Mastering the Art of French Eating

by Ann Mah

  Making the sauce

  In the same skillet, heat 1 tablespoon of the butter with the meat drippings. Add the shallots and sauté over medium heat until golden brown, about 7 minutes. Add the red wine vinegar, thyme, and stock (or water), and bring the liquid to a boil. Cover and cook until the shallots have softened and the liquid has almost disappeared. Swirl in the remaining tablespoon of butter and add any juices released from the meat. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning, adding a few drops of vinegar if needed.

  Slice the steaks against the grain into thin strips. Serve with the shallots spooned on top, accompanied by mashed potatoes or steamed green beans.

  Chapter 2

  Troyes / Andouillette

  I had everything under control until I saw the ceramic Buddha. It appeared in the window on a gray and humid August morning, two burly movers sagging under its weight. “On va le mettre où, madame?” asked one, pointing with his chin at the rooms already stacked high with cartons.

  My parents had thrust the statue upon me the last time they’d cleaned out their attic. It was about the size and weight of a Great Dane. I’d shoved it into storage hoping it might disappear, and it did—from my memory at least. Now—surprise!—it was in Paris, delivered along with the rest of our boxes and furniture, hoisted by crane up two stories and hauled through our dining room’s French windows.

  It had been five years since I’d seen most of our personal effects, which had been packed hastily during the panicked month that separated our wedding and our move to China. While we lived in a furnished apartment in Beijing and then a cramped one-bedroom rental in Washington, the cartons had done hard time in a storage unit in northern Virginia. But our apartment in Paris was unfurnished, and so now we were reunited with everything—for better or worse.

  Sorting through the array of dusty boxes was like viewing my past life, the one I’d led before I met Calvin, back when I was just another New York editorial assistant slaving over a hot photocopier. As I tried to find room in the bookshelves for my waist-high stacks of paperbacks, I thought about my last day of work in publishing, when my colleagues toasted me with coffee and doughnuts and I surprised everyone, including myself, by bursting into tears. I didn’t feel too different from that girl in her mid-twenties, the one who’d dreamed of running her own publishing imprint and who’d survived on grilled cheese sandwiches toasted on the waffle iron. Still, it felt as if a lot of time had passed since I’d gotten married and left New York.

  I like to tell people that my husband and I met at a party, but the truth is we were set up. A mutual friend, John, introduced us, inviting me to accompany him to Calvin’s holiday party so he could play matchmaker. The first thing I noticed when I walked into Calvin’s apartment was the view—the dazzling drape of the East River, the red lights of the Pepsi-Cola sign reflecting in the water. The second thing I noticed was that no one was speaking English, not even my host. While I chatted with young diplomats from the United Nations and ate chunks of aged Gruyère cheese, I snuck occasional glances at Calvin’s boyish face as he mingled with his guests in Russian, English, and . . . French?

  “He speaks French?” I whispered to John. My Francophilia was on high alert.

  “Didn’t I tell you? He taught kindergarten in Paris for a couple of years, before he joined the foreign service.”

  A French-speaking diplomat who had lived in Paris and liked Gruyère and kids? What can I say? It was love at first sight.

  Six months later we were engaged—so quickly that we felt a little shy about telling people—and a year after that we got married. And then, a month after that, we moved to Beijing. I quit my job in book publishing, the only work I’d ever known, a career I’d adored for six years, and leaped—into nothing.

  Beijing sprawled in front of me, an enormous, vibrant, uncompromising metropolis. After an initial flush of sightseeing, reality set in. How could I fill the days? Shopping for knockoffs and cheap pearls held little appeal. I started taking Mandarin classes again, but they raised complicated memories of childhood coercion, when my mother had dragged me to Chinese school every Saturday. I considered working at the embassy, but the only jobs available for spouses were secretarial, and I had no patience for administrative work. My limited Chinese prevented me from finding a job locally. In any case our host government strongly discouraged diplomatic spouses from working or even volunteering.

  I missed my friends and family, of course, but more than anything I missed my job. For more than half my life, I’d dreamed of working in publishing, ever since I discovered at the age of ten that creating books was a profession and that people called editors actually got paid to read. I’d spent the years since college on the humble path to editor, answering phones and sending packages, acquiring a few projects of my own, dreaming of one day shepherding a string of authors onto the New York Times bestseller list. Now, I was unemployed in Beijing, and my former ambition seemed like the pollution that smudged the sky, a great green cloud composed of a billion different particles of fear and uncertainty. Without a career I hardly knew who I was anymore.

  I was terrified my friends and family would think I’d made a mistake in marrying so hastily, that I’d been immature and foolish for allowing my heart to carry me more than six thousand miles away. My weekends and evenings had never been happier, filled with late-night strolls through twisting Beijing alleys, Sunday afternoons spent basking in the rare calm of a Confucian temple, and feasts of pork-and-chive dumplings with new Dutch diplomat friends. But I dreaded Monday mornings when Calvin left for the office. The workweek spooled to infinity, my days an exercise in killing time. I dawdled over the weight machines at the gym, spent hours comparison-shopping at the grocery store. I cooked elaborate meals for dinner and wondered how the hell I—a self-proclaimed feminist—had become a housewife.

  I tried to stay positive, writing to friends back home about China’s vitality, picnics on the Great Wall, excursions to eat fried scorpions at the night market. In reality I struggled daily with identity issues—not only job-related but also cultural: I thought of myself as an American, but everyone else viewed me as Chinese. My Asian features were like a mask. Sometimes I felt grateful for the way I could slip into a crowded Beijing subway car, unnoticed as long as I remained silent. But most of the time, I elicited hostile disappointment, expressed in the double take when a taxi driver saw my face and heard my accent, the questions, always the same: “Where are you from?” The refusal to accept my response: “America? You don’t look American. Americans have yellow hair and big noses.” In a culture as ancient and proud, as trampled and reborn as China’s, a little ethnic chauvinism was natural. But what shocked me were the privileges granted automatically to my Caucasian friends and husband, the respect offered because of their foreign features alone, the praise of their Chinese judged by a single “Ni hao.” In contrast, there was hardly anyone lower on the totem pole than a woman who looked young and Chinese. And even though I wasn’t that young, or that Chinese, when Calvin and I went out together, people took one look at us and thought I was his translator. Sometimes they assumed worse.

  At least I had lunch to punctuate my days. For an hour or two each afternoon, I plunged into street markets to slurp up noodles and dumplings. I watched with fascination as a jianbing vendor swirled crêpe batter on a hot griddle and delicately cracked an egg on top. I scalded my tongue on soup dumplings and stuffed my cheeks with snow-white hunks of puffy mantou (steamed bread). At Calvin’s suggestion I started a food journal, a dog-eared notebook where I recorded recent meals and other culinary adventures.

  Salvation came one day in the form of a magazine rack in our apartment building’s mail room. I can still picture it, a shoulder-high structure in dark wood, right next to the window where I dropped off the dry cleaning. I can still feel the filmy cling of the plastic-bagged laundry draped over my arm as I stopped to glance at the garish covers. They were expat magazines that exi
sted primarily to sell advertising, the articles in hastily copyedited English. For months I’d ignored them, but that day I picked up a copy of each, took them upstairs, and examined them. By the end of the afternoon, I had chosen one—That’s Beijing—as the best of the bunch.

  And so I thought up some story ideas and e-mailed them to the address listed for the editor in chief. I hoped to write about food, but he wanted stories for the House and Home section, so I wrote an article about orchid care. I reviewed books that I’d purchased on vacation and pestered so many cabdrivers for their opinions that I feared they might issue an all-points bulletin banning me from the city’s taxis. After I’d freelanced for several months at one RMB per word (the equivalent of eight cents), the dining editor left. When they offered me the job, I jumped into the seat. Yes, That’s Beijing was a far cry from Manhattan book publishing—the magazine’s typos, which seemed to multiply as fast as we could correct them, made that abundantly clear. But I loved reviewing Beijing’s restaurants and writing about Chinese regional cuisine, experiences that would eventually inspire me to write a novel. Every day for lunch, my colleagues and I would try a new restaurant, often delicious and always dirt cheap, and slowly, over shared plates of stir-fried bitter melon and cumin lamb, these co-workers evolved into friends. They had chosen to build a new life in Beijing, and their enthusiasm for the city’s relentless energy and hustle, its sense of possibility and quirky charm, was infectious. I started writing pieces for American magazines, just short, front-of-the-book articles—barely longer than three sentences but each one a step forward, tiny but sure. Food had become a bridge to a foreign culture and, maybe, a new career.

  The thing about diplomatic life is that just as you’ve gotten settled, made a few friends, and grown confident at navigating a new country, your assignment is over and it’s time to move on. After almost a year and a half at That’s Beijing, cleaning out my desk proved harder than I’d thought. I sifted through the detritus—receipts and business cards, broken pencils and coffee-stained notebooks—separating it into piles to keep and piles to throw away. In the end I swept everything into a huge garbage bin. I would have to start afresh in our next assignment in Washington, D.C. New contacts, new article ideas—I would need to build everything from scratch. Now, a year later, in Paris, I found myself starting over once again.

  The day before the shipment of our belongings arrived at our apartment in Paris, I walked through the empty rooms, mentally unfurling a carpet here, hanging a favorite photograph there, selecting a cupboard for wineglasses near the refrigerator and one for pots and pans next to the stove. Three overseas transfers in five years had made me savvy. The next morning I asked the movers to empty all the boxes and take away the bulky packing materials. Calvin and I gently unwrapped our wedding china and made a trip to IKEA to buy a new bookcase. As for the Buddha, I shoved it into the cave, the basement storage room that was supposed to hold our precious wine collection. There it remained, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for our next move.

  * * *

  * * *

  With the apartment unpacked and the Buddha stored, we settled into a routine of métro-boulot-dodo, as the French call the daily grind: subway, work, sleep. Calvin immersed himself in his new job at the American embassy, and I worked on revisions to my first novel, which I’d sold a few months before our move.

  I’d written a first draft of the manuscript in Beijing, weaving together descriptions of the city’s vibrant cuisine with the story of a young American woman in China who happens to be Chinese. My agent called over the summer to tell me she had found a publisher for the book, reaching me in the midst of my French-immersion program. There I was, tucked into a jewel-box New England college campus, sworn to speak only French, sneaking off to an empty field so I could talk to her in English on my cell phone and shriek at the top of my lungs. Even now, several months later, the double happiness of publishing a book and moving to Paris made me shaky with joy and a little fearful that I didn’t deserve my good fortune.

  As I soon discovered, however, the only thing better than working on a novel in Paris was not working on a novel in Paris. The streets beckoned, their morning markets bursting with late-summer produce—fruits I’d never seen before, like tiny golden plums called mirabelles and vine peaches with dusty skin and scarlet flesh. There were fromageries to visit, bakeries to discover, baguettes to sample. I wanted to shop like une vraie femme au foyer, a market basket over my arm, buying only enough groceries for one day or sometimes, it seemed, a single meal.

  “Ah, non, monsieur! C’est trop! C’est trop!” cried the little old ladies at the market. They liked to nudge in front of me with an adroit maneuver of the wheeled shopping cart and bat their eyelashes at the vegetable vendor. “Juste un TOUT petit peu!” Just a LITTLE bit! “Une POIGNÉE!” A handful! “Pas TROP!” Not TOO much! “S’il vous plaît!”

  I couldn’t help but wonder, what were they cooking at home? What did real French people eat? I tried to peer into their market baskets, but the contents offered few clues. Out to dinner with Didier at a local café, I sat up in my straight-backed chair when he ordered off the ardoise chalkboard menu an unfamiliar plate, something called andouillette. Five spiky letters followed the word: AAAAA.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “C’est un plat typiquement français,” Didier told me as a television in the corner flashed soccer. “Une charcuterie faite d’intestins de porc.”

  A traditional French sausage made from pork guts? My curiosity faded.

  “Les français adorent ça!” he said with a grin. The French adore it? I was pretty sure he was teasing me.

  When the food arrived, Didier’s meal looked innocent enough, a pale sausage in a creamy, mustard-grain-flecked sauce. But when he cut off a slice, I smelled it, a deep whiff that was reminiscent of the barnyard. Or a cow pasture. Or a baby’s unchanged diaper. Or one of Paris’s narrow, dog-friendly sidewalks. You catch my drift, right?

  “Tu veux goûter?” Didier asked me, his fork and knife poised to offer me a chunk.

  “Ça a l’air délicieux . . . Mais non, merci,” I said. He shot me a look, as if I’d shown him my inner core and it was soft like a coward’s.

  Thus I was spared the hard lesson of the difference between andouillette, andouille, and the latter’s smoky, spicy Cajun cousin of the same name. I didn’t know what the letters AAAAA meant, but when I saw them on menus, I knew to steer clear. I wasn’t proud of my timid palate. I didn’t advertise it. But I wouldn’t have tucked into a big, steaming plate of offal even if threatened by a gang of knife-wielding butchers.

  I could have gone on avoiding tripe sausage forever. But one day I found myself preparing dinner for a group of friends—nine omnivores and one vegan. As I devised a series of special animal-free courses, I couldn’t help but feel a little aggravated, I admit it.

  “Have you ever noticed that picky eaters never think they’re especially picky?” I asked Calvin. “Cate doesn’t eat meat, fish, dairy, or soy. And yet the first words out of her mouth are always, ‘I’m not that fussy, am I?’” I thrust a tray of red peppers under the broiler. “I’m tired of people who don’t eat everything.”

  “You don’t eat everything.”

  “Yes I do!”

  “Offal? Sweetbreads? Brains?” He raised an eyebrow. “Andouillette?”

  I swallowed hard. He had me there. I started thinking. And feeling a little hypocritical. How could I describe myself as an open-minded food enthusiast—not to mention a food writer—if I refused to sample andouillette, one of France’s oldest, most traditional forms of charcuterie? After all, would Julia Child have turned her nose up at pork intestines?

  “Why don’t you find out more about andouillette?” Calvin suggested. “You could take a trip.”

  “By myself?” I dropped a clove of garlic, and it skittered under the stove. “I don’t think so.”

  “Just a
day trip? Why not?” He reached into a grocery bag and handed me a fresh head of garlic. “Who knows? You might even like the stuff.”

  That is how I found myself in Troyes, a city about a hundred miles southeast of Paris, in the southern part of the Champagne region. The capital of andouillette.

  * * *

  * * *

  Do you know what tripe is? I didn’t before I went to Troyes. It turns out it’s stomach lining, a pale, wrinkly membrane used in digestion (hence the smell). Most of the world eats tripe. It’s boiled up in spicy Chinese hot pots, chopped and stuffed into tacos, stewed with tomatoes and Pecorino Romano cheese—to name just a few of its global incarnations. If not cooked gently, it becomes tough and rubbery.

  Though beef tripe is most commonly eaten—with four stomachs, cows have a lot of it to offer—tripe sausages in France are made of pork. There is andouille de Vire, smoky and chunky, which hails from Normandy. There is andouille de Guéméné, from Brittany, made of rolled sheets of tripe that form a swirling pattern when cut across the bias. But the most famous of all tripe sausage, andouillette, comes from Troyes—a twist of tripe and stomach, mixed with onions, spices, and lots of salt and stuffed into la robe, another part of the pig’s intestine.

  The first thing I noticed when I entered the spotless laboratoire workroom of the charcutier, Patrick Maury, was the smell. It was muffled but persistent, an unclean whiff that pervaded the winter cold of the unheated space. The culprit sat near the large windows, a plastic bucket filled with pale pink intestines soaking in water. Other corners of the room hid gruesome surprises like sagging sacks of blood—used in the boudin noir, a type of black sausage—and bags filled to bursting with unidentifiable animal bits.