Some time ago I promised more of the letters I have been writing on the French. Below is another.
Food And Alcohol
When
told the people had no bread to eat Marie Antionette is famously
reputed to have said «Then let them eat cake». This has been shown
to be untrue by contemporary historians. What is true is that
Parisian women forced the king and his famiIy out of Paris crying
“bring the baker, his wife and apprentice to Paris”. The price of
bread was controlled in France by monarchs from the 14th
century and subsequently by various governments until 1987.. Thus
bread has played a major rôle in the French political psychology and
diet. Order what you will in any French restaurant you will always be
served a basket of bread with it. For many years after Marie
Antionette had her capacity eat anything rather violently removed the
price of bread was controlled by the government so that the poor had
at least that to eat.
Every
country outside the polar regions has it’s staple «filler» in
meals in some form of starch, depending on what can most easily be
grown. In northern climes potatoes predominate, in Italy the filler
is pasta, northern Africa has millet, the sub-Saharan countries have
manioc or cassava, south America has corn and Asia has rice.
The
filler is also in many cases the basis for making alcohol to wash
down the food or simply to get pie-eyed. In England the standard
filler is potatoes although these are more closely associated with
Ireland where until recent years the most common form of cheap
alcohol was a form of vodka called poteen. An Irish friend of mine
once told me the following tale. He had invited his father for a meal
and decided to cook something new for him: spaghetti bolognese. His
father liked the meal but said afterwards: «That was good, son, but
where are the spuds?»
Nowadays
France has an enviable reputation for fine food but that wasn’t
always the case; The English doing the grand tour of Europe in the
18th and early 19th centuries would
sometimes criticise the poor food they had to endure in France. At
the time all perishable food had to be what was available locally
and, anyway, much of France was near starvation in the 18th
century The advent of trains seems to have made the difference. Prior
to that the food on offer would have been restricted and possibly not
always of good quality.
Although
France is now famous for its «haute cuisine» my own opinion of
French cuisine is that the genius lies lies in perfecting simple
dishes rather than in sophisticated cooking: starters like radishes
with butter and salt, carrots shredded and doused with olive oil and
pepper, etc. Indeed, a custom I was acquainted with in France in the
1950s was to serve each component of the meal separately, each
vegetable and fish or meat on its own, each prepared and cooked as
well as the cook could manage. Thus potatoes on their own, perhaps
new potatoes with butter and pepper, peas as a single dish cooked
with lettuce and maybe small onions or bacon, etc. And bread with
everything of course.
In
contrast England has a reputation decidedly in the opposite
direction, although that too has changed in the last few decades.
You can now eat in England as well as anywhere in the world, although
for many years that wasn’t the case. Some of my French friends of
my age, who first visited England in their youth, as I did France,
and haven’t been back since, have a permanent memory of bad food in
England. Admittedly, in the early post-WW2 years, ingredients for
meals were severely restricted; but the same was true of France when
I first visited and I ate very well with a very poor family and in a
student canteen.
No
doubt an important factor in the difference is the attitude to food.
If the French live to eat, the English eat to live, although both
these assertions should perhaps be put in the past tense. That is how
it has been for very many decades but is much less of a difference
now than it has been. Now the main difference I find is that local
restaurants in France are much less likely to be part of a national
chain, less likely to rely on fast food and are generally better
value for money. What a friend of mine calls the “theatre” of a
meal out is also more likely to apply: the welcome and the service
are not formal and stereotyped but personal and sincere and the
description of the food available is not formulaic but takes account
of what is seasonal and how it has been cooked. There is an openness
and individuality that is relatively rare in English restaurants.
As
for alcohol, considerable change has occurred there too. In both
England and France. In England wine was made by the Romans and
continued to be made up to the 16th century and brandy
with it. Climate change put a stop to that and beer and barley-based
spirits have generally replaced them, with a temporary diversion in
the 19th century towards gin. In France, wine and
fruit-based spirits have always predominated; some beer was always
brewed in the north but was best left to the Belgians, who did it
better. Both countries have experienced something of a revolution in
the way they make their drinks. British beer started deteriorating in
the 1950s and 1960s as skill in keeping beer became more costly and
scarcer until a consumer-led campaign, CAMRA, forced a change towards
higher quality; and the viability of micro- breweries in recent
decades has reinforced this and decimated the market of big breweries
looking for higher profit margins. And England has once again taken
to making wine, albeit mostly white and in necessarily small
quantities, making it expensive.
France
also has experienced a change in quality, owing perhaps more to the
skill and practices of Australian wine-makers than many French would
like to admit. Poor quality wine, particularly that from north
Africa, was as much in evidence in the 1950s and 1960s in France as
poor quality beer was in England at the same time but there is now no
market for it. Other wine- producing countries have increased both
the quality and volume of their output and that has no doubt
contributed to the demise of cat’s piss.
As
for which country is most bibulous, both experience health problems
due to alcohol consumption so readers can make up their own minds.
There are no precise records of the past but the English were
certainly more inventive. At the height of their empire-building the
English often found themselves in countries without the materials to
make beer and only those to make barely drinkable wine. Not to be
deprived of the means to get pleasantly drunk, they therefore found ways to make
undrinkable wine into a good drink; sherry, madeira, marsala and
cognac(?) are testimony to that.
