French Lessons (9 page)

After a few minutes of
pleasant indecision, we both chose the same dishes: frogs’ legs, followed
by chicken, with white and red Burgundies from just the other side of the
autoroute. When the bottles were brought to us, I noticed there were no
warnings about the presence of sulfites.

“Good God, no,”
Régis said. “Not here in France. Not in
Burgundy.
Mind
you, one never knows what the law says they have to add when they send it over
to America.” He held his glass up to the light and studied the pale
shimmer of the Meursault. “Which reminds me …” He
chewed on a mouthful of wine before reaching into his pocket. “I cut this
out for you,” he said, smoothing a newspaper clipping on the table in
front of him and passing it over to me. “I thought it was a sign of the
times.”

It was an advertisement. A grizzled gentleman dressed as
a typical cowboy—work shirt, large hat, picturesque wrinkles—was
remarking on the fact that McDonald’s, that most American of
institutions, was now serving only homegrown French chicken in its restaurants
in France. The timing of the advertisement was significant: There had just been
a major scandal in neighboring Belgium involving tainted food, some of it
chicken, while across the Channel, the English, perfidious as always, were
taking France to court for refusing to accept their beef for fear of
la
vache folle,
or mad cow disease. All in all, these were trying times for
the country of Brillat-Savarin and Escoffier, and extra vigilance was needed to
make sure that crafty foreigners didn’t succeed in foisting suspect food
on the trusting French public. The cowboy was there to reassure
McDonald’s addicts that correct Gallic standards were being
maintained.

I asked Régis if he’d ever been to a
McDonald’s. He looked at me as though I were deranged, then shook his
head.

“
Moi?”
he said. “I
wouldn’t go, as a matter of principle. Do you know the average time taken
to eat a McDonald’s meal? Seven and a half minutes! And they’re
proud of it! It’s an affront to the digestion. No, you’ll never
catch me in McDonald’s—although, to be fair, I have heard good
reports about their
pommes
frites.
” I saw his nose
twitch, and he turned his head. “Ah, here come the frogs’
legs.”

The essentials were arranged in front of us: two
well-filled plates, still sizzling; finger bowls; a basket of bread. The tiny
aromatic legs had been sautéed with garlic, then dusted with chopped
parsley. After refilling our glasses and warning us that the plates were hotter
than hot, our young waitress wished us
bon appétit.
Régis bent over to inhale the scent and, using a piece of bread,
maneuvered his first leg to the side of the plate, picked it up with careful
fingers, and examined it.

“The English don’t know what
they’re missing,” he said, stripping the flesh off the bone with
his teeth. He chewed for a moment. “Or are they worried about mad frog
disease?” He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and nodded. “That
must be it.”

With the assurance that comes from being an official
member of the brotherhood of thigh-tasters of Vittel, I dealt with my first few
legs—moist, almost crisp, with the clean flavor of parsley coming through
the garlic. Delicious. Why don’t the English eat them? We certainly have
the ideal climate for frogs, damp and cool. But then the thought occurred to me
that perhaps we have a national aversion to eating things that hop or
slither.

“We’re not too keen on snails, either,” I
said.

“Ah, the snail is different.” Régis sucked a
thighbone thoughtfully. “His purpose in life is to be a vehicle for
garlic—good enough, in his way, but he lacks the finesse of the
frog.” He wiped his plate with a scrap of bread, rinsed his fingers in
the small bowl, and poured more wine. “Do you think all these people are
here for the show?”

I looked around to see if I could spot any
obvious poultry tycoons, with the odd feather still clinging to their clothes,
but it seemed a fairly typical French mixture of friends and families out on a
Saturday night. Several children were there, polishing off their grown-up food
with adult dexterity, and I was struck, as I often am, by the good behavior of
French children when they are taken to restaurants: no squawks, no tantrums, no
earsplitting demands for three courses of ice cream. And their patience never
fails to amaze me. Two hours or more at the table must seem like an eternity to
a seven-year-old.

Régis, as usual, had the answer.
“Watered-down wine,” he said, “that’s the secret. It
has a very calming effect on the young. Also, it’s better for them than
any of those gassy sweet drinks. I myself was brought up from the age of six on
diluted Côtes du Rhone, and look at me.” He beamed across the
table, ruddy-faced and bright-eyed. Heaven knows what his liver looked like,
but externally, he was the picture of health.

The red wine, a
Côte de Beaune from Jadot, was scrutinized, sniffed, rolled around the
palate—“the interrogation of the bottle,” as Régis put
it—and pronounced excellent. And then we saw our chicken making its way
toward our table, the plates held high by the waitress and protected from the
elements by great silver domes, which she removed with a double flourish.

“
Voilà, messieur
s—
poulet
de Bresse à la crème.”
She watched Régis with a
smile as he bent over his plate and, with small encouraging flutters of his
hand, waved the steam rising from the chicken toward his face. He remained
nose-down for a moment, inhaling deeply, then nodded two or three times before
looking up at the girl.

“Tell me if you would, mademoiselle, a
little about the recipe.” He wagged an index finger at the waitress.
“No chef’s secrets, naturally, just the main ingredients.”
Which she did, with the occasional murmured “Ah, yes” or “Of
course” from Régis.

First into the pan goes a generous
knob of butter, followed by the chicken breasts and legs, a large onion cut
into quarters, a dozen or so sliced
champignons de
Pari
s—
those small, tightly capped white mushrooms—a
couple of cloves of garlic
en chemise,
crushed but not peeled, and a
bouquet garni of herbs. When the color of the chicken has turned to deep gold,
a large glass of white wine is poured into the pan and allowed to reduce before
half a liter of crème fraîche is added. The bird is cooked for
thirty minutes, the sauce is strained through a fine sieve, the dish is
seasoned to taste, and there you have it.

The waitress returned to the
kitchen, having made the whole thing sound as easy as preparing a
sandwich.

It was a chicken in triumph, we both agreed. Like the
frogs’ legs, it was moist and tender, almost melting, but with a more
defined taste, the flesh as smooth as the cream it had been cooked in. We ate
at an old-fashioned, pre-McDonald’s pace—slowly, taking pleasure in
each mouthful, and in almost total silence. There was nothing to say except God
bless the chef.

When our waitress came back, she saw two extremely
clean plates. “So it pleased you,
le poule
t
?”
Indeed it had, we told her.
Unctuous
was the only word to describe it.
We asked her to present our congratulations to the supplier of the chicken, the
chef, and, with our complimentary mood well lubricated by Burgundy, to everyone
else who had been involved.

“And how did it compare with the
frogs’ legs?” she asked.

Régis sat back, tapping the
fingertips of both hands together while he thought of an appropriate reply.
“Let me put it this way,” he said. “It was like the
difference between a very good wine and one of the great vintages.”

The waitress inclined her head, and shrugged.
“C’est
normal,”
she said. “The chicken, after all, has the
appellation contrôlée.
Whereas the frog, no matter how
worthy, is still just a frog.” She cleared away our plates and suggested
a little local cheese, the Bleu de Bresse, to go with the last of the
wine.

The cheese, pungent and creamy enough to coat the palate and
flatter the wine, set Régis off on one of the many hobbyhorses he keeps
in his stable: the importance of eating food at the right time of year and in
the right place. Strawberries at Christmas, wild boar in June, and all the
other exotic delights made permanently available through modern methods of
preservation, he rejected with a wave of his glass. That’s fine for
supermarkets, he said. But the truly educated gourmet (doubtless a Frenchman)
eats only what is in season. And if he’s lucky, as we were that night, he
eats the local specialties on the spot, where they are produced.

It
made excellent sense, I said, as long as our educated gourmet had unlimited
time and the resources to follow his appetite all over the country. As soon as
I spoke, I realized I should have known better. Régis leaned forward,
his eyes glittering in the candlelight. “That’s it!” he said.
“That’s what we should do next—a gastronomic Tour de France.
Imagine: those little corners where they produce the best food in the world,
and we could be there at the
moment juste
for the asparagus, the
spring lamb, the oysters.…” His face took on the dreamy, faraway
expression of a man contemplating an imminent journey to paradise, and it took
the offer of a glass of Calvados to bring him down to earth. He was still
muttering about lark’s tongues and truffles half an hour later, as we
walked back to our hotel in the bitter December night air.

The following morning was the moment of truth for the
most noble poultry in France. Régis and I were there at the Parc des
Expositions as the doors opened, and were swept through in the first wave of
enthusiasts. Two vast spaces were devoted to the exhibition, and a quick
inspection showed that one was allocated to the living and the other to the
dead. Drawn by the sound of chirping, we went first into the hall of the
living. In the central space, a series of small fenced gardens had been set up
and landscaped with rocks and foliage and verdant artificial grass; lining the
outside perimeter of the hall were stalls providing refreshment for those in
need.

Régis rubbed his hands as he took stock of the dozens of
trestle tables laid out with smoked ham, sausage, cheeses, handmade country
bread, pâtés and a selection of wines from as far north as
Champagne and as far south as Châteauneuf, the yellow wine of the Jura
side by side with Beaujolais and the heavier Burgundies. A greedy and
unprincipled man, as he observed rather piously, could eat and drink extremely
well without spending a centime, simply by taking advantage of the free samples
on offer.

I steered him away from a bulging sausage the size of a
weight lifter’s bicep and over to the heated compound set aside for
chicks. Clearly excited by their first public appearance, they were scurrying
around and chirping loudly enough to drown the sound of the early-morning
grumbles of the loudspeaker system. A series of notices planted in the fake
grass informed us of the life these chicks could expect. After five weeks in
centrally heated
poussinières,
they would be let out into the
open, with at least ten square meters of grassland per chicken, to spend
anything from nine to twenty-three weeks feeding on natural rations (worms,
insects, small mollusks) supplemented by maize, wheat, and milk. These months
in the fields would be followed by a fattening period, during which two square
meals a day would be served to them in capacious wooden cages. This,
apparently, was the secret of the unctuous flesh.

We were able to see
the results of this privileged upbringing in a neighboring compound. It may be
difficult to imagine such a thing as a glamorous chicken if you’ve never
seen one, but these were as close as it gets: plumage as white and spotless as
fresh snow, vivid red crests, bright and beady eyes, and those aristocratic
blue feet. Their walk was stately and deliberate; they paused between steps,
holding one foot in the air, as though they were tiptoeing across a sheet of
paper-thin ice. Each bird wore the aluminum ring, stamped with the
breeder’s name and address, around the left ankle. There is no chance of
a Bresse chicken crossing the road and finding anonymity on the other
side.

I heard what sounded like a dogfight, followed the noise, and
discovered that there was more to the exhibition than chickens. Half a dozen
turkeys, magnificent black-feathered beasts a good three feet tall, were
complaining—possibly about the uncomfortable proximity of
Christmas—their wattles quivering with indignation each time they gave
voice. All they needed were pearl necklaces and they could have passed for
dowager duchesses bemoaning the declining standards of the House of Lords. They
made a curious yapping, not at all the soothing gobble I had expected; more
like a squabble of terriers.

Régis had disappeared, and I went
to look for him among the crowd. There were farmers and chicken breeders,
cheese makers and winegrowers, some in suits and ties, their unaccustomed
formality sitting uneasily on bodies more used to overalls. There were
occasional flashes of chic—women in sleek tweeds and country jewelry,
with conspicuously glowing makeup, clean shoes, and the odd jaunty hat with a
pheasant feather stuck in the band. And then a sight straight out of the
nineteenth century—a group of men and women in traditional Bressane
costume, waistcoats, breeches, long dresses, bonnets and clogs, clattering off
to a corner of the hall.

I tagged on behind them, watching as they
adjusted their bonnets and tuned up blunt musical instruments that looked like
acoustic tennis rackets. Forming up in pairs, off they went, circling around as
they performed their rustic minuet, the music punctuated by high-pitched cries
and the stamp of clogs. I dimly remembered a dance known as the funky chicken,
which came and went back in the sixties. This must be the original version, I
thought.