La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (22 page)

I asked Pauline about the relationship between perfume and seduction, unsure of the answer she would give me. To put it bluntly, she didn’t seem to be trying very hard. Her full body was hidden under a loose black-and-white dress that nearly reached the floor. Large glasses sat crooked on her nose; her bangs fell into her eyes; no lipstick or rouge adorned her face. Her black shoes had square toes and clunky heels. She was a French version of Agnes Gooch, the unglamorous stenographer in
Mame
.

But Pauline and I found a connection, and the conversation turned to her own life. “If you don’t seduce in France, you’re a nobody,” she said. “I’m very shy, and if you’re plain or if you’re shy and if you don’t put yourself out in front, you don’t fit the mold. I tell myself that if I stay in a corner, it won’t work, but if I’m smiling and really show I want something, then it comes. It’s a kind of game.”

“Do you wear perfume?” I asked.

“Of course,” she replied. Her lips parted and she smiled. “My husband knew I always wanted Chanel No. 5, and a few years ago he gave it to me. When I opened it, I asked him, ‘Must I do like Marilyn?’”

“Like Marilyn? Marilyn Monroe?” I asked.

“Yes, Marilyn said that all I wear when I’m in bed is Chanel No. 5,” she explained. “My husband said he would like that. So I said to myself, ‘Let me be quite crazy.’ And I took off all my clothes.”

Suddenly, right before my eyes, Pauline became a sex goddess. I think I was beginning to understand the power of perfume.

I had never had a gastronomic orgasm before I met Guy Savoy. Sure, I appreciate good food. In our basement kitchen when I was child, my grandfather taught me how to pickle eggplant, simmer tripe in tomatoes, and grill lambs’ heads with lemon and rosemary. He introduced me at the age of five to the wine he made in our backyard every summer and kept in two oak barrels in the cellar, next to his tools.

My father owned an Italian grocery store in Niagara Falls and sold provolone and parmesan, prosciutto and salami, homemade sausages and hand-cranked pasta-making machines, in the days when real Italians called it pasta, but everyone else still said macaroni. In the front of the store, he put wicker baskets of
petits-gris
escargots that came from France, until the government banned their importation. There was fresh-baked Italian bread on the family dinner table every evening.

Food was straightforward. As an adult, I sometimes thought the rapturous dining ecstasies described by brilliant food critics like Mimi Sheraton were over the top and a bit unreal. But there I was one morning in Paris with one of France’s three-star chefs, allowing myself to get carried away.

I had declined Savoy’s invitation for dinner—it could have cost five hundred dollars and would have violated my newspaper’s ban on accepting a gift of value. But breakfast, I figured, should be safely within the rules.

Before then, I had seen Savoy only in his virginal whites: a starched, double-breasted chef’s uniform that stretched tight over his belly and made him look older than his fifty-six years. That morning, he met me at the entrance to the modern restaurant that bears his name just off the Champs-Élysées wearing a black turtleneck and pressed gray slacks. The off-duty look threw me. It made his black eyebrows darker and contrasted nicely with his white hair and graying beard. He had lost his slightly rounded chef look. He led me into a private, dimly lit dining room with the window shade drawn and sat me in an armchair at a linen-covered round table. The room was small, and we were seated close together. A primitive African sculpture of a nude woman with breasts protruding like projectiles was just a few inches away. It felt naughty.

It was 9:00 a.m., but this was a moment for champagne, not orange juice and coffee. A salad of asparagus and Parma ham came first, an initial warming caress. Then fluffy soft eggs with specks of black truffle. Savoy likes to call himself a man of the soil, and the truffle portions must have seemed stingy. So he called for a truffle the size of a baseball and shoved it under my nose. “Breathe,” he ordered. I inhaled. “Breathe again, deeper!” The aroma was musky and strong, penetrating my nasal passages and down into my throat. Wielding a small grater, he scattered slices of the fat, gnarled tuber over the eggs. Slowly at first, then faster and more frenzied. He couldn’t stop. The slices flew past the plate and onto the tablecloth.

“Now I’ll show you what real food is about!” he said. He cut two pieces of a crusty stick of bread, spread them with unsalted butter, and topped them with thick slices of black truffle. He handed one to me and took one for himself. We popped them into our mouths at the same moment. We chewed, slowly. We swallowed. We exchanged looks. Nothing was said. It was too intimate a moment. We both knew what we were feeling.

He had won me.

“I am seduced,” he said, “by the magic of real taste. We are in the concrete here. You can see the truffle on the bread, anticipate it, feel it, smell it, taste it, savor it. This taste is exuberant but not violent. Alas, we live in a virtual world—of video games, blogs, financial bubbles. Gastronomy is not that.”

Savoy railed about the pretension of so-called food artists who use chemistry to turn truffle oil into fake caviar and zucchini flowers into foam. “Cooking is about the art of creating, of transformation, of pleasing,” he said. “The act of a woman preparing and serving a meal for her husband and children is nothing else than an act of seduction.”

I asked him the source of his inspiration. He talked about his childhood and how his mother introduced him to the transformation of ingredients. He was about six years old, and they baked a simple cookie called
langue de chat
—cat’s tongue. It was in her small restaurant attached to their home in rural France that he said he discovered the driving force behind cooking and eating: “Pleasure.”

Here was the key to understanding real taste: it comes with
petits plaisirs
, small pleasures. Sure, we were enjoying ours on this day in a very fancy setting, and one pleasure was a truffle, one of the most expensive foodstuffs in the world. But Savoy was making a larger point: that satisfaction in life can come from a series of small, simple, everyday pleasures.

“Is your mother still cooking?” I asked.

Yes.

“Will you take me to meet her?”

Of course.

Savoy is a chef who is constantly surprised by food and who longs to turn it into something seductive for others. It sounds like a cliché, but Savoy makes food sexy. He supervised a documentary in which over the course of a year he visits ten people whose products he buys for his restaurants. In the film, he is constantly touching, tasting, licking, smelling, as if food were a woman and he a man obsessed with her. His odyssey of culinary sensuality is not just a show; it’s genuine pleasure. He tastes snow. He dips a finger—twice—in walnut oil and then lets the oil dribble onto a slice of bread. He dips a finger at another point into melted milk chocolate and then into raw milk. He picks up a piece of hot white cheese with his fingers and eats it, saying it tastes like flowers. He licks his fingers as he pulls apart a lobster. For Savoy, the smell and taste of the golden wine from Château d’Yquem is emotionally “moving,” the pale skin of a plump, raw chicken is “amazing,” like “satin.”

Long ago, France refined the preparation of food and the production of wine into seductive arts. But as much as Savoy reflects and upholds the country’s gastronomic honor and traditions, he seems to be fighting the future. A downward trend line has been clear for decades: the food of France is in decline; French wine, while holding its reputation for quality, is facing stiff competition from every continent. Every year, with the French economy struggling and the global cachet of French food and cooking diminishing, the predictions get bleaker.

There is some truth to the frequent lament that France’s rich culinary heritage—from the Michelin-starred restaurants to the neighborhood café, from the produce at neighborhood outdoor markets to the meat and fish at Rungis, the largest wholesale food market in the world—is suffering.

In his book
Au Revoir to All That
, the American journalist Michael Steinberger mourned the death of French food. Every depressing statistic was another dagger into the heart. A generation ago, the average meal in France lasted eighty-eight minutes; now it ends after thirty-three. Mega-supermarkets account for 75 percent of all retail food sales in France. Starbucks, which opened its first outlet in Paris near the Opéra Garnier in 2004, had more than fifty branches in and around the capital by 2011. In 1960, there were 200,000 cafés in France; now there are about 40,000. Wine consumption in France has dropped by 50 percent since the late 1960s. By 2009, McDonald’s had more than 1,100 outlets in France; one had even opened at the Louvre! And,
quelle horreur
, France is McDonald’s most profitable market after the United States. And on and on.

But the woe-is-me attitude somehow misses the point. There is a ritual at play in France—the search for the products, the preparation of the meal, the tasting and savoring, the memory of what is eaten recalled. The food on the plate is seductive, and the diner is eager to be seduced. This is not chemistry class but a love rooted in the soil, an appreciation of the classics and a feeling—shared by the simplest worker and the most lofty aristocrat—that food in France is about happiness.

“What I love about gastronomy in France is the idea of being led astray,” said Basil Katz, a Franco-American journalist and a former chef. “A good dish will make you forget how much butter is used in the sauce, that you’re eating what used to be a live animal, that the finished product is a clever mise-en-scène meant to deceive and prick your senses—from a sound like the crunch of crispy potatoes to the feel when you grab an asparagus and it is warm, slightly stiff with a little give but not too much.”

The French take pride in sharing knowledge about what Americans may consider the most ordinary of tastes: water. Dominique Hériard Dubreuil, the president of Rémy Cointreau and a member of my French women’s club, told me that water is the best medium for learning how to taste. Hériard Dubreuil’s mother has trained the palates of her young grandchildren by serving them an assortment of mineral waters and teaching them to focus on the differences: which one is salty, which one is milky, which one is metallic.

Even as French patterns of cooking and eating change, an authenticity endures. The genius of French cuisine does not rest in theatrical presentations. Some cheeses disappear, but new ones—real farm cheeses—are being created. Old varieties of fruits and vegetables are being resurrected. Food produced in France remains among the most diverse in the world.

In 2010, the French meal was recognized as part of the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations. The campaign had been launched by President Sarkozy in 2008, when he called French cuisine the best in the world and proclaimed his desire to make France the first country whose gastronomy would be so honored.

UNESCO did not declare French cuisine the world’s finest or warn that its fruits, vegetables, poultry, or signature dishes were endangered. Rather, it honored the French mealtime tradition, with its rituals, table settings, multiplicity of courses, and the matching of wines with food. (At the same time, UNESCO also recognized Turkish oil wrestling, Azerbaijani carpets, and Croatian gingerbread.) It was only a symbolic gesture, and some food experts and critics called it a bit pathetic, but it fit in well with the French sense of national pride.

The guild-based industry of transformation still exists in France—the art and craft of turning raw food products into objects of desire through manual labor. Tightly hierarchical kitchens still contain armies of laborers who carve perfect florets out of carrots and cut vegetables into perfect eighth-of-an-inch cubes. There are no shortcuts.

Gilles Epié, the owner and chef at Citrus Etoile, who ran the Los Angeles restaurant L’Orangerie for three years, returned home a French chauvinist. “The turbot you find in New York—it’s not what you find in Brittany,” he told me. “The cèpe mushrooms in Washington State have no resemblance to ours. It’s impossible to find fresh ducklings. When I asked a supplier in Colorado for a baby lamb, he looked at me as if I were a pedophile! He was ready to call the police.

“In L.A., they only want to eat salad. When you buy fish in a fish store, there aren’t any heads, as if they aren’t animals. You feel like you’re in a pharmacy. I want my fish with heads! If a fish is served with bones, clients call their lawyer.”

Food is consistently presented in France as a source of pleasure, and gustatory is so close to amatory delight that the lines may sometimes blur.

This is a country where I have switched on the morning news to find myself tuned into a scholarly discussion about the aphrodisiac properties of arugula or experiments on the use of escargot mucus to make a facial moisturizer. Artichokes are reputed to heal both body and soul; just about every French food writer praises truffles as helping to arouse lust. I have learned that tripe is a “sexual” food that can have “troubling” effects, along with certain mushrooms, shellfish, and strong cheeses whose smell is close to that of human sweat.

In 2010 Francis Martin, a plant biologist at the University of Nancy, and his team of researchers announced that the black truffle of Périgord has a sex life. In decoding the genome of the treasured fungus, they discovered that truffles are not asexual but are either male or female. Martin has advised truffle growers to encourage sexual intercourse by injecting oak tree roots (the truffles’ habitat) with both male and female truffle spores.

French literature and cinema reflect this habit of association between love and food. In the dinner scene in Guy de Maupassant’s novel
Bel-Ami
, the different courses are sexualized: “The Ostend oysters were brought in, tiny and plump, like little ears enclosed in shells, and melting between the tongue and the palate like salted bonbons. Then, after the soup, a trout was served, as rose-tinted as a young girl, and the guests began to talk.”

Today, when Fauchon, the luxury-food emporium, advertises a new line of take-out box lunches, it starts with a classic place setting: two forks, two knives, two glasses. Instead of a plate, however, there is a woman’s slightly opened mouth, her lips plumped up and painted in frosted rose that glints in the light.

In France, outsiders can be judged by their level of appreciation of food and knowledge of wine. James Bond, the fictional British secret agent, for example, spoke French, sported a French cigarette lighter and cuff links, drank Bollinger champagne, and ordered vodka martinis with a splash of Lillet. But his savoir faire—and therefore his seductiveness—apparently ended at the dinner table.

At a scholarly conference in Paris in 2007, the French researcher Claire Dixsaut cut down 007 in a way that his adversaries never could. Bond “never ordered a gastronomic menu,” she sniffed. “He loved grilled chops, sole meunière, rare tournedos, and fresh vegetables. He was, at the table, as in his investigations, in search of the truth,” nothing more. No raptures of culinary pleasure here. It got worse. “Bond,” Dixsaut declared with the solemnity of a judge, “was a pitiful connoisseur of wine.”

The French take their wine as seriously as their food. Wine is not just a product that is produced and consumed. It is an idea about France: a way of doing things, the celebration of a common past, the pleasure of sharing, the preservation of the magic and myth of the
terroir
—arable soil, but more like soul than soil, since the word embraces geology, history, family heritage, climate, and farming methods. Just about all the French people I have ever met, except for practicing Muslims, are interested in talking about, buying, storing, and drinking wine.