A Moveable Feast (19 page)

David Lebovitz is a pastry chef and baker from the San Francisco Bay Area, who worked at Chez Panisse in Berkeley for thirteen years. He is the author of five cookbooks, including
The Perfect Scoop,
a guide to making ice cream, and
Ready for Dessert,
a compendium of his all-time favourite desserts. He has been living in France for nearly a decade and penned a memoir (with recipes) called
The Sweet Life in Paris,
which chronicled his adjustment to living in a foreign land; the book was a finalist for an International Association of Culinary Professionals literary award. David also writes a popular blog,
www.davidlebovitz.com
, which features recipes, Paris travel tips and stories about coping with life in the world’s most popular – and sometimes perplexing – city.

Where does one begin when it comes to the origins of French cuisine, often regarded as the pinnacle of high gastronomy? It might be with the biography of Antoine Carême, considered the patron saint of all chefs, who rose from being an abandoned child to cooking for French royalty, including baking the wedding
cake for Napoleon III. Carême was so committed to his craft that he died for the cause – of carbon monoxide poisoning, the result of a lifetime of cooking in unventilated kitchens.

A few decades later,
The Belly of Paris
was written by Emile Zola. It’s worth plodding through this sappy tale to read firsthand accounts of the astounding market of Les Halles in all its gastronomic
richesse,
where magnificent French cheeses, charcuterie and produce converged from across the country, creating what was the world’s most thrilling marketplace in the centre of Paris for nearly 1000 years.

Weighing in at over seven pounds, nearly twice what a jumbo loaf of
pain
Poilâne clocks in at,
Larousse Gastronomique
provides an encyclopedic overview of
l’art de la cuisine française.
First published in 1938, it gave concrete definitions to French cuisine. It’s still in print and is considered the standard when it comes to defining and explaining the myriad classic sauces, techniques and culinary terms that are de rigueur for professional cooks to know and master. If one has a question about a recipe or technique, from whipping up a simple mayonnaise to mastering a mousse-like
marquise au chocolat,
Larousse gets the final say.

All these are culinary classics, but change is in the air. Les Halles was demolished in the 1970s and all the merchants were moved to a grey, soulless warehouse out by the airport. The latest edition of Larousse has blurbs by –
mon dieu!
– British cook Jamie Oliver, potty-mouthed US chefs David Chang and Anthony Bourdain, and American home cooks Martha Stewart and Ina Garten. Even the two French chefs who lend their words of praise, Jacques Pépin and Daniel Boulud, both live and work across the Atlantic – in America.

The French have not completely turned their backs on their treasured men in
toques,
however; in recent years, chefs Paul Bocuse and Alain Ducasse have been honoured by the Musée Grévin in Paris, which replicated their images in
la cire
(wax).
Still, unlike those
métro
tickets you’re saving from your last trip to Paris, which will work for all of eternity, other things in France don’t last forever, and when three-star chef Bernard Loiseau (who completed the trilogy of French chefs honoured at the waxworks museum) committed suicide in 2003, allegedly because of a rumour that he was going to lose his hard-earned third star, French chefs went on high alert that something had gone amiss. Although Michelin later revealed it had no intention of demoting Loiseau from his three-star status, his passing made many starred chefs question the point of doing what they were doing. All were spending enormous sums of money, racking up debts of hundreds of thousands of euros in the hope of getting, and guarding, that final star that sealed their success. Once anointed, they’d be considered
le top du top
in the culinary business, part of an exclusive club, a privileged handful selected annually by a roving band of anonymous inspectors who dined alone and never revealed their identities nor their exacting standards of inspection.

(This reminds me of my visa appointments, where they give you some vague idea of what documents you need to bring, but fail to provide a concrete list so you can properly prepare for it. I, too, have considered ending it all by plunging myself into the Seine after each of my annual appointments at Paris’s fearsome
préfecture de police
.)

Even before the time of Loiseau’s death – though many admitted the trend was accelerated because of his suicide – many French chefs were getting out of the
luxe
business, yanking the smooth linen tablecloths off the tables, trashing the whisper-thin wine glasses, and dressing down the waiters to jeans and T-shirts rather than constrictive tuxedos. Tables were set with stiff butcher’s paper, wine was to be drunk out of supermarket-quality wine glasses and, perhaps most telling, the classic French bistro accoutrement, pots of Dijon mustard, were proudly back on the table.

The
bistro gastronomique
movement was born, and instead of paying €33 for a bowl of soup or a slice of cake, guests could eat quite well on a three- or four-course
prix-fixe
menu for less than the price of the long-cooked tomato dessert at L’Arpège – which might have you simmering too, when you found out it cost over €50. (Actually, two could dine for the price of one of those tomatoes, which seemed like a pretty good idea to me too.) The success of the
gastro bistros
that opened in Paris during the 1990s was proof that guests didn’t care all that much about having a tufted Hermès stool brought to the table for their handbags, and that they preferred a meaty slab of
pâté de campagne
and a crock of cornichons to a team of waiters standing behind you monitoring your every mouthful, ready to pounce in case you needed a bit more bread or wanted guidance to the restroom.

It was a win-win situation: guests got to eat well, enjoying traditional French fare prepared with high-quality ingredients, served at reasonable prices. A lot of chefs were happy about it too; many noted that they were relieved of the stress of no longer having to have four cooks spend their entire shift peeling peas, or making sure the soap in the restrooms had perfectly shaved ninety-degree corners, lest the Michelin inspectors make a stop in the can. They could just prepare hearty French dishes, using inexpensive cuts of meat that benefited from long braising, and instead of stocking a wine
cave
filled with exceptional vintages, a hand-written chalkboard could make the daily announcement of which wines were on offer, sold inexpensively by the carafe. I happily ate in a lot of these restaurants, and except for how difficult it became to get a reservation, it was hard to find fault with them.

Well, apparently not everyone thought things were going well. In 2000 a movement with undoubtedly the most unfortunate name in French culinary history – or all culinary history, for that matter – was founded: Le Fooding. The idea seemed like a good
one, I suppose, though I’m not so sure because no-one seemed to have a concrete idea of what Le Fooding was. Even the founders.

They issued a statement that they wanted to ‘make a statement’. But as with many things the French do, it was hard to decipher the circular logic and figure out what the rationale was. What statement were they trying to make? The Spanish had come up with molecular gastronomy, Americans were embracing regional cooking, and British chefs were doing their best to erase unpleasant memories of boiled steaks and mushy grey peas.

What were the French doing? The only thing I could come up with was that the French love organising and categorising things, like the annual meetings we foreigners must endure at the
préfecture,
or city hall, where you need to show up with a minimum of seven
dossiers
that include the last five years of bank statements, photocopied in triplicate, proof that you’ve indeed been paying your electricity bill (because, lord knows, they don’t want anyone not living with electricity) and your original sixth-grade report card, professionally translated and notarised back in your home country. No photocopies accepted.

The French also like ‘movements’. A strike or demonstration is a
mouvement social,
which are those special times when the French get to exercise one-third of their national motto:
liberté, fraternité et égalité.
So they march in
fraternité
and in solidarity with their brethren down the boulevards of Paris, somehow forgetting about any
égalité
with their brethren when squashed together on the
métro,
packed so tightly that you’d better not get an itch on your nose because you can forget about making any sort of
mouvement
with your arms. And I know a few women who’ve told me that at times they’d like a little
liberté
when men have tried to become a little too
social
with them when the subway is that packed.

So an organisation and a movement was off and running, and a bunch of restaurants in Paris became part of the
Le Fooding
Guide
, an annual magazine that boasted
‘864 restaurants de style’.
I was immediately leery because I’ve found that restaurants that boast ‘style’ usually mean they have attractive yet completely disinterested hostesses who greet you as if they’d rather be doing anything than checking to see if your name is in the reservation book. And you can be sure at such stylish establishments that at least one corner of each plate – square, of course – will be dusted with some sort of powder that may, or more likely may not, have anything to do with the dish.

Trying to stir things up, some of these chefs started to do all sorts of audacious things. Cumin became de rigueur. I remember sitting through a three-course meal at a stylish wine bar in the 5th
arrondissement
where each course had at least a tablespoon of it either mixed in or featured somewhere on the dish. One day, a package arrived with a generous sample of a French chocolate riddled with the stuff. When I pried the lid off the container and took a whiff, I had a true Proustian moment: I was transported right back to my high-school locker room, to the canvas bin where we tossed our stinky jock straps and gym socks after running around the sports field for a few hours. Peeling off those sweaty clothes was, I’ll admit, a pleasant memory. But not necessarily one I wanted to recount over a bowl of steamy soup.

One chef in Paris, testing the limits of his imagination and our stomachs, held an event called ‘Les Incorrects’ and politically incorrectly served raw horsemeat pounded as carpaccio. Another cooked up a rabbit stew with
tagada.
If you’re not French,
tagada
may sound like an exotic, elusive spice to you, which might go well with a lovely
plat du jour
of braised hare. Except
tagada
are bright red, artificially flavoured strawberry marshmallows, best appreciated by folks under the age of seven. The
cheval
-spurring chef dared guests to eat his horsemeat, announcing that people should stop thinking about where food comes from and just eat it. Oddly, this announcement was pretty much in contrast to the
rest of the world, where many people had been taken ill because they hadn’t sufficiently cared about where their food had come from, and as a result, food safety scares were becoming commonplace, prompting massive recalls of produce.

Around the same time, I tried horse milk, which I saw at the swank La Grande Épicerie supermarket. I reported about this on my website and then made a casual mention that because it’s sold in France, I should probably give horsemeat a try as well. Almost immediately, someone who raises horses in North America, where the horsemeat in France comes from, strongly cautioned me that I should take a pass, as those horses aren’t raised for consumption and are injected with all sorts of hormones and hazardous chemicals. In that case, pass the marshmallows.

The whole incident struck me as arrogant compared to what chefs elsewhere were doing, which was sourcing food locally and becoming more keenly focused on how food is grown and produced. Eating locally became popular and a vast network of farmer’s markets flourished across America, including one in the middle of the most urban city in the world, Manhattan. Surrounded by skyscrapers, one could find dazzling vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes, clusters of organic grapes with the morning dew still clinging to them, and fantastic handcrafted candies made of just-tapped maple syrup, which would dissolve in your mouth, making you feel as if you were melting into a pool of buttery maple syrup.

Back in Paris, chefs were hunched over their countertops filling glasses called
verrines,
mixing things like soon-to-be-extinct bluefin tuna with popcorn, and baking up foie gras chocolate éclairs. In America, online foodies would have taken to task any chef who dared to mix strawberries, gelatine and rabbit parts. But where was the outrage in Paris? French chefs always waxed about how their cuisine was the best in the world. I heard not a peep of criticism. In protest, I cancelled my cable
subscription to Cuisine.tv, France’s food network, because I was tired of the focus being on
les tendances,
the trends, and seeing hyperactive women layering food into glasses and shrieking in delight at their cleverness, rather than promoting the beautiful cheeses, chocolate and charcuterie that France was known for.

(In their defence, change just doesn’t come naturally, or easily, in France. The numerous bloody and violent revolutions over the course of French history can attest to that. Even today, anyone who has tried to get a shopkeeper or cashier to give them change for a €50 note knows that change still comes reluctantly to the French.)

Though already considered passé in Spain, foams had been discovered by French chefs, and it wasn’t unusual to be served Caesar salad
bouchons
(mouthfuls) in one-bite portions on porcelain spoons. At this time, a reader – after dining around town on a trip to Paris – wrote to me, ‘What the hell is up with all those little dishes they serve food in?’ And I was sure that I’d missed the decree suddenly banishing bowls in France, since it appeared obligatory to serve soup in glasses, each serving invariably topped with a dab of crème fraîche and, uh oh, ground cumin.