Paris on a Plate

by Stephen Downes

  ‘David qui?’ he asks.

  day seven

  Sunday morning, and I have a family lunch ahead: I’ve been invited by my brother-in-law and his wife. It’ll be a real Gallic Sunday lunch, which can be everything special and nothing special, in French terms, depending on who is attending and whether any celebrations are in order. It is, however, always good and substantial, a serious meal with which to start the week. But neither their son nor daughter will be coming, so sitting down will be just Josiane, Jean-Pierre and me.

  They live in the eastern suburban fringes about seventeen kilometres from the centre of Paris. And, while you can zip around the city itself fairly quickly, once you leave the centre for farther points, commuting can take time. Where they live is not all that easy to get to, even if two fast-train lines (RERs) run fairly close by. So getting near is relatively easy, but the last three or four kilometres, through narrow streets that were pioneered by haycarts centuries ago, tend to snare the big teal-blue Renault buses. And from the bus stop you must walk about five hundred metres.

  Jean-Pierre and Josiane moved here in the early 1970s because the place lacked a good butchery. He retired recently, a man of considerable means. His modern home, with its vast living areas paved in polished stone, sits in generous gardens. Towering over the lawns are conifers, an enormous walnut tree, and plum and apple trees of various species. There are roses and rhododendrons, and a new BMW in the double garage.

  I love visiting them. We talk a lot about food and cooking, where the French are going gastronomically (often not a happy discussion), politics and taxes. We almost never talk about restaurants because, like many French, Josiane and Jean-Pierre dine out very rarely. Sometimes they will admit that they’ve been disappointed. Josiane cooks sublimely, and her meals are built from the ground up, from the raw materials. And, as we eat, Jean-Pierre regales the gathered with spontaneous puns and word-plays, his eyes glistening with fun. I’ve never noted a single one, they erupt so instinctively. And they’re mostly very clever. They flash and die, but within a minute or so another bursts from his lips. Life has hurled some very nasty vicissitudes at Jean-Pierre and Josiane, yet they both remain charming, generous, modest and high-hearted. I enjoy being with them enormously — so much, in fact, that to go there partly to work (the situation today) is a little dispiriting.

  I change from the Métro to RER line A at Châtelet les Halles, get off at Noisy-le-Grand, find the right exit for the bus station in the enormous commercial centre constructed above the rails, and take the bus, which is full of French Africans from north and south. With waiting time it’s a ninety-minute journey on a Sunday.

  As always, the welcome is chaleureux. I’ve brought a bottle of bordeaux, for which I paid a little more than average. When I first came to France, invités took a pot of flowers or a fruit tart to their hosts. Increasingly, you can offer a good bottle. Within about ten minutes — these people speak at formula-one pace — we’re all up-to-speed with recent family events, jobs and the amount our adult children are paying in rent. (Nothing when they’re at home, which is both wonderful and lamentable for their parents.) Small triumphs are announced and, happily, only a few smaller tragedies are revealed. We decide, as we agree tacitly every time, that the world is in equal measure atrocious and wonderful. None of us, if I remember rightly, has ever tried to explain why. We just say that it’s like that, a common expression.

  The table is set, white plates with gold rims dressing an elegant cloth worked with yellow and navy daisies. Stemmed wine glasses and horn-handled cutlery wait to be used. Luxurious floral napkins that match the tablecloth are at hand, and three rustic chairs with seats of woven rushes are ready to be pulled out and sat upon. Josiane tells me several times that we’re having a simple lunch — she has gone to no trouble. A tall, elegant and attractive blonde, she appears at least ten years younger than her age. Jean-Pierre, who is a few years over sixty, has slightly thinning brushed-back hair. Only in the past couple of years has it shown a light seasoning of more salt than pepper. Solid, he is shorter than three of his seven sisters.

  Over many years, the family has listened with infinite patience to my talk of Australian cooking and restaurants. Not once do I remember either Josiane or Jean-Pierre insisting that the French way was best. Or that what I claim about the freshness and originality of Australian cooking can’t be right. We drink a bottle of champagne, an habitual aperitif in French middle-class families, even if there is nothing special to celebrate. Jean-Pierre warms up with a little word-play about the boules (bubbles) in the coupe (champagne glass) and the coupes (winners’ cups) in boules (otherwise known as pétanque, the bowls game played with heavy iron spheres and a jack). And we sit down to lunch.

  It’s simple, says Josiane again, as she places a large oval platter of tomato slices in the middle of the table. Jean-Pierre pops the cork out of a dry white wine from his region, the Loire. Dressed in a vinaigrette sauce and topped with chopped chives and shallots, the tomato slices are a deep-scarlet and oozing juice into the barely whisked oil and acid. They are delicious and full-flavoured. He’s had a lot of success this year with his tomatoes, says Jean-Pierre. These are the very last of the season, picked in the week before I arrived. It was mild, he says, then the cold arrived. Very quickly. They’re called beef’s hearts. I should be very clear, he smiles, that they are from the beef’s coeur (heart) and not his queue (tail). Do I want him to write that down? I retort with a laugh, knowing that he knows that I know the different sounds these two words make, even if some English-speakers might find them difficult to tell apart.

  Next up are mussels from the Mont-Saint-Michel bay in Normandy. They’re famously known as moules de bouchon, which needs some explaining. Moules are mussels, of course, and a bouchon amounts to rank upon rank of vertical sticks stuck in shallow tidal water. Mussels attach themselves and grow on the sticks. You might have seen images of bouchons — pickets protruding from the sea by half an arm’s length — stretching to infinity. And you will certainly have seen photographs of Mont-Saint-Michel, exposed tidal flats all around, such are the sea surges in this part of the world. Bouchon mussels are small — about the size of half a thumb — and Josiane has cooked them quickly and classically in white wine with onions and a sprig of thyme. Parsley choppings speckle them. And they’re excellent — their flesh firm, its colour a dark orange-saffron. An argument goes that small bivalves taste better than bigger ones, but I point out that the much larger blue mussels (about four times the volume of the Normandy mussels) grown in Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay are more delicately gelatinous but retain very good flavour. And that even more spectacular are the huge Spring Bay mussels (twice the size of the Port Phillip variety) cultivated in ‘lanterns’ of plastic mesh in the cold and spectacularly clean (and nutritious) waters off the east coast of Tasmania. These observations are greeted with interest.

  For main course we have something of the highest quality, says Jean-Pierre. Roasted lamb shoulder, but not just any lamb. This is Elovel lamb from the Lozère in south central France, a plateau of 1000 metres altitude. It’s the best time to be eating it, too. The ewes and lambs are free-ranging, and at the end of autumn indigenous herbs and grasses are most highly flavoured. Jean-Pierre dashes off to get printed information for me. From the kitchen, I hear sizzling. He returns with a thick file in tanned leather, newspaper clippings and press releases catalogued within it, each with its own plastic sleeve. The lamb’s race is Massif Central white. They eat such plants as mélilot, bush cumin, pimprenelle, box and angel’s hair. After a hundred days, they’re taken from their mothers and have to forage. Cereals supplement their diets, and by the time they’re slaughtered they weigh about thirty kilos and have been alive just a few months. Their health is monitored throughout, and the birth certificates with which the best beasts are sold double as death certificates. The controlling authority Agneaux de Lozère (Lozère lambs) recommends that they’re consumed eight days after killing. I ask Jean-Pierre how much t
hey retail for. He lifts his head, reflects, and says about 14 to15 euros a kilo.

  Josiane returns with the shoulder in slices on a platter and an accompanying boat containing the reduced cooking juices. They’ve been emulsified with butter, she says. And how does she roast the lamb, I ask. Like a rappeur, says Jean-Pierre. Hot and short. I detect that the smile she sends her husband is somewhat forced. ‘Effectivement,’ she says politely. The shoulder is trussed, of course, and put in a roasting dish with roughly chopped garlic, a dried bay leaf, some water and sunflower oil. She puts knobs of butter on top of the joint and adds dried rosemary. Her oven is very hot, she adds — about 250 degrees Celsius — and she roasts the meat for about forty minutes, basting every now and then. Like most roasts you will eat in France, quite a lot of the meat at the centre of the joint will be uncooked, warm-raw. This one is done a little more than usual — perhaps because I’m here. It’s astonishing, at any rate, the best lamb I’ve eaten. It’s not so much the complex sweetness of the meat that is so wonderful, it’s the texture — the grain of the muscle is so fine, rawer parts almost like red-raw tuna. We have standard green beans fried in butter and garlic to accompany. (And a burgundy Jean-Pierre thinks might go well with the lamb.) Thin young green beans are getting difficult to find, says Josiane. Increasingly they’re imported from Africa; Senegalese are the best, but she also buys Kenyan and Moroccan beans. Until fairly recently you could easily buy beans grown in France. These days they are rare and expensive ’ it’s becoming too dear to harvest them by hand when they are only half a centimetre in diameter. The French won’t do it, and, increasingly, immigrants won’t either, Jean-Pierre says. African beans are cheaper.

  We eat a salad of endives — which are known as witlof in some countries — containing pieces of the couple’s own walnuts, followed by a platter of cheeses, including a brie from Meaux, a fresh goat’s cheese and a roquefort. All are made from raw (unpasteurised) milk (the roquefort from ewe’s milk) and have brilliant complexity and depth of flavour. Every single cheese made from pasteurised milk that attempts to emulate these creations tastes bland. You might as well eat the packaging it comes in. The fakery of big commerce and the exploitation of novice gastronomes is never more blatant than in cheese production. These are real cheeses. Anything less is rubbish.

  And I tell Jean-Pierre that, once again, we’ve come to the end of the meal without noting enough of the funny things he has said. I’ve been enjoying myself too much, I say. Can he remember anything? ‘Eh ben…’ he says — a colloquial ‘Well’. He furrows his brow between guffaws. Nothing, he says. I’ll bring a digicorder next time, I say menacingly. After strong black coffee and a promise from me to pass on their love to Jean-Pierre’s two sisters in Australia, they drive me to Noisy and the RER. Kisses all round.

  By late evening, I’m ready to try another Bib Gourmand, especially after the success of the Pré Cadet. Buisson Ardent is in the fifth, the Jussieu quarter, which has a lot of students who attend nearby schools of the university. It’s said to be small and has frescoes dating from 1923. I imagine, perhaps unsurprisingly, that it’s a bit of a layabouts’ hangout — tatty, perhaps, and filled with young people in t-shirts who are so relaxed you could carry them about in buckets. The food will be super-cheap, I tell myself, and not especially good.

  Buisson is a complete surprise. It’s tiny all right, a walk-in off busy rue Jussieu. But it’s modestly elegant, its ceiling high. It’s a bit like a palace boudoir. OK, a maidservant’s palace boudoir. No oak floor in herringbone pattern, though. Buisson has small, fawn or chocolate-coloured floor tiles and wall-mounted lamps in art-deco style. They depict a bouquet of white lilies, the flowers of smoked pearlescent glass. Heavy brown art paper overlays timber tables and you use alloy cutlery and acceptable glassware. But a real advantage here are huge cream napkins in heavy worked fabric. The walls are panelled in blue and aqua distemper, and they rise to a plaster frieze. And there are indeed frescoes. Autumnal ones, I suppose you could call them. It’s the Impressionists’ fault — Renoir and Manet especially — for promoting the notion that outdoor leisure in the nineteenth century was idyllic. Romance was exercised in parks and gardens, they argued in oils, and it rubbed off on all kinds of artists well into the twentieth century.

  Although they were conceived and created at a time when Paris vied with Berlin to be Europe’s most amoral city, when mobsters ruled in Chicago and German politics was about to gamble on a monster, Buisson’s wall stories are peaceful, bucolic and charming. A full moon rises behind a mill. Two sheep graze in lush grass beside a winding metre-wide brook. Another panel, another mill (this time powered by wind) and the scene is wintry, snow deep. A nearby lake appears to be frozen. But two panels of lovers are the most arresting. (Buisson’s painters, by the way, were of no more than modest talent, in my view.) Perhaps they are the same couple; it’s hard to tell. In the first, they are chastely kissing in a nineteenth-century manner as they cross a bridge in a town. The second is tragic, its heartbreak enacted in a formal French garden on steps: an urn at the top of a heavy stone balustrade tumbles with pink geraniums; the young woman stands at the top of the flight, her body yearning towards her lover, two steps down. Her right arm is outstretched and he’s kissing her hand with a look of resignation. These things must be, says his body language. She is devastated, and he is probably a cad.

  Buisson offers gastronomic versatility. Starters are listed at 9 euros, mains at 17 euros and desserts at 6 euros ’ excellent prices for restaurant eating in Paris. But there is also a four-course menu for 35 euros, or 45 euros with wines. The wine list is not extensive, but at least Buisson makes available what are called ‘vin de pays’, or modest regional wines, at pretty low prices. Two are on special tonight at 19 euros the bottle, and a 2004 red made from grenache and shiraz grapes in the Duché d’Uzes in the south-west is quite acceptable.

  I select the menu, beginning with two thin ovals of foie gras said to be cooked with red wine. Not a plating that would grace any magazine cover, it puts the fattened liver to the south, strings of balsamic-sweated onion to the north-east and centimetre cubes of mango to the north-west. Balsamic vinegar is terribly chic. It shouldn’t be, in my view. Few chefs restrain it. It needs to be buckled, employed to give the faintest of medicinal accents. Cough-mixture flavours. The onion, said on the menu to be a ‘confiture’, is spoiled by the balsamic, at any rate. The cold foie gras terrine itself is fine, and the mango, said to be a chutney, is more or less just mango.

  Cumin is another flavour that’s popular in France. Again, I find it has to be treated with care. This time, though, it’s well-handled, a nice scent in a central pile of strings of carrot and zucchini. Three scallops in a well-balanced, sour burnt-butter sauce surround the vegies, and the bivalves themselves are springy, tasty and quite sweet. I like it, even if, once again, it is fairly rudimentary on the visual side.

  Tables fill. There are couples, young and old. A family celebration of some sort sees three generations take eight seats. The Buisson packs customers in fairly closely, and before long I’m overhearing a couple restraining themselves to my left. They’re bursting to hammer and tong one another — ‘Tu as le droit?’ (‘You have the right?’) the wife snaps indignantly at one point — and I’m delighted there’s a restaurant between us. I turn off when the husband begins telling his wife that she must try to understand, although I’m all for communication and understanding.

  Dish number three is half a stuffed quail presented on shreds of sweated cabbage. Surrounding the lot is a fine brown juice built, it’s obvious, from an excellent poultry stock. The stuffing is barely OK, though, and it’s too salty. And the little bird — these days they’re bred for the table — is very small, its flesh scant. It’s a jockey of a quail, quite disappointing alongside even the smallest of the species I’ve been served elsewhere. But I finish with a wonderful dish — a slice of terrifically powerful chocolate terrine as dense and rich as a Brazilian striker, and a wonderful mousse au c
hocolat in a pot. A lot of chocolate dust has blown in all over the plate — from a chocolate desert — and there are also chocolate dribbles and almond shavings. I can’t help thinking that, for a country where elegance is prized, it seldom makes it onto restaurant plates.

  I’m not too far from the world’s most famous English-language bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, which is open from noon to midnight, seven days a week. Its address in the rue de la Bûcherie dates from 1951, when it was opened by a young American, George Whitman, who was studying French at the Sorbonne. (A bûcherie has nothing to do with meat, by the way — it’s a woodyard.) Writers Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Alan Ginsberg, among many, sought sanctuary, quiet, reading space and talk here.

  But let’s not confuse the present shop with the original Shakespeare & Company, which Sylvia Beach, a refugee from stifling American Protestantism (she has my sympathy), opened in 1912. Its first address was in the rue Dupuytren; its second and most famous at 12 rue de l’Odéon. On its website, the present Shakespeare & Company says it has continued Sylvia Beach’s legacy. Some legacy! It was to the rue de l’Odéon in April 1921 that James Joyce went to seek consolation after another knockback for his gigantic novel Ulysses. ‘My book will never come out now,’ Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, quotes him as saying. And Sylvia said, ‘Would you let Shakespeare & Company have the honour of bringing out your Ulysses?’ The following year, the greatest twentieth-century English novel appeared. (And wouldn’t we all love to own one of those first thousand copies?) Hemingway borrowed books from Shakespeare & Company because he had no money to buy them. Sylvia, he wrote, ‘had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested… No-one I ever knew was nicer to me.’

  In style and content, the present Shakespeare & Company must be similar to the original. I enter a small front room straight off the street, then realise the place is a warren of nooks and crannies, couches, cushions and cats. The colour of every single well-worn bookshop in the world is brown. (At least bookshops used to be brown, in the days when they sold reading rather than envy.) This place seems browner. It’s dusty and musty and every square centimetre of wall is shelved with books. There are tables supporting stacks of books. Some books are new and some are old. Prices vary erratically. At ten o’clock at night perhaps a dozen people graze intellectually.