Mastering the Art of French Eating

by Ann Mah

  Several weeks earlier, I had received an assignment from the New York Times—the New York Times! My forehead broke out in beads of nervous sweat every time I even thought about it—for a travel article retracing Thomas Jefferson’s 1787 journey through the vineyards of Burgundy. The focus would be wine, but as I packed my bags for the Côte d’Or, the narrow territory that produces the region’s renowned vintages, my mind kept turning to boeuf bourguignon. The wine-rich beef stew was one of the first dishes Julia Child had ever cooked on television, the one she chose to launch her show The French Chef.

  For Julia, boeuf bourguignon offered many teachable French cooking techniques: how to brown and braise meat, how to sauté mushrooms and make a fine sauce. But in recent years the dish had acquired a rare patina, transforming from a humble beef stew into, for many Americans, the symbol of French cuisine. And yet what did we know about its origins? Now I had the opportunity to visit Burgundy and discover the true story of boeuf bourguignon. And though I was traveling alone, I thought I could imagine twin voices on either side of me—Julia’s and Jefferson’s—two Americans separated by centuries but united by their admiration of the region.

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  The drive from Paris to Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy, takes about four hours, a steady southeasterly slog along the A6 national highway. Even if I hadn’t been following the GPS as if it were the Messiah, I would have known I’d arrived in the Côte d’Or by the gentle, vine-covered slopes rising up on either side of the road. Though the region of Burgundy is large, its wine territory is focused mainly on this small strip of terrain, an almost mythical chain of microclimates, mildly pitched hills, and rocky, rust-colored, mineral-rich soil. When the French speak of terroir—a word that literally means “earth”—they’re referring to a special confluence of climate, soil, geography, plant species, and farming techniques. But if I had to pick one place in the world to illustrate the term, it would be here in the Côte d’Or, which packs more than a hundred appellations into a space half the size of New York City, where the same grape varietals have been cultivated into wine for almost a thousand years.

  Legend has it that monks established the Burgundy winemaking tradition in the eleventh century, clearing the land, testing grape varietals, and perfecting viticulture techniques. They divided the Côte d’Or into the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune (côte means “hill”) and traveled between the slopes, mixing the soil with water to taste the differences in terroir. They were the first to realize that neighboring plots of land could produce wines with wildly different flavors, mapping these designations into appellations, many of which are still used today.

  The monks came from two very different orders: the permissive Benedictines and the rigid Cistercians. The Benedictines had an abbey farther south, at Cluny. The Cistercians, whose headquarters were at Cîteaux, nearer to the Côte d’Or, were, ironically, ascetics, forbidden to eat meat, eggs, fish, or dairy or to drink anything but water (though they permitted themselves to sample the wine they produced). For the Cistercians wine was purely a commercial endeavor, sold to support their monasteries or offered as gifts in return for political favors.

  During the Middle Ages, Burgundy was not part of France but a powerful and independent duchy with borders that stretched to Flanders and the Netherlands, governed by a series of dukes with names that sound like superheroes’: Philippe le Hardi (the Bold), Jean sans Peur (the Fearless), Philippe le Bon (the Good), Charles le Téméraire (the Reckless). The first, Philippe le Hardi, could also have been named Philippe the Wine Lover. A dedicated oenophile, he forever defined Burgundy wine when he commanded the removal of all Gamay grapes (he described them as “disloyal”), ordering instead Pinot Noir to be planted in the region, an edict that remains unchanged since he issued it in 1395. Today only two varietals are grown on the Côte d’Or: Pinot Noir for red wine, Chardonnay for white.

  I noticed these very grapevines climbing up the hillsides, attached to wood-and-wire trellises. In the chill damp of early spring, the landscape was bare, the region’s famous reddish soil clearly visible beneath the orderly rows of short, twisting, black stumps. And yet even in their denuded, hibernating state, the vinestock appeared well tended, neatly clipped and trimmed, waiting patiently for the warmer weather to coax out leaves, flowers, and fruit.

  The lines of vines stretching up the hill appeared—to my untrained eye—like a single, vast vineyard. In reality, however, my gaze was sweeping across tens, if not hundreds, of different properties, unmarked by walls or fences as tradition dictates. Until the French Revolution, a few wealthy landowners held the majority of Burgundy’s vineyards, the largest being the Catholic Church. That changed in 1790, when the Church’s land was sold as national property and its huge swaths of vineyards were carved into small plots. Today Burgundy remains a region of modest vineyards—some as tiny as a garden patch—with many owned by independent producers instead of large conglomerates.

  In Beaune I admired the town’s prosperous shine, the buffed stone hôtels particuliers opening to well-preserved courtyards, the roofs tiled in colorful geometric patterns, the medieval ramparts edging manicured streets lined with gleaming wine shops and fromageries. Foreigners flock here in all seasons, a steady stream of tourists that have left the locals a bit blasé in their welcome. I sat in one café and watched a group of British tourists keen to partake in a glass of local refreshment. The waiter rattled off the wines by the glass—Gevrey-Chambertin, Meursault, Nuits-Saint-Georges—and their jaws dropped. Mine did, too, a little, hearing all those famous names offered so casually. It felt like a celebrity sighting.

  Later I had a chance to taste some wine with Thibaut Marian, a young winemaker and owner of Domaine Seguin-Manuel, a winery in Beaune. Thibaut’s family has been making wine since 1750, but he acquired his own establishment more recently, in 2004. We sat in his office separated by a long row of bottles—about half of the twenty appellations that the domaine produces—and Thibaut started pouring. First the whites, golden, crisp, flowery, minerally. He described each one with a father’s tender pride. We swirled, sipped, sucked air into our cheeks, swished, as if cleansing the entire mouth with wine—actually, Thibaut did all these things, and I copied him, always half a beat behind—and then we spit. I had expected the expectoration, but even so it wrenched me to lean over the terra-cotta pitcher. Could one even properly taste wine without swallowing? I considered my car, parked a few blocks away, and tipped the rest of my glass into the crachoir. Thibaut promptly poured from another bottle.

  Thibaut’s winery is small and artisanal. He produces about seventy thousand bottles a year, and his production is linked, like that of many independent producers in the region, to organic farming and a lunar bottling cycle, which gives the wine “more purity, more freshness and lightness, and better aging capacity,” he said. We finished tasting the whites and moved on to the reds. Until this point we’d been using the same glass to taste all the wines, but now Thibaut noticed a bit of sediment at the bottom of mine.

  “Let me find you a new glass,” he said.

  “No, don’t worry, we can just rinse it out with a little water.”

  “Water?” A look of horror crossed his patrician features. “Non, non, we will use wine.” He reached for one of the bottles of white and poured a slug, thoroughly rinsed the glass, and drained it into the crachoir.

  That was when I knew I was in Burgundy, where wine replaced water.

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  In March 1787, Thomas Jefferson set out from Paris on a three-month tour of France. The purpose of the voyage, he claimed, was to heal a broken wrist by taking the mineral waters at Aix-en-Provence. On the way he planned to fulfill his obligations as America’s top envoy, researching French agriculture, architectural, and engineering projects. But when he chose to begin the trip in the vineyards of Burgundy, his daughter Martha became suspicious.

  “
I am inclined to think this voyage is rather for your pleasure than your health,” she teased him in a letter.

  In fact, Jefferson’s five-day visit to Burgundy was not accidental. After spending two years establishing diplomatic relations in the court of Louis XVI, he had tasted his fair share of fine vintages. Now he was keen to explore the Côte d’Or’s cellars and vineyards, to discover the art of viticulture with the hope of transporting it back to Virginia, to taste the wines of a region famous—even in the late eighteenth century—for its terroir.

  Thomas Jefferson had first arrived in France three years earlier, a handsome forty-one-year-old widower with two young daughters. He had been sent by Congress to join John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, succeeding the latter as minister plenipotentiary. For Jefferson, whose wife had died two years prior, the appointment fulfilled a childhood dream of living in Europe. He found housing in a series of grand hôtels particuliers with his daughter Martha and a slave, James Hemings (his younger daughter, Maria, joined him in 1787, accompanied by another slave, Sally Hemings), and he began to circulate among a swirl of artists and intellectuals. Among them he met Maria Cosway, an artist born in Italy to English parents, and her husband, Richard Cosway, a renowned miniaturist and portraitist.

  A friendship (or was it a romance?) between Jefferson and Maria blossomed over six weeks, as the two met often on a series of group sightseeing excursions to places like Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Marly-le-Roi. During this period Jefferson dislocated his right wrist while attempting to jump a fence at the Cours-la-Reine park—some have speculated that he was trying to impress Maria—an injury that would trouble him for the rest of his life.

  Jefferson’s injured wrist confined him to home for a month, forced him to correspond through his secretary, and—most tragically—cut short his time with Maria. Less than a month after the accident, she departed France with her husband, leaving Jefferson in a gloomy state. “I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings,” he wrote in a letter to her. “Overwhelmed with grief, every fibre of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear.”

  Titled “Dialogue Between My Head and My Heart,” the letter portrays a lively debate between Jefferson’s tender emotions—“I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief!”—and his cooler sense of logic, which tempered his affection for a beautiful married woman (albeit one whose husband was a notorious philanderer). A facsimile of the document shows his handwriting cramped and crooked—he was forced to use his left hand—but the sentiments rocket off the page. It constitutes the only existing love letter that Jefferson ever wrote.

  By March 1787, Jefferson’s wrist had sufficiently healed for him to travel, but his mood remained pensive throughout his solitary journey. Could the three-month trip have been an elaborate distraction from a broken heart? “One travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more,” he wrote in a letter. But when he reached Beaune, he sought guidance, hiring a wine adviser, Étienne Parent. Like many men of the era, Parent dabbled in viticulture and barrel making, but his main income came from acting as a négociant, or wine merchant, blending wines from various producers to create and sell a sufficient commercial quantity. He led Jefferson on a brisk tour of the Côte d’Or, whisking him in and out of cellars from Nuys to Pommard to Meursault, and introducing him to the wines that would become his favorites.

  As I toured vineyards and visited vaulted cellars, I tried to see the region through Jefferson’s eyes. The funny thing was, although more than two centuries separated our journeys, it wasn’t that hard to imagine him there. For one thing the landscape still resembled his description, with “the côte in vines. Some forest wood here and there, broom, whins and holly, and a few inclosures of quick hedge.” The famous soil was still “a good red loam and sand, mixed with more or less grit, small stone, and sometimes rock.” The people still appeared “well fed.” Or at least they bloomed with the aura of well-fed confidence that comes from centuries of prosperity.

  Also, I had found a wine adviser, Anne Parent, a direct descendant of Étienne who owned Domaine Parent, a winery in Pommard. She led me through her cave, a dimly lit space sharp with the sour tang of vinegar, pausing before various casks and drawing out drafts for us to swill, savor, and spit (directly onto the gravel floor).

  Though Jefferson’s diaries offered meticulous travel notes, they revealed no clues to his emotional state. Like him, I traveled alone and, like him, I discovered that the solitude offered lots of opportunity for reflection. Were his thoughts, too, filled with someone who was far away? I imagined him wandering through vineyards with Étienne Parent, quiet as they sipped different vintages, seduced by the magic of the terroir, marveling at the good fortune that allowed him to admire firsthand the beauty and history of Burgundy and the skill of its vignerons. I imagined him feeling all these things and yet all the while being wistful for Maria. When you love someone, you want to share with that person the things you enjoy most in the world.

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  I had come to Burgundy with two goals: to taste the region’s wine and sample its food. I had drunk the wine. But when it came to the pleasures of the table, Jefferson was a terrible guide.

  Aside from a few potatoes in Dijon—“the best round potatoes here I ever saw”—his diaries don’t mention food at all. Where were the descriptions of beef braised in a wine-dark sauce? The tales of snails roasted in garlicky butter and pried from their burning shells with the help of a special clamp? The stories of jambon persillade—pink Easter ham coated with verdant chopped parsley and slipped into a jellied case? Didn’t he eat any gougères—those cheesy puffs that are so delicious with white wine—or sample the local cheeses, either the soft, creamy fromage de Cîteaux (made by Cistercian monks) or the decadent, sloppy Époisses?

  He did not. Or if he did, he didn’t write about them. Perhaps Jefferson—a semivegetarian—didn’t consider matters of the stomach worthy of his diary. This was one of the many major differences between us. His travel diaries neglect food. Mine talk about nothing else.

  No, if I wanted to explore Burgundy’s storied cuisine, I would need another guide. Someone who had sampled the region’s rich and classic dishes and knew how to cook them. Someone who shared my omnivorous approach and American sensibilities. Someone like Julia Child.

  In her classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia describes boeuf bourguignon as “one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man.” She provides a meticulously detailed three-page recipe but also offers a disclaimer: “As is the case with most famous dishes,” she writes, “there are more ways than one to arrive at a good boeuf bourguignon.”

  That, I soon discovered, was a gross understatement. Over plates of wine-braised beef, Burgundy’s professional and home cooks offered me a wealth of contradictory advice, dispensed in hushed voices or with defensive shrugs. You should use only Burgundy wine. You can use any good-quality wine. Add a dash of vinegar to the marinade. Pfff . . . He uses a marinade? Bacon adds a wonderful smoky flavor. The one thing I never use is bacon. My mother makes the best boeuf bourguignon. My grandmother’s is the best. Mine is the best. Julia Child would be happy to know that Burgundy’s debate over boeuf bourguignon is alive and well.

  Whatever their particularities, however, most people acknowledged that the dish is a rustic one, a ragout with humble beginnings (or at least as humble as a plate of meat can be considered). Meat was precious back then, more precious even than wine, which in the days before the phylloxera blight was produced in every region of France, with vines growing right up to the gates of Paris. Thrifty cooks endeavoring to use every scrap of an animal soon realized that tough cuts like paleron, or chuck roast, became tender when slow-cooked in wine.

  As I left the grape-centric hills of the Côte d’Or and drove south into the wide, flat pl
ains of the Charolais, the origins of boeuf bourguignon became even clearer. There, dotting the green pastures in groups of two or three, I spotted Burgundy’s other famous product: Charolais cattle.

  According to local legend, Crusaders brought the snow-white livestock back from their overseas travels and used a rudimentary form of animal husbandry to breed them into powerful, utilitarian farm animals. In 1747 word of their meaty flanks began to spread when an enterprising cattle farmer marched his herd to the market at Poissy, outside Paris, a folkloric journey that took only seventeen days. By 1770 herds of Charolais dotted the route from Burgundy to Paris. “You found them all along the Loire, passing through Nevers, and Orléans,” said Frédéric Bouchot, director of the Maison du Charolais, a museum in the town of Charolles that is devoted to the breed. By the late nineteenth century, Charolais cattle had spread throughout France. Today they’re found around the world—notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia—in either single-race herds or crossed with other breeds.

  In 2010, boeuf de Charolles—that is, beef from Charolais cattle, produced in the Charolais region—was awarded the title appellation d’origine contrôlée. According to the cahier des charges, the animals must graze on the region’s rich grass from March to November and move indoors during the winter months. They’re slaughtered at six years instead of the usual five, which allows them more time to grow. The result is generous cuts of beef, prized by connoisseurs for their light marbling and high flavor.