BOOK OF THE DAY: Au Revoir To All That: The Rise and Fall of French CuisineBy Michael Steinberger Bloomsbury 343pp; £18.99
THE FRENCH used to believe proudly – some would say smugly – that their cuisine was the finest because France was uniquely blessed with the best of everything that soil or sea could provide.
France, said the great 19th-century chef, Escoffier, had the best wines, the most tender meat, the most delicate and varied game: “Thus, it is completely natural for the French to become both gourmands and great cooks.” Implicit in this was the concept of terroir and the belief that the French terroir was better than anyone else’s.
It was a universal belief.
Visitors to France would invariably go home imbued with the zeal of converts to the cult of French food. Until recent times, that is. Now they’re likely, if they’re first-timers, to return wondering what all the fuss was about; and if old hands, in a spirit of mourning and regret.
Like so many of us, Michael Steinberger wanted to know why. Steinberger is a devotee of the classic style of French dining that he first experienced in a restaurant called Au Chapon Fin in the Macon as a 13-year-old. Not just the pates, the excellently cooked meats, baby peas in butter, the perfect mille feuilles, but the ambience in which you ate them – the thick white tablecloths, aproned staff, the heavy silverware and ornate ice-buckets. On his return years later Au Chapon Fin was in sad decline, the food poor and the tablecloths thin. His last visit found it a ruin. Meanwhile, in the nearest city a branch of McDonald’s was thriving. In 2007 France was the second most profitable of its markets.
What happened to French eating in a few decades? Steinberger’s answer, at its most concise, is that times changed. Modernity happened. The French, just like the rest of us, eat fast food because life is faster. French women, like women everywhere, have jobs. They don’t have time to cook or to nurture the cult of la bonne cuisine in their offspring. The offspring themselves are in crisis. France has been in economic stagnation since the early 1980s – Steinberger blames Mitterrand with his bureaucratisation and social policies – and in all that time its youth has been reared in an atmosphere of pessimism.
A scarcity of jobs and money is not good for the restaurant trade.
French confidence has also been in crisis. In the era of globalisation, with its race towards standardisation and the dream of wealth, France was confused. To be French was to be out of step and backward when before it had meant to be in the forefront. French cuisine was one casualty of the loss of confidence. Slow, ceremonious, heavy with butter and cream, it seemed an obvious symbol of stagnation.
French chefs did adapt to new tastes and habits. Nouvelle cuisine produced new staples like magret de canard and saumon à l'oseille.But it was the Basques, like Arzak and El Bulli, who were the avant garde of the new kitchen-as-lab style cooking.
French chefs too were obsessed with the Michelin guide and its stars, to the extent that more than one could be said to have died to gain a star or after having lost one. Michelin’s tyrannical hold on haute cuisine began in 1900 but may now, happily, be faltering.
It’s intriguing to think that with recent events the wheel may have turned once more. When the dust settles French ways and French cuisine could be a comfort to us all again.
And all is not lost. Steinberger ends his book with a lunch in 2008 in St Germain des Prés of salade nicoise and praline mille feuilles – both even better than those he enjoyed years ago.
Anne Haverty is a writer. Her most recent book is a novel The Free and Easy(Vintage)