Mastering the Art of French Eating

by Ann Mah

  How does a cross-cultural seesaw affect a person’s identity? Perhaps if I learned more about Alsace and its cuisine, I could better understand what might happen to me, an American of Chinese ethnicity who changed countries every three or four years. By the time my number was called, I had decided to travel east, to the Rhine River, to the border between France and Germany—to Alsace.

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  Alsace is nestled between the Vosges Mountains and the Black Forest, a protective topographic sandwich that shelters the region from harsh weather. It also means that when the fog settles in, it lingers, blanketing the plain in a chilly, swirling mist that seeps through the bones like an unhappy ghost. During my four-day visit in October—carefully timed to coincide with the end of cabbage season—the fog never lifted. It hung in the air, dulling the fall colors into a muddy blur, spurring my imagination to run wild with thoughts of battlefields haunted by phantom soldiers—relics of a land that has suffered more than its fair share of carnage.

  Instead of abandoned battlefields, however, I found actual fields, the agricultural kind. And instead of ghosts, they were filled with cabbage—acres and acres of it, planted in orderly ranks that stretched far into the distance. Piles of even more cabbage broke the horizon, heaping mounds that loomed over the farm equipment.

  The amount of cabbage shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, I had come to the village of Krautergersheim, located in the center of the Alsace region, because it is called the capitale de la choucroute. Twenty percent of all the choucroute produced in France is grown here—about twenty thousand metric tons a year. Even the village’s very name refers to its livelihood. “Kraut is the German word for cabbage, heim means ‘home,’” René Hoelt, the village mayor, told me.

  With their rich and moist soil, the fields surrounding the capital of choucroute have produced beautiful cabbages for centuries. A crossbreed of the local variety, Quintal d’Alsace, the heads are heavy and robust, with wide, tender, spongy leaves that absorb flavor and shred into long, fine strands.

  The word “choucroute” is a combination of French and German that translates literally as “cabbage cabbage”; in the Alsatian dialect, it’s called Sürkrüt. Cabbage has been documented in the local diet as early as 1673, a reliable source of vitamin C during long, cold months lacking fruits and vegetables.

  Every fall a craftsman called the Sürkrüthowler, or Sürkrüt schneider, traveled between farms, slicing each family’s cabbage harvest with a lethal mandoline. The family gathered the cored and chopped cabbage into a wooden barrel or a stone vat, then liberally salted, pressed, and covered it and left it in the basement to ferment. Throughout the course of the winter, they dipped into their stash, which grew more acidic as the months progressed.

  Industrial choucroute production came to Krautergersheim in 1874, when Martin Dell, a Swiss entrepreneur, saw profit in the fertile cabbage fields and opened the first factory. In the industry’s 1960s heyday, there were fifteen producers; today only five remain. They still make choucroute in the traditional way, the cabbage cored, grated, salted, weighted, and fermented for two to twelve weeks, depending on the weather—the warmer the temperature, the shorter the period of time.

  “It’s the ancestral method,” said Jean-Luc Meyer, the director of the choucroute producer Meyer Wagner. “The same one my great-grandfather used when he started the business in 1900.”

  I got lost on my way to the Meyer Wagner factory, despite Krautergersheim’s small size and the small number of choucroutiers in town. I couldn’t keep my Weber straight from my Adès Weber, from my Meyer Wagner. I finally found the factory, a vast boxy building on the village outskirts, surrounded by fields. Outside, a conveyor belt delivered cabbages straight to the mouth of an open door. Inside, the immense space hummed with machinery and smelled of cut cabbage, a raw, lingering scent that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  Meyer led me on a tour, showing me the machines that sliced and salted, the cement fermentation vats sunk deep into the floor, before pausing at another, discernibly warmer section of the factory that fogged my camera lens with steam. Here choucroute simmered in giant vessels, the uncooked, fermented stuff becoming soft and pliable in its warm bath of wine, water, goose fat, and spices. Once the pride and provenance of Alsatian housewives—each with her own secret recipe and tricks for producing the tenderest, most aromatic cabbage—the choucroute-cooking process has today been taken over by the factory.

  “Most people don’t have the time or inclination anymore,” Meyer said. Though the company still sells a small quantity of raw choucroute, the majority of their business is done in flat, sealed, plastic packages of the cooked stuff, ready to reheat and serve. Sometimes the traditional meat accompaniment—ham or cured pork belly—is even included inside.

  It seemed a little sad to me, this disappearance of the cast-iron Staub pot of choucroute bubbling away gently in Granny’s kitchen, but Meyer seemed perfectly cheerful about it. “In the mid-1970s or early ’80s,” he said, “the local producers had to decide whether or not to buy the equipment to cook choucroute.” Today Krautergersheim’s five remaining choucroutiers all sell it cooked. It turns out that cooked cabbage saved the industry.

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  During our conversation Meyer offered me a bit of linguistic instruction. I had been calling the dish “choucroute,” but, as he pointed out, that refers only to the preserved cabbage. The official name is “choucroute garnie,” or garnished choucroute. The “garnish” means—inversely—the sausages, salt pork, smoked bacon, and knack, or hot dogs, that make up the caloric bulk of the meal.

  At Charcuterie Muller, a small shop located on the main street in Rosheim, the pretty, half-timbered village where I was staying, I inspected a long glass case stuffed with cuts of pork in varying shades of pink: smoked, freshly salted, fully cured, squeaky lean, or striped with fat. There were sausages fat and thin; white; black; some made of liver, heart, or blood. There was a mound of crimson ground liver, used to make poached quenelles, or dumplings. The shop clerk—a dark-haired woman who politely refrained from asking me any questions despite my appearance, accent, and avid curiosity—patiently explained all the different cuts and cures, the pieces that should be cooked with the choucroute and those that needed to be cooked separately. We spoke French together, but when an older couple entered the shop, they addressed her in Alsatian, and she snapped into the other language without dropping an umlaut.

  I eavesdropped on their conversation, straining to catch the meaning. Sometimes, if I listened carefully enough—and if the interaction was about food—I could pick out a few words of a local dialect or even other Romance languages. But this was impenetrable, a thick wall of sounds that, to my tin ear, sounded indistinguishable from German. I could recognize only two phrases, “Ça va” and “Ja, ja, ja.” They repeated them often.

  The Alsatian dialect, I later discovered, is linguistically close to Swiss German, a hearty tongue that’s still spoken widely in the region, especially among Alsatians d’un certain âge. It has noble roots—in the Middle Ages it was the literary language of troubadours—and in the nineteenth century Napoleon grandly tolerated it, saying, “Who cares if they speak German, as long as their swords speak French?” Its vowels and low cadences color the names of towns and villages, making them difficult for non-Alsatian speakers to pronounce (which causes much glee among the locals).

  This Germanic influence has also left its stamp on the region’s gastronomy, with its encyclopedia of sausages and dishes like Baeckeoffe, a casserole of layered meat and potatoes, traditionally cooked in the baker’s oven by housewives occupied with the weekly laundry. It’s evident in the soft, fat pretzels, called bretzels, stacked on hooks at the boulangerie; in the elegant, long-necked bottles of local Riesling and Gewürztraminer; in the robust sweets like Kougelhopf, a tender, yeasty cake studded with dried fruits and nuts.

  As
I wandered the old-fashioned center of Strasbourg—the region’s capital and a seat of the European Parliament—I felt drawn into another era, one of gas-powered streetlamps and half-timbered taverns, of pretty canals lined with Renaissance gingerbread houses in La Petite France, the city’s heart-stoppingly charming historic neighborhood. Another era? Perhaps rather another place, another country distant from France. The street signs in Alsatian; the young families bicycling politely along marked paths; the pastry-shop windows filled with Black Forest cake and tarts of quetsches; the Plätze, or places, named after German icons like Gutenberg; the cozy pubs, called Winstubs, that beckoned with promises of vin chaud—all of it combined to make me feel as if I’d entered into a foreign land.

  Later I described Strasbourg to a French friend as feeling like “nowhere,” but that came out sounding much harsher than what I wanted to express. No, rather it felt to me like a different dimension—not a mix of France and Germany but another creation altogether—a city of Mitteleuropa where I could communicate perfectly and yet understand almost nothing.

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  On a chilly, late-autumn evening in Paris, I went to a farewell party for some departing American friends and drank one too many farewell glasses of Champagne. It was a perfectly innocent mistake—innocent, that is, until the next morning when I overslept my alarm, woke up late with a tongue that felt pickled, and had to dash through a dense fog to the northeast corner of Paris. My formation civique—the obligatory class that would teach me about French history, culture, and values—was scheduled to begin at half past eight.

  I raced through the métro, up the stairs, and along a wide boulevard in the twentieth arrondissement, dodging mothers pushing strollers, veiled women carrying heavy sacks of groceries, and groups of men smoking and chatting outside cafés. At the address marked on my letter of invitation, I found a modern cement building, the windows covered in blinds, the door locked.

  The door was locked.

  I glanced at my watch and double-checked it against my cell phone. According to both, I was three minutes late and thus fully deserving of having the door locked against me. Still, I struggled to contain my rising concern. What was I going to do? How could I reschedule my class? Was I even allowed to reschedule?

  I stood on the street, buffeted by a sharp wind, berating my own stupidity. I was learning the first lesson of being an immigrant: Never be late for any meeting relating to your situation. I rattled the door with increasing desperation, barely registering the man who had dashed to my side.

  “Formation civique?” he asked. At first I thought he was a security guard, come to shoo me away. But then I noticed his rolling accent; the color of his skin, toffee, as if he’d come from warmer climes; the note of panic in his voice that matched my own; and I recognized him as a fellow émigré. I had observed at my medical examination that almost none of us were white, myself included. Evidently he identified me by the same criterion.

  “C’est fermé à clé.” I gestured at the door.

  He shook the handle, and when the door didn’t budge, he did what my blushing, ladylike, middle-class American sensibility prevented me from doing: He started to pound on it, hard enough to make the windows shake.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  He paused, and we turned our heads to listen. Nothing.

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Still nothing.

  He raised his fist again, but before he could continue, we heard the sound of a bolt turning in the lock. A woman sporting a dark suit and a disciplinary air stood before us.

  “Formation civique?” the man said again.

  She puffed up her cheeks and blew them out again, the epitome of French exasperation. I took a deep breath, prepared to argue until she let us enter, but she merely asked for our documents, looked them over, and then allowed us through the door, pointing wordlessly toward a classroom. Inside, fluorescent bulbs lit the eyes of about thirty strangers, who watched as I hunted for a seat.

  Our instructor was another woman, wearing a similar dark suit and air of authority. She was d’origine tunisienne and born in France, she announced, and today she would teach us about this decentralized republic of twenty-six regions. We went around the room and introduced ourselves. Of the thirty people in the room, I was one of two Americans—the other was a female rock musician who spoke exquisite French and sported tattoos and dark eyeliner—and among a minority of women. The rest were men, many from Africa, places like Tunisia, Algeria, or Mali. Mauritius. Eritrea. Later, when I got home, I looked up these last few places on the map.

  The lecture began, our instructor careening wildly among topics that I expected—presidential term limits, the French judicial process—to those that in a million years I would have never dreamed she’d raise: female genital mutilation, polygamy (both illegal in France, in case you were wondering). During the breaks half the class rushed outside to smoke while the other half stood about in the drafty hallway. The men gathered in clusters, chatting and laughing, already united by common acquaintance perhaps, or a mother tongue, or simply gender. The women sat silent on the edges, blown aside by the testosterone in the room.

  Around noon lunch arrived on cafeteria trays, but I slipped out to a local café and escaped into my book. Fifty minutes and a croque-monsieur later, I made my way back to the classroom—the door was unlocked this time—where I found my fellow classmates looking as sleepy as I felt. We settled in for an afternoon of lectures, maybe some discreet dozing. But then our instructor appeared, vibrating with renewed energy, as though she’d spent the past hour lifting weights and popping cans of spinach. She announced we’d be taking a true-or-false test and started to read the questions aloud.

  “Vrai ou faux. Homosexuals have the right to marry in France.”

  From my seat in the front row, I heard a collective intake of breath behind me.

  “Faux,” said a man in the back.

  “Oui, faux,” said the instructor. “But two men can join in PACS, a pact of civil union recognized by the state.”

  “Only a man and woman should have the right to marry,” said another man.

  “Tout à fait!” called out another voice. Exactly.

  The room erupted in lively debate, with those in agreement facing off against the instructor, who shouted paragraphs from her manual. It continued so loudly for so long that we had to take another break for everyone to calm down.

  After ten minutes of more weak coffee, more idle cell-phone scrolling, more hurried smoking, we reconvened in the classroom for another question.

  “Vrai ou faux—” The instructor paused. “Women must obey men.”

  “Vrai,” said someone, and a few of the men in the room laughed.

  “Vrai? Why do you say that? In France men and women have the same responsibilities and rights. Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying all day?”

  “Oui, mais chez moi, c’est chez moi.”

  “Would you let your wife go to a café alone?” the instructor asked.

  “Ma femme? Jamais.”

  “Women can go to the café here in France. If they want to go alone, and order a coffee, sit and read the newspaper, that’s their right. They also have the right to go to school, work, vote, and inherit property—the same as men. C’est. La. Loi. Vous comprenez?”

  “Chez moi, c’est chez moi,” he repeated.

  The instructor’s eye caught mine, and she rolled hers slightly, as if to say, Men! I was too startled to respond. Two things surprised me: First, it had never occurred to me that going to a café by myself could be considered improper. Second, my life had been so sheltered I had never before encountered such overt chauvinism. Until now I’d only seen sexism lurking like a shadow, the transparent glass ceiling, the unspoken bias. Now here it was, a hulking mass standing defiant in the center of the room. Not even four years in China had prepared me for its ugly muscularity
.

  I twisted around in my chair to get a glimpse of the man, expecting to see a stature that matched his opinions. Instead I found someone nondescript, neither big nor small, with a beard covering most of his face.

  “D’où venez-vous, monsieur?” asked the instructor.

  “Eritrea.”

  “Things are different here in France. Vous verrez.” You’ll see. It sounded like a promise—or a warning.

  Later, after the class had ended, after the instructor handed out signed certificates of participation, after I had returned to my pretty, privileged corner of Paris, I continued to think about the formation civique and my fellow classmates. I could guess at the reasons that had brought them to France—Eritrea alone is desperately poor, with one of the world’s worst human-rights records—but I would never completely understand them. Now they had entered into a brave new world, one that upended their stature, along with their traditional values. How would they accept France? And, just as important, how would France accept them, if at all?

  After a year in Paris, I still flinched when I heard people described by their race: le cafetier maghrébin, le plombier roumain, la petite chinoise. This last referred to me, no matter that I was born, raised, and educated in the United States, as American as my second-generation (but white) husband. Roots traveled deep here, a tangible marker considered acceptable in polite conversation, unlike religion or work. In the United States, race and nationality are separate; in France you are either French—with all that implies—or a citoyen français, with all that does not.

  In the refined sixth arrondissement where I lived, I sometimes pretended to be a local, at the bakery joking with the cashier about the weather or at the market when my favorite vegetable vendor slipped a few extra lemons into my basket. But I was obviously an étrangère, a fact made evident by my accent, the shape of my eyes, the darkness of my hair, the briskness of my walk. For me it didn’t matter; I was just a guest, after all. But what of the real immigrants? The ones who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—return home? The complicated truth was this: They would spend the rest of their lives in France, yet they would never become French.