Behind the pot-au-feu

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

An appreciation of French cuisine—the one and only art in which France does not tolerate any competitors

The French have long been regarded as an artistic race, and on the whole it is a reputation they have worn with much right. But it is well to remember that they owe it, not to their supremacy in the fine arts—for, unless the novel can be included among them, there is not one in which the French are supreme—but to the closeness which all the arts have, in France, with the common life.

Certainly they have produced, since the Renaissance, an abundance of poets, painters, sculptors and architects; they have produced a few musicians, some actors and, as I have said, novelists of the utmost craft. Their achievement has been fine and continuous. There has probably been no time in the last three centuries when the French artists did not have something to teach their contemporaries, if only a consciousness of method, a discrimination in the use of materials, a sense of order and restraint. But, preeminent though they are in France, they seem to lose value as soon as they cross its borders. What they lose is their connection with French life.

Here the French stand in clear contrast to the English. With them, the arts are an addition to life; to the English, an escape from it. The consequence is that the more remote an art from the daily concerns of living, the more skilful will be the English practice of it. Their poetry, if we take the whole body of it, is incomparable. But, aside from a love of the countryside and a passion for the sea, it is hard to find anything which the English poets share with their compatriots.

Their cookery, on the other hand—to come at once to that art which is of all the arts the most daily—is not so good. In fact, ask any but an Englishman, and you will probably be told that it is abominable.

It is very nearly the reverse that is true in France. Which is why they deserve—richly and proudly—their reputation as an artistic race. Art, there, is a familiar thing. It has been made so, first because the finest of their artists continue to think and feel as Frenchmen, and then because those qualities which they bring to the fine arts they bring also to the humbler and more useful ones.

The French are not, I should say, of the first rank in music, in sculpture, in poetry or even in painting—for which they have so long received an exaggerated acclaim. But in all those arts which touch life daily—one might almost say hourly—they are supreme. In the art of dress they have no rivals. Their cooks are the acknowledged masters of the world.

"All praise of France," a friend of mine, who far preferred Italy, once said to me, "eventually comes down to a question of cooks." Well, if I finally, in praising the way things are ordered in France, come down to the cooks, it is with no sense of contempt. They are, in France, extremely important people—as they should be everywhere. For after all, there is nothing that so marks a civilized race as a capacity for doing those things which are most necessary to life as though they had no use beyond exhibiting the skill and grace of the performer and affording pleasure to the spectator. The French, like the rest of us, must eat to live; but they do not consider that that settles the matter.

Many attempts have been made to define French cooking. You will find books to insist that the essential thing is the use of stock as a foundation for sauces. The next will say that the secret lies in the employment of herbs, rather than spices, for seasoning. An American who had dined much in the great restaurants, but seen only the final manipulation of Poulet Flambe or Crepes Suzette at the hands of a maitre d'hotel over a chafing dish, would probably carry away the impression that the French cooks could do nothing without generous quantities of wine, kirsch and old brandy. Mrs. G. B. Stern, the English novelist, whose Bouquet is one long compliment to French chefs and vintners—broken only by complaints at the difficulty of testing all the vintages of France in two weeks—on her return to the British Isles seems to have missed nothing more than the mushrooms and the truffles. All these opinions have some point; but they are not so much definitions of French cooking as lists—and very partial lists at that—of its characteristic ingredients. Yet but two things need to be said to define it completely: it is an art and it is, with the possible exception of the Chinese, the most traditional cooking in the world.

Now if cooking is an art, and a French art, it must have its critics. The inventions of the cooks must submit to the fine judgment of the gastronomists. These gentlemen, in France, are taken very seriously; they have quite as much fame and their opinions are received as solemnly as those of any critic of literature or connoisseur of painting. Your great chef is a vain and conscientious creature; he waits on approbation as eagerly as an actor, but unlike the actor he is always ready to receive judicious criticism. The fact is, he must have both to thrive. It is because they do not get it abroad that French cooks go so piteously to pieces in America, or for that matter anywhere out of France. There, it is the gastronomes who keep them at the pitch of perfection. They may pass single judgment, but they also have their clubs, the most distinguished of which is the Club des Cents. Once a month its members meet—needless to say at a table—and compare their gustatory sensations over a menu prepared for them with lavish care. They even hold their elections. There is, in France, not only a Prince des Pontes, there is also a Prince des Gastronomes, or, as we should say, a Prince of Epicures. The present holder of the title is a certain M. Curnonsky, who, in spite of the sound of his name, is not a Pole but an Angevin. It is his opinion, solemnly pronounced, that no dish is worth seriously considering which has not been made and remade by at least five generations. A devotee of the cookery of the provinces, M. Curnonsky would have it that it requires the skill of many housewives and a long trial of time to bring a recipe to its final perfection.

This opinion may seem exaggerated. It is not. Two hundred years is not a long time for the French to spend learning to do a thing well. In fact, they can hardly do with less. You will quickly discover in France that wherever there is a craft with a long tradition behind it, it will be practised with a skill no other race could rival. They have been exporting fashions, for instance, since the days of Edward II of England. War is even an older story with them. But give them a job whose antecedents do not go back of 1789 and they will drive you insane with their incompetence. Merely to take down the receiver of a telephone in Paris, is to risk nervous exhaustion, a succession of wrong numbers and very possibly a round of abuse. It seems incredible that a people obviously intelligent should be so baffled by the multiple switchboard. But it is so, and the explanation is this: the telephone is for them still a new device, having been in use only a paltry eighty years or so.

The Revolution established the French Restaurant. You will find, it is true, on the cards of the Tour d'Argent, La Biche and La Petite Chaise dates of their foundation which would make them appear to have anteceded the First Republic by a hundred or more years. But as I happened myself to dine at the Petite Chaise within a month of its opening, and as my age is something less than that of Methuselah's, I cannot but think that all this pretention to antiquity means is that there was once, a long time ago, an ordinary cabaret on the spot, which for its sign hung out a little chair. The first restaurant in which it was possible, simply by passing out money, to enjoy what the French call the haute cuisine (that is, "high cooking" as opposed to the cuisine bourgeoise, which is the equivalent of "family cooking"; the use of the word "high" here reminds one inevitably of the English "high" and "low" church, the haute cuisine having also its ritual, its all but unbreakable forms and ceremonies) was established at Paris in 1765, by a certain Boulanger, in the rue des Poulies. Until then the ultimate delicacies of the culinary art had been reserved to the nobles, the clergy, and the very rich financiers.

It is only in what the Parisian calls the Grand Restaurants that the American travelling abroad can hope to savor the fine excellence of the best trench cooking. Not that all the good cheer is in Paris; on the contrary, there are certain dishes which cannot be tasted in their perfection outside the provinces. For Sole normande you must go to the Couronne at Rouen, Quenelles de brocket, sauce Nantua, are not at their best north of Lyons. The one salad of the famous Mere Filioux which consists of hearts of artichokes soaked for two hours in seasoned oil and vinegar and then disposed on a bed of fresh lettuce leaves, covered each with a slice of foie gras studded with black truffles, the whole masked with a thin mayonnaise to which more than the usual quantity has been added, can only be truly experienced in that little sidewalk restaurant still maintained by the inventor's daughter and son-in-law on the Quai Duquesne at Lyons. Nevertheless, the good cooks do tend to come to Paris, as the good bankers in America gravitate toward New York. And nowhere else in the world has one such a choice of places to dine, seriously and long.

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The French chef is an artist; being a Frenchman, he has a wholesome respect for tradition; but the first ingredient of every one of his great dishes is, not butter, but imagination. He will not repeat, or, rather, he will always repeat with a difference. The foreigner is frequently led to believe that the specialties of the house are the private inventions of the cook. This is hardly ever the case. Ordinarily, the spécialités de la maison are simply some half dozen of the stock dishes of the French repertory which the chef thinks he does especially well. He will, of course, add his own touch—taste is a personal thing. But the limit of his invention will probably be a slight alteration in some longtried recipe.

But though they work for the most part with dishes whose form has been definitely established for the last hundred and fifty years, the restaurants have from time to time made a permanent addition to the traditional list— an addition which has itself become part of the great tradition. For instance, there is the sauce Bearnaise of the Pavilion Henri IV at Saint Germain (named, of course, for the first of the Bourbon Kings, who hailed from Béarn)—as well as souffle potatoes, which, by a happy accident, were discovered the day King Louis Philippe came to Saint Germain to celebrate the opening of the first railway line in France. The train being late, the cook, who had already fried his potatoes, to reheat them plunged them again in hot oil; they puffed to his surprise beautifully and they have continued to puff ever since whenever fried twice in pots of different temperatures.

Sometimes the restaurateurs will adopt the invention of some thrifty village housewife—employing a finer choice in the raw materials. Or his ingredients will be more suavely mixed. Or he w ill do what the Parisian chef always does when his imagination fails, he will add mushrooms and truffles.

More often than not, the result is admirable. Only the incurably romantic will prefer the bouillabaisse of Marseilles and the fishing villages of the Riviera, to the Parisian version, which is made, not with the coarse rock fish of the Mediterranean, but with the far more agreeable products of the North Atlantic. Soups, in particular, gain as they mount upward in the social scale from the peasant. But the changes are not always good, and usually for a single reason: your Paris restaurateur also knows how to be economical. His quenelles de brocket will be eked out with breadcrumbs and the delicate flavor of the freshwater pike lost. His blanc manger will be that tasteless thing only too well known in America under that name, not the old-fashioned marvel into which no cornstarch enters, only the milk of pressed almonds.

Let me state that the essential character of French cooking was fixed in the XVIIIth century—the period in which French civilization was at its height. There was, if you will, moral decadence to be observed, the state was certainly close to bankruptcy. But not since the Middle Ages had the French found in the arts, particularly the minor arts, so perfect an expression of their natural qualities of grace, subtlety and charm. They were then. if I may put it so, more French than they have ever been since, and they had a right to be, for it was the period when their taste, if not their armies, governed the continent.

Whether the Americans will dominate the XXth century in the same way remains to be seen, but reason forces the conjecture. Already our commerce is in every port, our manners have begun to affect the world, If, during the time of our preeminence, we should care to create a national cuisine comparable to the French, then their example is significant. We have a tradition, less ancient than theirs, to be sure, but richer than is commonly supposed. Like many another of our national treasures it has been allowed to lie waste. There is, of course, no reason why we should not borrow foreign dishes if we please—which the French have always done—and in time make them our own. And there is much that we could profitably take from the French.

But what most is needed is many amateurs who are capable not only of taking their food seriously, but who insist on taking it delightfully. They should not be epicures only, but, wherever possible, cooks as well, reviving old recipes, inventing new ones. If their own skill is limited, they should at least be able to direct others toward fine discoveries. But too much confidence should not be given the professional cook, least of all the cooks of fashionable restaurants. Restaurateurs can be entrusted to preserve a tradition, but not to create one. And, as a last word, I should say that the new-fangled dieticians and faddists should be chased from the kitchen door. Prepare your salads well and leave the vitamins to take care of themselves. For these things are of science, and cookery is an art; it begins where dietetics leaves off.