by Ann Mah
“Maybe you could take another trip before I get back,” Calvin said eventually. He leaned forward a little in his chair. “You could go to Lyon and see if they really eat salad.”
“You mean launch a pressing investigation into whether or not Lyon is the cradle of . . . the work lunch?” I laughed. “That sounds like just an excuse to travel around and eat.”
“Well,” Calvin raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
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Some serious eating occurs in Lyon, I noticed right away. In this town dining out requires a special vocabulary, even for French people. It’s a place where nuggets of fried pork rind, grattons, replace cocktail-hour peanuts, and a scoop of silk worker’s brains, cervelle de canut, refers to herb-flecked farmer’s cheese. Here restaurants are called bouchons, a word with many meanings: cork, plug, or a bunch of packed straw once used to wipe down a sweating horse. In fact, Lyon’s classic eateries take their name from these handfuls of hay, used during the days of carriages and stagecoaches, when the city was an important rest stop between the treacherous mountains of the Alps and the Massif Central. Tired travelers would stop at roadside inns to eat, sleep, and groom their weary horses. Over time these simple establishments became known simply as bouchons.
At least that’s one version of the story. Other accounts were either more simplistic (bouchon refers to the cork of a wine bottle) or strangely complex (a long tale involving Bacchus, branches of pinecones evolving into bunches of hay, and wordplay). Whatever the legend, it’s true that at some point before the twentieth century these convivial, warmly lit bistros became the signature eateries of Lyon, renowned for excellent food, a casual ambience—and a special midmorning meal called the mâchon.
On my first day in Lyon, I learned all about the mâchon from two members of the Confrérie des Francs-Mâchons, Emmanuel Peyre de Fabrègues and Christian Proton, respectively the organization’s president and vice president. Rooted in the Lyonnais tradition of secret societies—the group’s name is a pun on francs-maçons, or freemasons—this brotherhood of forty men strives to preserve the tradition of the hearty morning meal, meeting one morning a month to sample a mâchon at an untested bouchon. At the end of the year, they bestow awards to Lyon’s best establishments: a small plaque emblazoned with Gnafron (a satirical figure, like Punch or Judy) and the words authentique bouchon lyonnais.
“Un vrai bouchon always serves the mâchon,” said Emmanuel. “At nine in the morning, you can sit down to a selection of salads”—lentils, pickled herrings, clapotons (sheep’s trotters), and salade lyonnaise, to name a few—“followed by a big hot dish”—like andouillette, poached tête de veau, or calf’s head—“and then some cheese.”
I gulped. Nine o’clock in the morning? “Does that mean the mâchon takes the place of lunch?” I asked.
“Oh, no!” Emmanuel said cheerfully. “They eat again at noon!”
I felt the waist of my pants pinch a little, just at the thought of all that food.
Emmanuel, with his rimmed glasses and dark jeans, his royal purple sweater and double-cuffed shirtsleeves, his job as an advertising director, is what the French would describe as bobo, short for the young, self-consciously chic, often reviled slice of society known as bourgeois-bohème. In contrast, Christian was an ouvrier d’état, a local mail carrier with a bald head and the sturdy frame of a rugby player.
The two had invited me for lunch at Chez Georges, a Confrérie-approved bouchon (I saw the plaque on the door), where it’s possible to tuck into a plate of stewed tripe at nine in the morning. We squeezed into a corner table covered in paper, and I took in the dining room’s classic bouchon ambience, a mix of lace curtains, vinyl tablecloths, and wooden chairs. The walls were covered in chalkboard menus, copper pans, straw hats, and other bric-a-brac.
“The mâchon was eaten by laborers, mainly canuts”—silk workers—“who began their workday very early, around four or five in the morning,” said Christian. He explained that the meal dates to the nineteenth century, when Lyon was an industrial center and silk production dominated the local economy. After a morning of manual labor, these workers needed a hearty and caloric spread of food, which they washed down with a pot (or two or three) of the region’s Beaujolais wine.
Over salade lyonnaise and a quenelle de brochet, Emmanuel waxed rhetorical. “Why is Lyon considered the capital of French gastronomy?” I listened as I sliced off a piece of the rather solid fish dumpling and dabbed it in the coral puddle of crayfish sauce Nantua. “Just look at a map of France,” he answered himself.
Indeed, the city sits at an epicurean crossroads, surrounded by several famous food-producing regions, all of which stock its larder. The sun-warmed produce and olive oil of the south, the butter and cheeses of the north, the beef from the Massif Central, poultry from Bresse, wines from Beaujolais and the Rhône Valley, not to mention imports from neighboring Italy and Switzerland, are all easily obtainable. “When the products are good, people like to eat. When people like to eat, they like to cook,” concluded Emmanuel.
In 43 B.C. the Romans founded a colony here, Lugdunum, centered on two rivers, the Saône and the Rhône. The town quickly grew into a commercial hub, eventually becoming the capital of the Roman Empire’s region of Gaul, second in size only to Rome. By the fifteenth century, Italian merchants had arrived, constructing pastel-colored Renaissance mansions—many still grace the city—and introducing a series of silk markets, similar to the trading fairs of Troyes. Under their influence Lyon blossomed into the economic powerhouse of France.
The greatest evolution in Lyonnais cuisine occurred during the first half of the twentieth century, with the advent of the Mères Lyonnaises. “They were often quite fat, with very strong personalities,” said Christian. “And they really, really knew how to cook.”
The kitchen skills of the mères had their roots in the grand bourgeois homes scattered throughout Lyon. As servants and cooks for those wealthy families, these women used the region’s fine ingredients to create meals that were simple yet perfect. After World War I, however, the French economy crashed, the bourgeoisie closed or sold their mansions, and many of the women found themselves unemployed. With their work experience limited to the kitchen, they turned to restaurants and bouchons, staffing establishments that served a few dishes cooked exquisitely. The advent of automobile travel brought customers from far and wide, and eventually word of Lyon’s exceptional cuisine spread throughout France, helped in large part by the celebrated French food writer Curnonsky, who in 1934 declared Lyon “the world capital of gastronomy.” Some women—like the famed Mère Brazier—even saw their restaurants earn Michelin stars.
Today, although there are few of the original mères left in the kitchen, their influence endures. I discovered evidence of this cuisine de femmes at one Lyonnais restaurant, La Voûte Chez Léa, even though a man, Philippe Rabatel, currently owns it.
Rabatel has the kind eyes of someone who loves to feed people and a heavy frame possibly made heavier from the cream-laced and butter-rich dishes he prepares. In 1980 he bought Chez Léa from Madame Léa, taking over the kitchen that she first established in 1942. “She was the last mère to open up a restaurant in Lyon,” he told me. “I spent six months with her, learning all her recipes.” Even after her retirement, Madame Léa lived in an apartment above the restaurant until her death several years later.
Many of Madame Léa’s recipes still appear on the restaurant’s menu, including her salade lyonnaise. I asked Rabatel if he knew its origins.
“Who knows?” He shrugged. “It could have been the washerwomen who invented it.” In the days before refrigeration or washing machines, he said, laundresses carried loads of soiled clothes to the river’s edge, along with picnics of bacon, hard-boiled eggs, and bread. Perhaps, Rabatel suggested, they gathered wild dandelion leaves along the way and tossed everything together into a big salad at the lunch hour.
Though this
theory seems dubious, a few details give it a shred of credibility. First, salade lyonnaise is traditionally made with dandelion leaves—Rabatel serves them in season. Second, in local parlance dandelion is called “lion’s tooth,” or dent-de-lion. Somehow, over the ages, could this mouthful of words, salade de dents-de-lion, have been shortened to salade lyonnaise?
Madame Léa’s version, as interpreted by Rabatel, arrived in a large glass bowl with sides cloudy from vinaigrette. Inside, a pile of curly frisée leaves tumbled with slivers of lardons, garlic-rubbed croutons, and a soft-boiled egg gently broken so that its yolk trickled into the receptive crags of lettuce and bread, the whole just overdressed à la française. I took a bite, and the tang of vinaigrette hit my palate, followed by the flush of bacon and something else deep and sumptuous. Smoked herring? As I ate, I thought of Madame Léa, and tried to imagine her as a young kitchen maid. At age sixteen she was sent into service at a bourgeois home, Rabatel told me, working for the same family for eight years. Was her hand evident in the vinaigrette, with its audacious hint of smoked herring? Had she boiled her eggs this way, with the yolk at that creamy point between soft and hard?
Even as I ate, I considered something else Rabatel had said: “No one ever invents a recipe. All the best chefs get their greatest recipes from their grandmother’s kitchen.” So, then, was this Madame Léa’s grandmother’s salad? Even with a recipe, a dish can never be re-created exactly. It will always be filtered through the hands of the cook, her memory of taste, the ingredients available, the weather, and a hundred other factors. Eating Madame Léa’s salad was a little like reading the Odyssey and straining to hear the voice of an ancient Greek poet—evident in some spots, in others maybe not at all.
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Despite the multitude of organizations that exist to defend and protect them, bouchons have suffered in recent years. No one I spoke to wanted to declare that they were vanishing, but everyone acknowledged that “vrais bouchons” were becoming scarce. When I asked the Lyonnais I met if they ever dined in bouchons, their answer was almost uniformly the same: Yes, but only when we have friends visiting from out of town.
Only Emmanuel and Christian, who enjoy a monthly mâchon with the Confrérie, professed to be steady bouchon diners. But even they made this assertion with a slight air of embarrassment. “Sure, we eat at bouchons all the time—can’t you tell?” Christian joked, patting his solid midsection and chuckling. Yet somewhere in his self-conscious smile, there was an acknowledgment that a regular diet of bouchon cuisine was not sustainable, even though, as he’d declared, “in Lyon pork is a vegetable that’s eaten with everything.”
So who frequents the bouchons?
The answer: tourists.
The experience of eating in an authentic bouchon is, arguably, Lyon’s top tourist attraction. And, as with any successful endeavor, imitators have followed. Yves Rivoiron warned me about these knockoffs. “There are many bouchons that aren’t real bouchons,” he said.
Rivoiron is the owner of the Café des Fédérations and a former member of the Association de Défense des Bouchons, a preservation society that is now defunct. His bouchon, nicknamed La Fédé, is considered a Lyonnais institution, established, as the sign painted on the windows indicates, “depuis bien longtemps”—a very long time ago.
“When I took over, the previous owner told me, ‘Make an evolution, not a revolution,’” Rivoiron said. “I’m very careful to preserve the authenticity.” It was midafternoon, the witching hour between the lunch and dinner services, and we were sitting in the empty dining room. He gestured at the tables covered in checked cloths and butcher paper, the bare fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. “But how can we evolve?” he asked. Behind the restaurateur’s mask of smiling good cheer, his eyes were shadowed with genuine concern.
For Rivoiron the answer has been to expand his dining room and increase the restaurant’s hours. “I’m thinking of opening on Sundays and throughout the month of August,” he said. This was not, I knew, a small decision for a French employer—especially a small-business owner—considering the financial restrictions imposed by the thirty-five-hour workweek. Employers pay high rates of social-security tax for every employee, and many can’t afford to hire extra help. Nevertheless, Rivoiron explained, “being in a tourist zone means being in a service industry.”
There are those who accuse La Fédé of being too touristy, an assertion that made Rivoiron bristle. “I don’t like the negative connotation of the word,” he said. “Tourists these days are intelligent and well read. We welcome them, but that doesn’t mean we’re not preserving our traditional spirit.”
Later, walking the curved cobblestone streets near the Hôtel de Ville, I considered his theory. Bouchons seemed to be perched on every corner, glowing with old-fashioned bonhomie, yet only a scattered few featured the true sign of authenticity, the plaque of Gnafron. “But even if the majority of customers are tourists, these places are still authentic. Yes,” Rivoiron had said.
When I thought back to my own vacations, however, to the hours spent plotting itineraries, right down to the last crumb of designer macaron, I couldn’t help but question his conviction. The slightest hint of a tourist trap—touts at the door, menus in English, the bright blue and yellow of a Rick Steves guidebook—could turn a culinary discovery banal. Authenticity sometimes seemed as elusive as a unicorn. And foodie tourists are an exasperating and exacting pack, influenced by rumors and legends and online forums, determined to capture the mythical beast and document it with a digital camera.
Perhaps, I thought, Emmanuel and Christian and the Confrérie des Francs-Mâchons had it right all along. Maybe the survival of the bouchon is linked to that of the mâchon. If bouchons exist to serve the mâchon, then the mâchon must continue. Suddenly consuming three thousand calories at nine in the morning didn’t seem like a gluttonous indulgence. It was a sacrifice.
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My favorite meal in Lyon was at Chez Hugon, a mother-son bouchon (she’s in the front, he’s in the kitchen) where I ate lentils dressed with bacon and a quenelle de brochet that resembled a small football and had a texture reminiscent of a cloud’s. The restaurant was almost empty that evening because it was a four-day holiday weekend, yet the customers chose to sit clustered together instead of spreading throughout the small dining room. In the fluorescent lighting, with a paper napkin spread across my lap, I slid a fork through the quenelle’s airy sponge, served from a family-style platter, and relaxed against the chatter of my neighbors. The room reminded me of a conversation I’d had earlier in the day, with Gérard Trachet, president of the Société des Amis de Lyon et de Guignol, a Lyon preservation organization (yes, another one). I finally felt I was witnessing the true spirit of a bouchon, where strangers sit “elbow to elbow,” as he had described.
To really understand bouchons, Trachet had explained, one must first understand the industrial fervor that swept Lyon between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the town lived and breathed for only one thing: silk. Italian merchants had introduced the precious cloth during the fifteenth century; by the eighteenth century, Lyon supplied the whole of Europe with bolts of heavy brocade and meters of gold-embossed ribbon.
Locals still call the Croix Rousse, the former neighborhood of the silk weavers, la colline qui travaille—the hill that works. (In contrast, adjacent Fourvière, with its watchful basilica, is known as la colline qui prie—the hill that prays.) The area still bears the marks of industry, with boxy, high-ceilinged lofts built to accommodate massive weaving machines and secret passageways, called traboules, which allowed workers to transport bolts of cloth without going outside. (Decades later the Resistance, too, used this hidden network of alleys during the Nazi occupation.) Silk weaving was a laborious process, one that required strength, skill, and hours of physical toil. The weavers, called canuts, existed under dismal conditions, working fourteen hours a d
ay for a miserable wage.
In the pyramid that was the nineteenth-century Lyonnais silk industry, wealthy merchants, called soyeux, sat at the top, followed by a larger layer of master weavers, followed by thousands of workers, apprentices and women among them. The world of the canuts rarely overlapped with that of the soyeux, who financed the manufacturing. But there was one place where bourgeois and workers alike gathered to eat, drink, and socialize: the bouchon. Here the wine flowed freely, everyone tucked into humble dishes like tablier de sapeur, a sort of chicken-fried tripe, and men addressed each other as tu, not vous. Though merchants and workers didn’t necessarily share their meals together, they did sit elbow to elbow, equals in the same establishment.
Over time bouchons evolved into social centers, where canuts met their colleagues to enjoy the morning mâchon, a bit of wine, and good gossip, discussing the price of silk and whether their work, which was paid by the piece, was being fairly compensated. With silk prices determined by the soyeux, the weavers were largely powerless. Still, things continued fairly peacefully until 1831, when an economic crisis hit Europe.
Demand for silk sharply declined, and silk prices tumbled. The canuts became anxious to protect their salaries, lobbying the soyeux to establish a fixed price for silk; the soyeux refused, saying it would hamper their trade. In November 1831 a group of frustrated canuts organized a violent revolt, halting silk production for weeks. In the end, however, their efforts proved unsuccessful. By December the national army had swept in and crushed the insurrection. The idea of the fixed price was swept away, and normal life resumed.
Until the next rebellion occurred, in 1834. And the next one in 1848. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the canuts organized three major revolts. Though the national army squashed each one, these events paved the way for the canuts to create trade unions that would protect their rights and salaries. “The entire population went on strike,” Trachet told me. “And in the end they succeeded.”