No matter how much the French love food—and they do—they will never let eating get in the way of a good conversation.
We vividly recalled how much French dining rituals are made to get people talking the first time we were invited to a friend’s house for lunch in Paris. Our hostess Janine, a friend from the hiking club Jean-Benoît joined fifteen years ago, had invited us to her apartment in the nineteenth arrondissement for a casual, midweek meal with a few other hiking friends. An elegant widow in her early seventies who walks twenty-five kilometers in the woods every weekend, Janine is also what the French call a redoubtable (a mix of excellent and formidable) cook. She has been known to show up for hikes with fifty crêpes au rhum in her backpack, “just in case we need a snack.” Fortunately, the other lunch guests, all fit, active retirees like Janine, were bonnes fourchettes, healthy eaters: we were about to spend five solid hours eating lunch.
We started with an apéro of champagne, which took about an hour. Then Janine set bowls of cold escargots, small cheese pastries, and shrimp hors d’œuvres on the table. That took another hour. For the main course Janine served steaming bowls of bœuf carottes, beef and carrot stew, with linguine in butter. After another hour passed, she brought out a cheese plate with Camembert, a goat cheese, and an Emmental. Then Janine appeared with the grand finale, an île flottante, floating island, essentially a soft mound of meringue bobbing in crème anglaise (caramel cream sauce). But that wasn’t the final curtain. Another hour passed and we moved back to the living room for the coffee and limoncello, an Italian lemon liqueur, which we drank while Janine told us about her holiday in Italy.
By the time we finished eating lunch, it was practically supper time.
You have to hand it to the French: they know how to pace a meal. French meals have a fixed order for courses. Hosts rarely deviate from these, though some simplify or combine courses to speed things up or cut down on cooking time. First comes the apéro and hors d’œuvres. Then the entrée, which can be more hors d’œuvres, or soup, and doesn’t necessarily have to be eaten at the table. The main course is normally served in large dishes guests help themselves to. Then comes the cheese course (cheese is never an appetizer or an hors d’œuvre in France), then dessert, then a digestif and coffee. It sounds like a lot of food to consume, but it’s not really when you consider meals can last five hours.
Do the French eat slowly and methodically in order to allow plenty of time to talk? Or do they talk in order to kill the time it takes to eat? They probably don’t know themselves. Though French meals are undeniably longer than they need to be, eating rarely feels tedious, partly because the food is so good, partly because the French know how to combine food and conversation and make the whole production feel effortless. After fifteen years of dining with the French (in France, and elsewhere), we’ve come to the conclusion that as much as the French love food, they love talking more. Even food takes a backseat to conversation at the dinner table. The point of the slow pacing is not to fill stomachs gently—it’s to build a frame for conversation.
In other words, talking is the real point of it all.
French meals are built on a series of rather complex table codes meant to give people time to talk. Our friend Janine followed French eating rituals to the letter, creating perfect conditions for her guests to say all the things we had to say. As she served consecutive courses, the conversation topics glided from serious health problems to lighthearted nostalgia, reports on recent trips, intercultural comparisons, and plain old gossip. Over the course of the meal, we compared notes about international adoption: the other couple there, Liliane and Alain, had adopted their son Stéphane, and one other guest, Jacqueline, had a four-year-old grandson adopted from Russia. Then we moved to a heartbreaking subject: one of the guests, Denise, had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and in a streak of disastrous luck, was knocked down the stairs of the Paris metro while her five-year-old granddaughter was watching, traumatizing them both and worsening Denise’s Parkinson’s symptoms overnight.
French dinners come in many shapes and forms, but French meals almost universally share a certain rhythm. That’s because the French believe conversations need time to breathe, like wine. Having many courses is a built-in mechanism to ensure a lot of different topics get on the table. Courses insert into the conversation breaks that give everyone the opportunity to change topic or tone. Otherwise, the French would probably feel like they were eating the same dish all night long.
After the first course, Denise herself changed the topic from Parkinson’s disease. Like all French, she knew that conversation is a shared resource, just like the bowls of escargots, and if you hog it—even with the best of intentions—you might ruin the experience for everyone. The end of the hors d’œuvres offered an elegant opportunity for us to switch to reminiscing about memorable hikes and gossiping about a few unforgettable hikers. One former member we had all known had to leave the club when he became a préfet (prefect), the state’s representative in one of the ninety-nine French départements, and began moving from post to post. We chuckled as the hikers reported all the privileges they had garnered from visiting him at his succession of residences. As the meal progressed, we worked up to some cross-cultural analysis, which gave the hikers the (always) welcome opportunity to vent about France going down the tubes, an eternal complaint. Liliane swore the French “don’t like to talk to each other anymore.”
We told her that was impossible.
French anthropologists who study food and the table recently revived an old, archaic term, commensal (table companion), and turned it into a new concept: commensalité, or table companionship, the ritual of sharing one’s meal. They simply found a name for the quality that is at the heart of France’s relationship with food. To the French, dining is about expressing relationships with others. The idea of commensalité applies to all French, regardless of their background, education, or social class. In contrast to the custom in the United States, in France meals are taken at a fixed hour, at the table, and they avoid eating alone if possible.1 They are akin to Catholic rites, like communion. To be capricious is to exclude oneself, or to excommunicate. If we sent French people to live on Mars and served them dried food out of packets, they would still eat together and observe the same rituals.
Dining rules have been passed down from generation to generation in France—probably not since the days of the Roman Empire, as many French believe, but long enough to convince everyone in the country that there’s no other way to eat properly. Since the nineteenth century, dining rituals have been a subject of serious, even academic, study in France. In one treatise, called Le goût de la conversation (The taste for conversation), the historian Pierre Sansot (mentioned in chapter 6) argues that a table with no ceremony, one that does not respect the order of servings, will “drain conversation.” Nor should the service itself be so elaborate that it “steals the show,” he says. In reality, though French eating habits are deeply ritualized, there’s no philosophy of “appropriate” topics of dinner conversation. You can talk about anything the French will talk about. The idea is to let conversation enjoy its natural lifespan, whatever that turns out to be.
Of course, the French spend a lot of time talking about food itself. You can talk about food anywhere in France, anytime, with just about anyone. Talking about cuisine is not particularly class dependent in France. It’s also a great way to talk to one of the most famous stereotyped characters in France: the waiter (or restaurant owner, as the case may be). North Americans tend to look at people waiting tables as part-time or temporary workers: waiting tables is not a highly respected vocation. But in France, waiting tables is a career. Good waiters have a solid knowledge of the menu and type of cuisine they are serving. Outside of lunch and dinner rushes, when waiters are not pressed for time, most are happy to discuss food at great length. (French waiters also tend to welcome criticism of the food they serve, not just compliments, as long as it is informed.)2
But don’t try to talk to the French about food unless you have at least a basic understanding of terroir. The word itself is difficult to translate. The French originally used it to describe the particular taste wines get from specific soils, growing conditions, and techniques used to create them. It was gradually applied to food, starting in the 1930s, when the French historian Lucien Febvre introduced the concept of France’s “map of food,” which consisted of four territories delineated by the type of fat each used in cooking: butter, olive oil, goose fat, or lard. Some French still refer to France’s four distinct regions and their fonds de cuisine. The actual word terroir only started being used for local specialties around the middle of the twentieth century.
We discovered the concept of terroir during our first stay in France when we heard locals boast about their culinary specialties in almost the same terms, everywhere we went. But when the French talk about terroir, they are not just bragging. Though some of France’s territories are naturally better endowed for culinary achievement than others, discussions about food rarely pit one region against another or place local foods in a hierarchy. Terroir is a synonym for authenticity. Eating cuisine de terroir is a way of connecting to regional identity, and to a certain extent, a gesture of solidarity with the few small-scale farmers left out there who stubbornly resist the trend to industrialize production.
The idea of terroir is not really about taste or quality. Food in France is not for “foodies” (hobby gourmets). In fact, you meet relatively few foodies in France, probably because most French have at least a rudimentary knowledge of French cuisine and no one thinks anything of it. So North American foodies traveling in France are bound to end up feeling foolish unless they know the basics of where things come from in France—which boils down to having a basic knowledge of French geography.
Although France is not the only country in the world with excellent regional cooking, there’s a reason it was the French who branded the notion of terroir: the country does produce an incredible variety of food. France has a natural advantage over most nations (with the possible exceptions of Italy and China) because its territory is remarkably varied, with landscape ranging from high chalk cliffs on the Normandy coast to mountains and volcanic plateaus in the Massif Central, stretching from an almost subarctic climate in the North to a semiarid climate in the Mediterranean and boreal rainforest where the Pyrenees descend into the Atlantic. France even has a natural advantage in climatology: since the average altitude rises almost evenly from the western shores to the eastern interior, rain falls evenly over the country. In short, France has excellent growing conditions from one end of the country to the other.
Famous for his writing on food and eating habits, the French anthropologist Claude Fischler developed a theory in his book L’Homnivore (The Omnivorous Man) that different eating styles of different cultures boil down to the way each determines what is good and bad to eat. North Americans, he argues, use nutritional quality as a benchmark. (Indeed, we spend a lot of time talking about fats and carbohydrates.) The French talk about fat content, too, but they definitely think it’s more interesting to talk about where food comes from than what it’s composed of, or how much fat it contains (though they do worry about this these days).
There’s another reason the French are so focused on food. In a country as politically and administratively centralized as France, food is a politically acceptable way to talk about one’s local origins. Talking about local cuisine allows the French to brag about their native regions without breaching republican doctrine. When the French talk about food, they are talking about themselves. The French are almost always ready to tell a story about the food or the eating habits of their hometown or region. When we served a humble leek and potato soup (the French call it vichyssoise) one night to our friend François, he reached over to the bottle of bordeaux on the table, picked it up, and started pouring wine into his bowl, as one might garnish soup with cream. We thought he was crazy. But all he was doing was showing us that even though he lived in Paris, he was a local boy from Tence, a town near Saint-Étienne in southwest France. “This is how the paysans eat vichyssoise,” he told us proudly (and to our surprise, it was delicious).
When we were eating at François’s house another night, he served us a jambonnette—essentially a sausage made of ground beef rolled in pig’s skin and stewed—that he brought from Saint-Étienne after visiting his father there. We raved about it so he handed us another local product, a saucisson (dried sausage) to take home. Jean-Benoît shared it with his hiking friends the next morning, and they were utterly enraptured. They demanded he supply details about it. Fortunately everything was explained on the package: it was a mountain saucisson, from a charcuterie in Lisieux, address: 43200 Saint-Jeures, Haute Vienne, a town of 950 people located at an altitude of 1,045 meters. That’s the kind of detail the French love getting when they talk about food.
The danger of emphasizing terroir, however, is to over-romanticize it. Insofar as regional specialties are considered to spring from age-old “traditions,” the idea of terroir is often a stretch. As the British writer and historian Graham Robb points out in his remarkable book The Discovery of France, until the beginning of the twentieth century, most French lived on a diet of boiled cabbage, dry bread, and an occasional piece of meat. Many local food specialties were actually luxury products regions exported to Paris and few locals consumed themselves. In other cases, they were the products of the intense efforts the French made, starting in the eighteenth century, to develop the countryside. We visited friends in the department of the Landes, for instance, and stayed in their village, Castets, about an hour north of the Spanish border on the Atlantic coast. Bayonne, just north of the area, is famous for its ham, and the whole area is heavily Spanish influenced with tapas and abundant Basque specialties, including one we loved, piperade (a garlic, onion, and pepper dish). But the fact is, until the nineteenth century, the Landes was pretty much a sandy swamp. Nothing grew there until huge parts of it were drained and planted with pine trees.
And as well endowed as France is geographically, scholars agree that the French attachment to terroir is not about geography so much as the peculiar history of France’s economic development. France industrialized later than the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Germany. Contrary to the British and the Germans, the majority of French didn’t live in cities until the 1950s, when factory jobs attracted them away from their villages. So by the time French peasants started migrating to the cities, education had been in place for decades (the school system was built in the nineteenth century), so they were relatively well educated. Suddenly plunged into modern urban living conditions, the French began to idealize country life. By the 1970s, urban French were taking vacations in the countryside. Urban workers brought the food of their terroirs, and the nostalgia that went with it, back to the city. In other words, French cities to some extent “created” the French countryside. (And, as Graham Robb points out, much of the French countryside itself actually was created by enormous public works projects during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like the one in the Landes.)
Some culinary “traditions” in France, for that matter, are entirely fictitious, like the Savoyard specialty tartiflette, a gratin of potatoes, bacon, and Reblochon cheese. The word tartiflette comes from the Savoyard for potatoes, tartifla. But far from “traditional,” the dish was invented in the 1980s by the cheese association of the Savoie department, ostensibly to find a way to sell more local cheese. The recipe quickly became a classic of French ski resorts and voilà!—a French tradition was born. (A similar dish predated tartiflette, so a case could be made for it being “traditional”; it uses the same ingredients—potatoes, onion, bacon, and cheese—but the potatoes are fried with the skin, and the cheese is dropped in the skillet. Tartiflette has boiled potatoes and is cooked in the oven.)
Today, the French are resolutely urban. According to France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), about 20 percent of the French population lives in a rural setting, but only 2 percent work on a farm. In other words, the French attachment to the land is more about postcard rurality than actual country living. For that matter, though the French strongly embrace the idea of small-scale agricultural production, over 80 percent of what they actually eat is the product of industrial processing. The French have one of the most mechanized and productive agricultural industries in the world. French frozen foods are of such high quality that restaurants regularly use them and pass them off as their own. In April 2013, French chef Alain Ducasse sparked a scandal when he claimed that 75 percent of French restaurants served meals made from ready-cooked ingredients, either frozen or vacuum-sealed.3 There was no official study to back Ducasse’s claims, but the words of a celebrated chef carry weight in France. The city of Paris reacted by creating a new label for restaurants that could prove they actually cook their food from scratch.
Though the French may be hazy about the time line of some of their traditional culinary specialties, that doesn’t change the fact that they know a lot about food and always have a lot to say about it. Even in urban France, people pride themselves on understanding and appreciating what the French land produces. Historically, the French state has been dedicated to centralizing the country and erasing differences, to the point of eradicating local, pre-French languages. But the French learn geography and are remarkably well versed in the various cuisines produced across French territory.
Nothing demonstrates the intensity of French interest in terroir better than France’s Salon international de l’agriculture (International Agriculture Fair) held at Paris’s Parc des expositions. In 2014 the Salon set a new record with seven hundred thousand visitors—that’s one French citizen in a hundred—and made the agricultural fair the second most popular exhibition in the country. In 2014 there were over 130 acres of culinary specialties, as well as machinery and livestock, from twenty-two French regions and four overseas territories. With enough appetite, a visitor could sample every imaginable delicacy in France (though we headed straight for the foie gras sandwiches when we got there and didn’t have room for much more). The French president spends a day at the Salon every year. His visit, highly covered by the media, is considered a litmus test. If a president can handle livestock competently (as Jacques Chirac famously did) then he’s deemed a leader. President François Hollande stuck to tasting food on his visit, without so much as picking up a piglet. His weak performance did nothing for his popularity, which was already on a downward spiral.
Most Parisians, of course, have roots in some other region of France (or another country). This physical distance can serve to heighten passions for terroirs, and the French who holiday in their hometown invariably bring back wine and other products to share with friends in Paris. The rest of the time, Parisians love to talk about where they buy their food, and in the process, unveil their secret knowledge both of food and of the city. We spent hours listening to Parisians tell us about the “best” places to find everything from macarons to choucroute.
One Sunday, when Julie was getting ready to leave Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens, after the girls had been playing in the children’s park, Erika announced she had a question: “Why is everyone speaking English today?” The park did have a remarkably high proportion of English speakers. Julie thought it over, then realized what was going on. It was Sunday morning. The French people were all out grocery shopping. She and the girls walked back to la rue Mouffetard, near our apartment, to see for themselves. La Mouff’, as it is known, is one of Paris’s oldest streets. An ancient winding path (a plaque on the street claims it has existed since Neolithic times), the street somehow survived the renovation of Paris during the nineteenth century, when Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine department, cut straight through the maze of streets and neighborhoods to create the long boulevards and avenues you see in Paris today. After having hit bottom in the 1960s, when it was ghetto, La Mouff’ morphed into a lively street of bars, boutiques, small groceries, specialty food shops, and eateries that cater mostly to tourists and students (the Latin Quarter is full of schools, as the name suggests). But on Sunday mornings, the local French residents literally take it back, arriving in waves and lining up at gourmet bakeries, butcher shops, cheese stores, wine cellars, and fruit and vegetable stores. They are shopping for Sunday dinner.
Meals and meal times in France are amazingly ritualistic. Children are taught the rituals from infancy and those habits are reinforced when they go to school. Specifically, French parents are spared the morning ritual of packing children’s lunches because French schoolchildren either eat at their school’s cantine (cafeteria) or they go home for a proper meal. A quick glance at the cantine menu will teach an outsider a lot about French dining habits. The objective of the cantine is not just to fill children’s stomachs. It’s to edify. Each meal has an appetizer and a main course, followed by cheese or yogurt, then a dessert (often fruit). Children (except our own) do not bring snacks to school, nor are they supplied, even during the after-school programs. In other words, kids are expected to eat what’s on their plates at the proper time, just like everyone else, and then wait until it’s time to eat again.
To many North Americans, the school menu at our daughters’ school would sound pretty grown-up. At lunch, our girls dined on roast pork à l’orange, Comté or raw milk cheese, vegetable potages, turkey escalope à la meunière, veal blanquette, ratatouille, paella, braised pork in Basquaise sauce with Piedmont salad, and rémoulade. Admittedly, it’s not stuff all kids like—even French kids. And the quality of the food varies enormously from school to school. But children in France learn to eat what the rest of society eats. And they learn the rules that French people follow when they eat.
French children are also expected to eat like adults and sit at the table for as long as it takes. It’s not that the French are cruel. On the contrary: they assume children will find the dining experience as pleasant as adults do. At the most, French parents make adjustments to the menu, but they never deface a meal by offering kids fish sticks or chicken nuggets in the middle of it. We’ll never forget a four-hour, nine-course meal we had with our daughters at an avant-garde restaurant, François Gagnaire, in the small city of Puy-en-Velay. The chef and owner marched up to our table, greeted our daughters—who were only six at the time—and told us not to worry. (It seems even French kids are averse to oysters and mushrooms.) A father himself, he told us to order off the menu for the girls, and he would just substitute offending ingredients with carrots and sweet potato purée (he even threw in a lollipop made out of red beet reduction as a garnish). But the most spectacular aspect of it was the dessert: a sugar shack and logs made of crêpes covered with a caramel made of maple syrup. He was remarkably accommodating. On the other hand, he didn’t serve us any faster.
French food habits are changing, though not as thoroughly as many French will lead foreigners to believe (see chapter 10, on French negativism). The French anthropologist Claude Fischler published a book in 2013 called Les alimentations particulières (it translates roughly as “individual eating”) about the arrival in France of special diets, like gluten-free or vegan. During our stay, the populist Parisian daily Le Parisien published an article on an “alarming” development: the French had started to snack. In fact, the article was about a study that found two out of three French now eat between meals. The journalist’s conclusion: the French model of three meals per days was eroding. That seemed alarmist to us, but we had to admit, some attitudes did seem to be changing. When we lived in France fifteen years earlier, McDonald’s was regularly decried as the model of mal bouffe (bad eating). In 2013, Le Figaro classed the fast-food chain among the fastest growing employers in France. With some twelve hundred McDonald’s restaurants, France has more McDonald’s than any country except the United States. So people can’t hate it that much.
More people eat as they work, and lunch breaks are getting shorter, with less wine. The French are also starting to carry lunch in a bag. According to a study of the Mutuelle Malakoff Médéric, in 1990 only 3 percent of employees brought a lunch to work.4 That had grown to 20 percent by 2009 and is now 27 percent. A survey of health and eating habits conducted in 2010 by the National Institute for Prevention and Health Education found that the number of people who only eat one or two courses for their evening meal had risen steadily, from 38 percent in 1998 to 49 percent in 2008. But one thing does remain stable: even if the French agribusiness is one of the most aggressive and productive in the world, portion sizes in France are still relatively small.5
We witnessed a few new rituals that had developed since we lived in France the first time. One that threw us off was l’apéro (before-dinner drinks). There’s nothing new about getting together for drinks. The novelty was that it had become code for a casual light dinner. Our first was at our upstairs neighbors’, a friendly couple whose young school-age children attended the same school as our girls, across the street. Our children met riding scooters and playing soccer in the tiny interior court of our building (kids in Paris work with what they have). A month after making our acquaintance they invited us upstairs on a Saturday night, at 7:30 P.M., for an apéro. We still thought this meant we would have drinks. It turned out to be more of an informal meal of finger food. And at any rate, no one gets together in this country to talk and eat for an hour. We headed home at 10:00 P.M.
We decided to host our own apéro and invited another neighbor we had met at the building Christmas apéro. Gauging the ceremony on our past experiences, we made the invitation for 7:30 P.M. And we made sure we had enough warm pastries, smoked salmon blinis, and canapés to last eight people for a couple of hours. Evidently we overdid things. Our guests good-naturedly complained that they wouldn’t have any room for supper! But then they stayed until midnight. We remain puzzled about this particular ritual.
So what’s the apéro, we wondered? It’s an excuse to get together and talk but without the onerous task of actually cooking a full meal. The unspoken agreement seems to be that you supply just enough food to keep hunger at bay for as long as the conversation lasts. A year, and many apéros, later, the precise characteristics of this mysterious ritual still escaped us: it seemed to assume a new shape every time we attended one.
The late afternoon goûter is another ritual we encountered for the first time, mostly because we now had kids. The verb goûter means “to taste” but as a noun, le goûter stands for a “substantial snack.” Like every food ritual in France, le goûter is governed by unspoken rules: in this case, we discovered (by trial and error), it must be something sweet, like cookies or cake—we had cold slices of French toast one afternoon. Beyond that, there are only guiding principles. Le goûter can happen as early as 4:00 P.M., but can be partaken as late as 6:00 P.M. The idea appears to be to hold children over until supper, and as far as we could tell, adults eat it, too, but only if they are with children. Again, children don’t snack casually, stuffing things in their mouths whenever they are hungry. They partake in a ritual called the snack.
But things in France aren’t changing that quickly, or profoundly, no matter what the French might say themselves. One afternoon, we visited the Musée Rodin, in the seventh arrondissement, with friends visiting from Montreal, Joëlle and Paul and their two sons. By the time we remembered what a food desert this neighborhood is, we had four hungry children on our hands. We finally found a bakery near the Solférino metro, but there was nowhere to sit. So the eight of us piled into the metro, then just pulled out our sandwiches and ate them en route to our next destination. Big faux pas: our fellow metro passengers observed us with a piqued look. You still don’t eat on the run in Paris, especially not when you are in a group.
We got the message loud and clear through the stern glares: no responsible parents should be teaching their children such atrocious eating habits.