelin guide to France, from which the extract above is taken.

  It is a pocket-sized volume, this first edition, of just under four hundred tightly set, busy-looking pages, and it was given away to owners of voitures, voiturettes, and even vélocipèdes by the brothers Michelin. They had created the removable pneumatic tire in 1891, and the guide was their way of encouraging motorists to wear out as much rubber as possible by extending their travels throughout France.

  Car manufacturers, most of them long since gone, were permitted in those days to advertise in the pages of the guide, and we find the Rochet & Schneider two-seater—“robuste, simple, confortable, élégant, silencieux”—sharing space with the larger Schaudel, shown fully equipped with four men in peaked hats gazing out sternly over the facial topiary of their mustaches. One of the few advertisers whose name we would recognize today is Peugeot, although a hundred years ago, the Peugeot specialty was not the car but the folding bicycle, constructed in accordance with “Le système du Capitaine Gérard,” a pioneer in the field of bicycle folding.

  Nearly sixty of the opening pages in that first guide were devoted to explaining the marvels of the pneumatic tire: its cushioned ride, its valves and grommets, its optimum levels of inflation, its care and repair. Other technical information took up more than a hundred pages at the back. In the middle was the filling in the sandwich, a listing of cities, towns, and villages, arranged in alphabetical order from Abbeville to Yvetot.

  Beneath each listed place was its distance by road from the hub of the universe, Paris, or from the closest large town. The number of inhabitants was also recorded, although I’ve never worked out why that should be of any particular interest to motorists. And on every one of those cramped, old-fashioned pages can be seen early examples of a visual vocabulary that is now in its second century, Michelin sign language: a miniature château to indicate a hotel, a first-aid cross for a resident doctor, a set of apothecary scales for a pharmacy, a tiny envelope for a post office, a steam engine for a station—even a black lozenge for hotels equipped with photographic darkrooms.

  Darkrooms were rare, and apparently so were some other less artistic refinements. A note in the foreword tells the traveler that next year’s guide would come to grips with the gurgling wonders of twentieth-century plumbing. Not only would hotels be credited for having bathrooms and showers, but also “si les W.C. sont perfectionés avec un appareil de chasse”—if they have lavatories that flush—those, too, would be given the prominence they deserve.

  Readers of that first guide were invited to write to Michelin with their comments, and they could hardly fail to have been impressed by the fund of technical and geographical information contained in the little book. But how many of them, I wonder, wrote in to ask that burning question so close and dear to any French heart at any time, but even more so after a hard day on the road. What’s for dinner?

  Because although hotels were listed, restaurants weren’t. The guide was, after all, intended to be a survival manual for motorists driving primitive machinery that frequently broke down. A man whose valves and grommets were giving him trouble could hardly be expected to give much thought or attention to a menu. Heretical though it may sound, in those early years, mechanics were more important than chefs.

  This changed by 1920. Cars had become more reliable and pneumatic tires were no longer the novelty they had been twenty years before. Food, however, would never lose its charm, and perhaps it was this that prompted the Michelin brothers to make three fundamental—and, as it turned out, very astute—decisions about their guide that year: It should include restaurants; it should
be sold in bookstores, rather than be given away; and it should no longer accept advertising.

  It wasn’t long before the restaurant listings, not surprisingly, began to overtake tips on tire pressure as a reason for buying the guide. Every year, more restaurants were included, and naturally—like everything in France, from suppositories to gravel—they had to be graded. More sign language was needed to identify the different levels of cooking skill—a short, simple way to let the wandering motorist know what he could expect to find on his plate. And not only What’s for dinner? but also How good will it be? To answer these questions, the star system was born in 1926.

  The Michelin stars, stylized rosettes that are called “macaroons” by the pros of the industry, are the gold medals of kitchen Olympics. They are awarded, confirmed, or withdrawn every year. Winning a star can lift a young chef from obscurity overnight, giving him (or, less frequently, her) a reputation that extends to wherever the guide is sold and food is discussed. Losing a star is catastrophique, a professional disaster, a personal tragedy, a reason to smite the forehead, tear out the hair, and consider taking up a less demanding occupation.

  What has always struck me about these annual dramas, which are widely reported in France, is that, in the most important sense, the decisions made by the guide are accepted. People may disagree—in fact, as it is France and as it concerns the stomach, they invariably do disagree—about a star being given or taken away. But I have never known anyone to accuse the guide of unfairness or bias. It is trusted. I find this remarkable in a world where corruption is constantly being uncovered and is now more or less taken for granted in every activity from politics to bicycle racing.