My first reaction to anything new is always “Fantastic!” My husband’s is “Why change?” We meet a new couple and I say, “Aren’t they nice?” And my husband will say, “They’re rather nice” (assez gentils), which means that if he could get to know them over the next two hundred years, he’d have the time to judge.
I am overwhelmingly enthusiastic, my husband less so. I don’t suspect everyone I meet of having ulterior motives; my husband is always on his guard. And so on. This doesn’t mean he’s not a great guy, but we find we do have different viewpoints. Fortunately, we have moved beyond the point of taking sides on who is “right” and who is “wrong.” We just chalk up a lot of misunderstandings to cultural differences.
You come here and you think that (apart from a few details) France is more similar to the United States than many other countries. After all, you could have gone to China or Japan. But in truth, living in France is almost as different as living in China or Japan. Because as the years go by, you, the American immigrée, discover that cultural differences run deep below the surface and that what once appeared to be minor quirks are actually major differences.
French Toast is the story of what those cultural gaps turned out to be.
The French and Their Food
The most awesome experiences in France revolve around cuisine. It’s one thing to partake of wonderful French food prepared by eminent chefs in four-star restaurants and quite another to turn out full-fledged French meals in your own home twice a day. Fortunately for me, my husband’s mother, sister, and aunt are all wonderful cooks and hostesses and generous with their knowledge.
Catching on to French food was both easy and complicated. Easy because I had excellent teachers right in my husband’s family. Complicated because, well, deep in my mental pantry, I have a hard time trying to think of what to serve for two full-scale four-to five-course meals a day, seven days a week.
My French sister-in-law doesn’t seem to have this problem. In the family country house, where there are always at least ten people at the table, I watch with wonder as she casually composes each meal. “Now what shall we have for lunch?” she’ll query, thinking of all the possibilities and combinations. And before I have the time to say, “Nothing,” which for my French in-laws would be unthinkable in any event, or “Every man for himself,” which would also be out of the question, she has come up with an answer. Or a possible answer: Her final choice will depend on what looks good at the market that day.
An example might be pâté to start with, then magret de canard (breast of duck) cut into little fillets, accompanied by fresh peas and new potatoes, followed by a big green salad with a delicious homemade vinaigrette, and finally a big plate of wonderful cheese (Brie, Camembert, a chèvre, a blue d’Auvergne) and then ice cream, cake, or fruit, depending on what went before.
I could report that my sister-in-law goes to this trouble only on weekends, but it’s not true. What I just described was a Saturday noon meal. On Saturday night, she proposed a different menu, composed of fresh asparagus with a sauce mousseline, a potato omelette (a family specialty) accompanied by a beautiful lettuce (real lettuce, not iceberg) salad, cheese (again), and a tarte aux fraises (strawberry pie). Whatever the spread is, my sister-in-law is afraid we aren’t getting enough to eat. What?!
I am in awe not just of how effortlessly she pulls all this off but also of one thing that has never ceased to intrigue me: SHE NEVER WEARS AN APRON. Not only am I incapable of dreaming up daily menus like hers (but I’m improving, maybe in another twenty years?); I can’t get near a kitchen without staining my clothes. My perfectly manicured and made-up French sister-in-law stands around in a silk blouse and high-heeled shoes as grease spatters about her but never comes within a centimeter of her.
As an American in a French family, I quickly caught on to the system of courses: the first, the main, the salad, the cheese, the dessert, all of which follow one another and aren’t served together. Being an American with a sweet tooth, thinking of what to serve for dessert never posed a problem for me. I also adore the cheese course because it’s sheer pleasure to select what you want out of the tremendous variety available—the more pungent, the better. The winner on the odor score is the Boulette d’Avesnes, a beer-based vache (cow cheese) rolled in a red pepper dust. If you can swallow a hunk of this stuff, you can down anything cheesy in France. Philippe perversely loves to bring home a Boulette, especially when we’re expecting guests. It’s a test of character. Remember de Gaulle, who asked rhetorically, “How can anyone govern a country with four hundred and fifty different cheeses?” That may not be the number, but the point is that there are so many kinds, the number changes every time the story is told.
The best thing about both the dessert and the cheese is that you can go buy them—good-bye homemade hassle. (You can also buy the pâté; no one in his right mind would make one unless that person had several hours to kill.) When it comes to actually concocting food à la Harriet, well, over the years (thanks to my mother-in-law and my husband’s aunt), I managed to get a few main dishes down pat. In fact, I even got to be rather good or, as the French would say, pas mal (“not bad”) at plats mijotés, those slow-simmering dishes that cook for hours and taste good even a day or two later. When I go to the market and find a cut of meat I don’t recognize or a fish whose name means nothing to me, I just ask the marchand what it is and how to make it (the result is generally a new recipe), and believe me, these guys know what they’re talking about when it comes to food. Et voilà!
The killer for me was, and still is, the hors d’oeuvre. Anyway, why have one? “Why don’t we just move to the essential?” I asked my husband. “Because,” he replied, “if you start with something, even if it’s just a little something, you won’t be as tempted to eat so much of what is to come.” Not bad reasoning, I thought. So I have made a bit of an effort but have yet to live up to my in-laws’ standards. Their first course is so copious that in the beginning, I thought it was the meal. A few bellyaches later, I realized you’ve got to go easy on the first course if you want to make it to the end of the meal without losing face, or anything else.
None of the above knowledge came easily, but that’s okay, because as an American living in France, I can take refuge in the fact that they (the French in general and my French family in particular) have some five centuries of food culture behind them and I have only a couple. So it stands to reason that just thinking about all this is an effort for me and as natural as breathing for them.
When I first came to France over twenty years ago, I decided to introduce the concept of The Sandwich As A Meal to my in-laws. This was pre-McDonald’s, when people like my father-in-law still returned home for lunch, a four-course affair. My mother-in-law, used to the preparation of two ample daily repasts, embraced my idea eagerly. We hence proceeded to prepare sandwiches for lunch and serve one to my father-in-law, normally the soul of tolerance. He gazed at our creation as if it were a strange living creature and, upon being informed that you ate The Sandwich with your hands, commented ironically, “Well, why don’t we all just get down on the floor and throw bones over our shoulders while we’re at it?” That, needless to say, was the last time we ever even entertained the idea of fast food in that family. My father-in-law has since died, but tradition holds. In my belle-famille, a sandwich is not a meal.
In spite of their marvelous culinary tradition, the French seem to be turning up their collective noses at fast food less and less (unfortunately). But not all the French. My mother-in-law and sister-in-law wouldn’t know what “a McDo,” the French nickname for the hamburger emanating from Ray Kroc’s ubiquitous chain, looked like if it was plopped down in front of them, and I have a hard time imagining either of them serving sandwiches for the midday meal or getting their impeccably manicured fingers around sliced bread. They’re having too much fun doing “real” food.
There’s another reason for leaving the kitchen to my French family. My mother-in-law in particular (but my
husband, too) has manies (obsessions), mostly concerning vegetables. For example, washing salads. In my family, my husband has washed lettuce leaves for the past twenty years. This was after he discovered that I hadn’t mastered the technique and probably never would. The technique is separating the leaves one by one and looking at every single leaf to make sure it is perfectly clean and void of those little fleas that prove the lettuce came from a field, then washing the good ones and ripping (not cutting) each leaf one by one into just the right size. My husband flips out at the sight of an imperfect leaf of lettuce, so, hey, he gets to clean them!
Then there are carrots: You cut out the pithy green inside. Tomatoes: My mother-in-law peels them and gently squeezes out the seeds when preparing a tomato salad. (When I do this, it looks like an ax murder. Her salad is a perfect jewel.) Roasts: Slices have to be thin, never thick. My husband, bless his artistic French heart, would never let a boiled potato out of the kitchen unless it had a bit of parsley sprinkled on it. Color! Oh yes, and if you serve a baked potato to my husband or any other Frenchman, he will cheerfully remove every single bit of skin before attacking it. “Only hogs eat potato skins,” exclaims my husband, watching me in horror as I eat the potato, peau and all.
Now, in all truth, I do actually put on two meals a day, but I am the first to confess that my husband is the one who has the talent and the ideas. In this, he is an exception. I don’t know a lot of other Frenchmen who are so gifted in the kitchen. His blanquette de veau is to die for. His potato omelette is perfect. He also makes crêpes. (I can make them, but he can both make them and flip them just so.) Whatever he rustles up is simply delicious. And he does it all with that perfect French nonchalance. I admit I am just a teeny bit vexed when, after years of valiant efforts of thinking up menus and making major meals, people say, “Oh, Philippe is such a wonderful cook!” I shouldn’t be, though, because he’s also the soul of hospitality and has what we laughingly refer to as the “syndrome du chef”—that is, he likes to feed people! In fact, I should thank my lucky stars that when guests come, he often does the whole deal and I get so relaxed, I think I’m at someone else’s party.
Things are much better, though, than they once were. A year after I got married, I decided to take the plunge and invite French guests to dinner. Like a general going into battle, I planned my attack. My strategy was to think out the meal from back to front—that is, retreating from the dessert course methodically back through to the starter (which probably violates all principles of gastronomy, but that’s okay). Nerves are nerves, and my first attempt was fraught with errors. My first course was a simple lettuce salad with chicken livers and bacon tossed with a vinaigrette. I didn’t consider that not everyone likes chicken livers and some people even hate them. So much for the hors d’oeuvre. I tried not to look crushed as the guests pushed those tender bits to the edges of their plates. I thought the French loved liver!
As for the chicken and rice, I mean, how can you go astray when you serve something as basic as a roast chicken? You can in France. One of my guests, a French friend, kindly requested the sauce, which, in the heat of the moment, I had forgotten to serve. Then there was the cheese course. Since the cheese had been stinking up the kitchen, I had put it in the fridge and had forgotten to take it out. So when it arrived at the table, it was cold and had congealed—a major booboo at the French table. The crème caramel of course didn’t have enough caramel. To top it all off, I hadn’t realized how much bread French guests can consume, and I’d had to escape in my apron to the local boulangerie just before the cheese course. The evening lurched from one catastrophe to another, until I was convinced that I would never, never entertain again.
I did, of course, and elaborated the Rochefort Rule: To save an evening, serve plenty of wine. If the guests are relaxed enough, they won’t notice the minor errors. I mastered the major challenges: Don’t forget the bread, follow the order of courses, don’t put the cheese in the fridge, and don’t serve anything on the list of no-no foods, such as squid, oysters, and, yes, even snails or offal. Before I knew this, I prepared a meal with squid—yummy, yummy—and one of my guests almost threw up before asking if she could please have some ham. So much for squid, unless, of course, you poll your guests before dinner: “Do you eat squid, intestines of pigs, et cetera?” My husband and I eat all these disgusting animal parts—brains, ears, tongues, feet, you name it, so I have to remind myself that many people, even French ones, find them revolting.
Of course, I wouldn’t make nearly as many mistakes now as I made then, either in terms of food or social codes. In the early days of my marriage, my husband’s boss called unexpectedly from the airport to inform us that he was in town. I would have let it go by saying, “great, nice to talk to you,” but my husband interpreted the underlying meaning of the call for my innocent foreign ears. This was not a casual hello. It meant, COME AND GET ME AT THE AIRPORT AND INVITE ME TO DINNER. Not being a good French housewife, I had literally next to nothing on hand. We had also just moved into our house, and barely had any furniture, let alone any foie gras. The boss ended up perched at my kitchen table in front of an improvised omelette. There was no bread (the bakery had long since closed), no cheese, and no salad, although there was a terrible dessert. The wine was not up to par. He hated the whole experience.
This disaster did, however, teach me that it is indispensable to have decent food on hand at all times. Unfortunately, to have food, you have to shop, and to shop for staples, you have to go to the supermarket, which is way down the line of relaxing experiences one can have in France. Every time I grocery-shop in this country, which is once a week on the average, I get an acute case of the supermarket blues. In the store, you are jostled, shoved, hit from behind, and squished. It’s normal: If you can fit France into Texas—and France has roughly seven times more people—it’s logical that there are more people and less space in the supermarket.
I thought I was alone in my dislike of the supermarket, but after polling my friends, I found I had a lot of company. “It makes me break out in hives just to think about the weekly shopping expedition,” one friend told me. Outdoor markets are much more fun and I go to them often—but when shopping for a family, one is condemned to paying regular visits to the supermarket for the basics.
The general complaint: There’s no one to bag the stuff! So the whole scene looks like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times with the reel speeding up and speeding up until everything falls apart. First, you are on one end of the line, getting out all your yogurt, milk, soap, and so on, then the checkout person is passing it through, and then, even before you’ve finished unloading the cart, you are suddenly on the other end of the counter, desperately stuffing it into flimsy tiny plastic bags.
In your haste, you see a shadow, a line of fidgety people behind you who watch as you stuff and stuff and can’t quite get everything in. You still have to get in the lettuce and Q-tips and Pampers and figure out how you will get all this to the car without breaking the eggs, when you realize that the person at the cash register has finished checking it through and you have to pay.
As I bag in a frenzy, I suddenly have a vision of my mom’s supermarket (Lund’s in Minneapolis). As befits a northern climate, the percolator is always filled with fresh coffee, which people can sip as they shop. The aisles are wide; it is calm. A kid bags the groceries and takes them out to your car. Am I dreaming?
No wonder Parisian women look like they’re in a bad mood when they’re shopping for groceries. (I say Parisian, because in the provinces, where life is slower, shopping in the supermarket can almost be a pleasure—it all depends on where you are.)
Now, let’s move on to a few helpful hints on what to do when you’re invited to dinner in a French home. Of course, much depends on what kind of French home (uptight or casual). When in doubt, be formal!
Other than learning that you should always have food, and preferably some fancy food, in your house, I learned that when invited, it’s not always good to help ou
t in the kitchen (I’m not much for being in the kitchen when I can be elsewhere, so this problem doesn’t frequently arise for me). However, I did once trek back to the kitchen with a French friend and, to her horror, dumped what I thought was a bowl of water into the sink. It turned out that it was the syrup for her fruit salad. And she did not see the humor of the situation. So much for helping in the kitchen. Fortunately, most French dinner parties are as ritualistic as theater performances: The hostess is the star, and you’re not supposed to mess up her act. This keeps people like me out of the kitchen. (More helpful hints on how to act at a dinner party will appear in the chapter on politesse: Stay tuned!)
I thought that with the importance the French attach to food and with the example of good eating habits and good food given them by their French families, my sons would grow up to teach me a thing or two about la bouffe. Wrong.
My French stepson is just fine on this score, as he was raised in a traditional French family. He’s got a pretty ferocious appetite but eats only at meals. These French-American kids of mine, however, are a total disaster in terms of food (by French standards, that is). Why? The elder one was born with anti-French food taste buds and anti-French eating habits: He does not eat asparagus, any kind of tripe, snails, oysters, barely touches vegetables, and the only fruits he will consent to eat are bananas. He adores hamburgers, pizza, Coke, all that good American stuff. His idea of paradise would be to dispense with the French mealtimes and stuff himself with McDos. (Now that he is at college, that’s exactly what he does, and his French friends are the ones who are astonished at his very un-French way of eating.) My younger son is not a total disaster. In fact, he will taste everything. So what’s the problem? The problem is that he is capable of filling up on two full-course French meals a day, then loading up on Coke and cookies in between.
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