Lyon / Salade Lyonnaise
Some ideas appear in the shower, magically whole and crystal-clear perfect. Others creep up on you gradually, sucked up through the subconscious the way a carnation absorbs dyed water, slowly drinking through its stalk until all the petals are blue. My idea to find a job was of the latter variety.
I know. I was supposed to be writing—another novel, a flurry of magazine articles. I should have been pitching travel stories until my fingers fell off from typing. But establishing freelance credentials in another country takes time, and I was still new in town, still trying to separate the fresh ideas from the clichés. Protective of their territory, my fellow American-expat travel writers hadn’t exactly welcomed me with open arms or shared lists of e-mail contacts (not that I expected them to). And my editors, used to articles from me about Asia or Washington, D.C., were confused by my shift in focus. I heard the word “no” a lot: No, thanks. Not for us. I’m not seeing this. Or—the most common form—silence.
As for my new novel . . . Well . . .
“Did you make any progress today?” Calvin’s voice, transmitted from Baghdad over the Internet, sounded tinny and echoey through my computer’s speakers.
“On Le Projet? Not really.” Le Projet was my second novel, the one I was allegedly writing—all fifteen hundred words of it.
It was my favorite time of the day—cocktail hour—when I poured myself a glass of wine, shook some cashews into a little bowl, and met my husband. Virtually, that is. Every evening we chatted by Skype, our voices and images transported over two thousand miles in the blink of a modem. Baghdad is one hour ahead of Paris (two in the winter), and so we started and ended our days at about the same time, a confluence of schedules for which I was grateful. Somehow sharing almost the same time zone made him seem not quite so far away.
“It’s so weird,” I continued. “Every morning the same thing happens. I make myself a cup of tea, sit down at my computer, and . . . log in to Facebook.” We laughed, but I was serious. Ever since Calvin’s departure a month ago, my discipline had been washed away by a sea of cat videos. The life of a writer was not for the faint of heart, or the thin of skin, or the flighty of mind. But I am only human, and I wrestled with bouts of self-doubt and sensitivity and entire afternoons lost to Google searches for narwhals. And now, without Calvin, I struggled with something else: isolation. I had a few friends whom I saw as frequently as social boundaries allowed, perhaps once or twice a week. But I interacted with no one on a daily basis, not even—as I had hoped—the apartment building’s gardienne, who left our mail on the doormat. I craved human contact, to be part of a community. And so, being American, I set out to find one the only way I knew how: work.
“Have you heard back from any bookstores?” Calvin reached to pour another glass of wine, and the image on my monitor distorted, his tender blue eyes and generous mouth dissolving into a blur.
“Nyet.” I had left my résumé with a handful of anglophone bookshops in the hopes that someone was looking for a clerk. So far none had responded.
“Well, perviy blin komom.” Calvin had several Russian phrases that he trotted out from time to time. They all sounded the same to me.
“Uh, never drink vodka on a Moscow balcony in January?”
“The first pancake is always a flop.”
I hit my head with my hand. “How do I always forget that one?” If Calvin had been standing next to me in the kitchen, I might have leaned over and given him an affectionate squeeze. But as we were gazing at each other through our laptops, a pixelated smile had to suffice.
“How about you?” I asked. “How was your day?”
He launched into a tale of office politics, which I followed as if it were a soap opera. I found Calvin’s colleagues fascinating, though I’d never met most of them. I often thought about them at the gym or while washing dishes, wondering if Anjali had eaten at any of the restaurants I’d recommended in New York or if Timothy had chosen Addis Ababa or Kuala Lumpur for his next assignment. Clearly this was another sign that I needed to get out more.
“And then,” Calvin continued, “just as I was heading back to the dorm from the DFAC”—the military dining facility—“a duck-and-cover alarm went off, and I had to wait in a bomb shelter for the all clear. That’s why I was a little late tonight.”
“Were there any bombs?” I took a sip of wine and resisted the urge to down the whole glass.
“I did hear some this time,” he admitted. We both fell quiet, and the silence stretched between us, broken by faint electronic creaks and scratches. “Don’t worry,” he said eventually. “I don’t think there were any direct hits.”
This, then, also haunted my solitude: fear and worry, twin demons that crept through my thoughts, darkening my imagination. I tried to smother them, tried to distract myself by looking for a job or worrying about the whiteflies attacking my window-box planters. But there were words I couldn’t bring myself to say: Mortar fire. Body armor. Car bombs. Attacked convoys. Rationally I knew that Calvin spent most of his time in a fortified embassy compound in the protected Green Zone, reportedly one of the safest places in Baghdad. When he traveled within Iraq (which was more often than I liked), he and his colleagues rode in armored vehicles, accompanied by armed bodyguards. But this was my husband we were talking about—my nearsighted, kindhearted, beloved husband. My favorite person in the world. My anxiety knew no rationality.
“Should we talk the same time tomorrow?” Calvin pushed down the top of the empty Styrofoam take-out box that held his dinner and moved it to the side of his desk.
“Oh, I can’t! I almost forgot—I’m volunteering tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
“At the American Library in Paris.” The English-language library was near the Eiffel Tower. Edith Wharton used to be a member—and Gertrude Stein. “They host weekly author readings. I’ll be helping with the drinks, pouring wine and passing around peanuts.”
“Mmm, red wine and peanuts. That reminds me of . . .”
“Peanut butter and jelly?”
“Doesn’t it? Do you think everyone thinks so?”
“Maybe I can conduct an impromptu survey tomorrow night.”
“I can’t wait to hear all about it.”
I smiled at him, and his eyes crinkled in response, just for a second losing the shadow of perpetual fatigue caused by the pressure of his job, the seven-day workweeks, the worry that his wife was too isolated.
“I think this is a great idea.” It was almost imperceptible, but in his voice I thought I heard a faint note of relief that I was finally getting out of the house.
Calvin was right. Volunteering at the American Library was a great idea. No, not just great. Utterly fantastic. A lucky break. Because if I hadn’t volunteered that night, I would never have known about the job opening for programs manager, the person in charge of inviting writers to talk about their books. It was a part-time job so perfect I would have eaten a big plate of andouillette to get it. Happily, all it took was an interview, during which I managed to convince the library director, Charlie Trueheart, that my experience as a former editorial assistant and first-time novelist meant I was highly skilled at handling the special neuroses unique to authors. When he offered me the job, I felt giddy with happiness.
Now it was early summer, and after a couple of months of brainstorming meetings, gossip over the electric kettle, birthday cakes, and happy hours, I felt enormously grateful to be part of a team. Sure, there were small crises—like the time a famous, bestselling author forgot about his speaking appearance, leaving me scrambling to find a replacement at the last minute. Or the time I miscalculated metric centiliters and spent an entire month’s wine budget on three cases of half bottles. But these mishaps were tiny compared with the comforting exoskeleton of routine the job gave me.
My colleagues were a mix of French people who had studied in the United States and Americans who had dual citizenship with Ireland, which gave them the right to work in Europe. (I have never met so many Americans carrying Irish passports as in Paris.) They were all friendly and collegial, chatting with me in English and using the informal tu right away when we spoke in French. And yet, despite the bilingual setting, the office felt comfortingly American, right down to the communal kitchen that smelled of stale coffee and the flock of fresh-faced summer interns imported straight from New England. I had been too proud to admit it to anyone, but ever since Calvin’s departure I’d struggled to feel at home again in Paris, where the telemarketers repeated themselves loudly and slowly to me as if I were a child, where the cashier at the grocery store refused to break a fifty-euro note, where a polite smile was often met with a blank stare. I sank into the American Library’s friendly familiarity, so lulled by it that I had no idea I was making an enormous cultural gaffe every single day.
I began to get an inkling of the error of my ways one sunny afternoon, when I’d been on the job for a few weeks. I had picked up a salad for lunch—stepping out into beautiful mid-June sunshine and crisp breezes—and brought it back to eat in the office. At my desk I speared a piece of cucumber with one hand and checked my e-mail with the other.
“Ooh, that looks good.” Elizabeth, the children’s librarian, appeared, weaving her way around the desks that made up the open-plan back office. “Did you go to the Greek traiteur?”
“Mmm, yes. Thanks so much for the suggestion.” I pointed to my plastic container of Greek salad and stuffed grape leaves. “I’m so happy to find a light lunch around here. I was having this recurring dream where I opened the office-supply cupboard and found a chopped-salad bar.”
She laughed. “Have a good lunch!” she said before tossing her purse over her shoulder and heading out the door.
I resumed scrolling through my e-mail, pausing when François, the quietly intimidating collections librarian, hurried by my desk. “À plus tard!” I said to his swiftly retreating back.
“Bon appétit!” called the reference librarian, Lisa, as she breezed past, a plastic bag swinging from one hand. Was it my imagination, or did she shoot a disapproving glance at the food on my desk?
Silence descended in the office, which was normal—this was a library, right? But it felt odd without the companionable click of other keyboards. I got up and walked over to the adjoining room of the office and out into the reading room. Even the front desk had a skeleton crew of volunteers. Where was everybody? I checked the kitchen, where I found José, the elegant, gray-haired circulation manager, eating a sandwich and reading a magazine. “Enjoy your lunch,” I whispered, backing out of the room.
* * *
How do you spend your lunch break? I’d always thought of the noonish hour as a chance to step outside, run errands, and pick up a salad or a sandwich, which I’d scarf down back at my desk.
As it turns out, in France the lunch hour is used for . . . well, eating.
According to recent studies, 60 percent of French people enjoy their daily midday meal in a restaurant. Compare this with almost 60 percent of Americans, who eat at their desks while continuing to work. I was one of them. Every day I lunched at my desk, trying hard not to drop crumbs on my computer keyboard, and every day I became increasingly aware of the silence around me.
Though a flurry of recent news articles has reported the demise of the traditional French lunch break, I witnessed the inverse among my colleagues. Even when they heated up leftovers or nibbled on a baguette sandwich, they preferred to dine in the small office kitchen, seated at a table, with a napkin and proper cutlery. After they finished eating, they read a book or took a walk and didn’t return to their desks until the entire hour had elapsed. No one ever said anything to me, but their daily disappearance spoke volumes. So did the employee regulations, which encouraged a lunch break in muscular language. The idea of eating mindlessly and hurriedly in front of the computer was unwholesome to the point of being unhealthy.
Of all the meals eaten in France, I’d argue that lunch is the most important. It’s an opportunity to draw a line between morning and afternoon, a chance not only to satisfy hunger but also to refresh the mind. French children are taught the art of lunch, dining every day in the school cafeteria on four courses, including cheese. For adults a government-mandated, employer-sponsored program helps fund the midday meal, distributing meal vouchers called tickets-restaurants (nicknamed tickets restos and accepted by restaurants and take-out shops) to workers whose offices lack a canteen. According to the Code du Travail, or French labor code, employers are required to offer a pause déjeuner for every six hours of work. In contrast, only twenty-two American states—fewer than half—require a meal break.
Are the United States and France two nations separated by the midday meal? Even our differences in lunch vocabulary seem to indicate our diverging attitudes. Take, for example, the salad, a typical lunch choice from Washington to Paris, Chicago to Lyon. In France there is the salade composée—a pile of lettuce topped with organized piles of cheese and cubes of ham, or flaked tuna and blanched green beans. The very name, that word—“composed”—is that a message? Eat me, the salade composée says, and you will be as serene and unruffled as my name implies. In contrast are American salads: tossed. Quick and convenient, thrown together at a bar, they’re a combination of ingredients and dressings that each person chooses for herself.
The longer I worked at the American Library, the more I thought about lunch. And the more I thought about lunch, the more I contemplated salad. American salads, like chilled iceberg wedges draped in creamy blue-cheese dressing. French salads, like my favorite, lyonnaise, with its contrasts of bitter frisée and salty bacon, tart vinaigrette and quivering poached egg.
“Stop! Stop!” Calvin protested as I described the latter during our nightly Skype chat. “You’re making me too hungry. Any talk about food is like torture.” Calvin ate three meals a day at the embassy’s dining facility, which offered a completely inoffensive menu of bland American classics.
“We’ll eat some when you come home,” I promised.
“I can’t wait.” He smiled at me, and for a moment it felt as if we were in the same room together, as if I could reach out and touch him.
“How many weeks until your vacation?” I glanced at the calendar on my desk. “Five? Oh, no, six.”
We both fell silent. It felt like forever.
“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?”
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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 day 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.”
But what does this have to do with the bouchon?
Remember that for most nineteenth-century canuts life revolved around the mâchon, the morning meal that was often the bright spot of an otherwise dreary workday. It was in the bouchon that they chatted, networked for jobs, complained about their silk prices, debated local politics—and, in all likelihood, plotted demonstrations. Is it too big a leap to suggest that some of the world’s first organized labor movements were fueled by salade lyonnaise?
Lest you think that I’m grasping at straws, I’d like to refer to an article, “Sur un coin de table, le mâchon lyonnais,” by Bruno Benoît, from the French journal Le Dossier: Casse-croûte, which posited this very theory that silk workers hatched the canut revolts over the mâchon.
The daytime meal, whether the mâchon or lunch, was more than just a chance to refuel between morning, noon, and night. It was more, as well, than a restful pause during the day—more even than a chance to laugh with colleagues and commiserate over the evil boss. It was—for the canuts at least—an opportunity to gather, debate, and organize, to try to change their world. I imagined their motto could have been “If you want to go fast, eat alone. If you want to go far, eat together.”
It was so simple. Obvious, really. Salad, lunch, and work—they had been linked all along, a sturdy triumvirate of food, rest, and camaraderie. It took a trip to Lyon to remind me that food has the power to unite, that the act of eating can create a community.
And wasn’t a community what I’d been looking for all along?
* * *
In Lyon I had faithfully learned the importance of lunch. But a few weeks after my trip, back in Paris, my lunches remained the same: a small carton of Greek salad, some hummus spread on a few crackers, eaten alone at my desk. I usually enjoyed the quiet time, reading the newspaper online or catching up on e-mail. But as the days and nights without Calvin wore on, as my evenings at home continued to mirror my lunches—a bit of food eaten in front of the computer—the loneliness started to engulf me once again. At the office I listened to my colleagues make quick phone calls about grocery lists—“Oui, chérie, I’ll pick up some lemons, pas de problème”—before bustling home to walk the dog. In the métro I saw couples on their way to dinner parties, juggling large bouquets of flowers; in the street I passed groups of friends cheek-kissing each other hello.
I had hoped that through my job, I would find a community—and, to a certain extent, I had—but it hadn’t lifted me out of my solitude.
“Why don’t you invite one of your colleagues out for a drink after work?” Calvin said one evening over Skype. “Marie-Claude? She sounds nice.”
“Oh, no. I don’t think so.”
We were having a difficult video chat. Already our connection had broken twice, which always made me extra anxious, and now my patience felt brittle.
“Why not?”
“It’s not that kind of office culture. People don’t socialize outside of work. They go home and spend time with their families.” I didn’t try to hide the note of resentment in my voice.
Calvin pushed his chair back. “It’s almost August. I’ll be home for vacation in two weeks,” he said evenly.
“I know. I’m sorry, I know you want to help.” I hated the anger that flashed through me sometimes, the self-pitying feelings of abandonment. I wanted to move away from those emotions, but too often they pinched me, little demons with sharp fingers. I didn’t want to fight with him, not about a decision that had been made months ago. How could I argue with him while he was in a war zone working twelve-hour days and I was living a life most people—including, at one point, myself—only dreamed about?
“I know you’re not having an easy time. I really, really do.” His brow furrowed into familiar lines, and as I looked at his face, so beloved and dear, my shoulders dropped. I would have given anything for a hug from him at that moment. But at least we had Skype.
I felt awful the next morning, guilty and sad the way I always did after snapping at my husband. But as the day wore on, Calvin and I exchanged jokey e-mails about our downstairs neighbors—the tiny couple who complained constantly about . . . well, everything—and my mood started to brighten. By lunchtime I was ready for a little salad and a few quiet minutes to send Calvin another e-mail.
“I’m going out now. Do you need anything?” Marie-Claude appeared by my desk. Une femme d’un certain âge, she’d worked in the fashion industry before becoming an office manager and still wore high heels every day.
“No, thanks. I brought my lunch.”
“À tout à l’heure,” she said, and turned toward the door, before hesitating. “I’ve been meaning to ask—where do you buy that salad? It looks so fresh.”
“There’s a Greek traiteur on rue Jean-Nicot. You don’t know it? Elizabeth told me about it.”
“It is where, rue Jean-Nicot?”
“It’s a little side street off of rue Saint-Dominique. If you go out of the building and turn right . . .” I paused. “You know what? I’ll come with you and show you where it is.” I stood up and reached for my handbag.
“Really? Oh, c’est gentil! Thank you! I would appreciate that so much!” She held the door open for me. “I love Greek food. My brother lives in Athens,” she said as we walked out into the bright summer day together.
It wasn’t lunch. It wasn’t even le mâchon. But it was a start.