Another Letter On The French

 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 14^th 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 18^th and early 19^th 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 18^th 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 16^th 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 19^th 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.