b. The French Heritage

Childhood Memories, the Périgord Roots

I was born near Bordeaux, in the French South-West region, famous for the French Paradox which consists of reaching old age through conscious abuse of goose fat, foie gras and generous amounts of red wine.

I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, much before hamburgers and soft drinks won the hearts of an ill-educated French youth.

It seems that at the time, at least in my family, everyone was interested in food and cooking and all the women were cooks. For my parents and relatives, fresh out of rural poverty and first-generation migrants to the local big city, cuisine was the unquestioned, overriding interest, a matter of pride, often the only object of conversation during a 4-hour long Sunday meal.

They would spend an inordinate amount of time and money to outdo each other, despite their actual humble means. They also were very competent with a sure sense of taste, a capacity to draw comparisons among renderings of the same dish in different circumstances, sometimes longing for a specific flavor they had experienced years ago in a dish prepared by a now deceased grandmother. They all had amazing analytical skills for tasting which seemed natural for me at the time but which, I have found out, are extremely rare today.

Essentially, my taste was educated. Not only did I develop a craving for good food, but I learned to critically appreciate what I was eating. This may have been the only instance in my upbringing when positive reinforcement was used generously, the gourmandise bug inspiring more genuine praise than a good grade in school.

I observed a lot, I helped at times, but I never really cooked myself until I left home: Cooking was serious business! But I did gain the confidence that I could certainly do well when the time came.

Except for my father who cooked all his life well into his nineties, cooks were the older women in the family, all vying to establish some form of supremacy in one specialty or another in order to collect praise and power. They were often slaves to recipes, transmitted gingerly from one generation to the next as so many family secrets. Cooking was, therefore, a traditional affair, a mix of mainstream French cooking, what we now call cuisine bourgeoise, steeped in flour-based sauces, long cooking peasant recipes and the regular or occasional splurging.

All this was sustained by regularly recounted stories of previous generations, often bordering on myths. They spoke of a time before electricity, when the fireplace was the heart of the house, when you buried embers at night and rekindled the fire in the morning. The unquestioned star was “la petite mémée”, my great-grandmother who, when pregnant and close to term, started the soup at 5 A.M., left it to cook slowly in the hearth, accompanied the men to the fields and harvested the hay with them, came back home to give birth to her latest baby, and brought back the soup to the hungry men. She certainly was a hard model to match for any new woman entering the family!

The other popular hero was the pig raised every year by my uncle Auguste. He was bought from the same country farmer every year, given an affectionate first name like anyone in the family, say Ernest or Charles, and lovingly fattened with garden vegetables and leftovers. When we went to visit my uncle and aunt every other Sunday or so, I would always run outside to say hello to Charles.

Eventually, family and friends gathered in the dark wee hours of a cold January morning, additional stoves were installed and lit up. Big cauldrons came out of nowhere. Charles was brought in, hoisted up a plank, quickly and expertly slaughtered, cleaned, cut into so many pieces and quickly processed by an army of helpers.

By the end of the day, Charles had been transformed into jars of pork liver pâté, rillettes, lard, bacon, delicious confits, a collection of different sausages and two beautiful salted hams which would dry out for a few months in the cellar. There was exhaustion and rejoicing.  Anecdotes would be volunteered about the exceptional intelligence of that day’s victim and hero, everyone trying to forget the haunting piercing shrieks uttered by the very hero before its departure.

Actually, my own family’s cooking was resolutely non-adventurous, keeping to a one-and-only way to proceed, honed by generations of cooks and judges of taste, avoiding any new spice or for that matter any new outside influence. Vegetables were appreciated, and loved for themselves. They were prepared for their own sake, never as a compulsory accompaniment to something else. Sautéed potatoes had to be prepared in goose or duck fat, the prized cooking medium, until health concerns - and costs - led to the use of vegetable oils. Wild mushrooms and game were just standard fare. Truffles were liberally used until their rarity and price lowered family standards.

Butter and Cream Delights

My first professional experience after college was rather adventurous: It involved leaving France and exploring different parts of the world. In particular, I was exposed to the marvels of Moroccan, Chinese, and Indonesian cooking. After discovering this variety of ingredients and tastes, I was never the same.

Then, my life changed suddenly and drastically. I met a wonderful American young woman, the love of my life, married her and settled into a much more sedentary lifestyle. At last, it was time to work and live in France. And I had to become somewhat French again.

Top 3-star restaurants were much more affordable in the 1970s than they are today and provided a unique eye-opener for me. We started going out to different restaurants, in Paris and in the countryside, exploring the riches of France, from Normandy to the Rhone Valley.

Only then did I discover that the French cooking praised the world over was based on two ingredients practically absent from my previous experience in Bordeaux except for pastry: Butter and cream. With the privilege of youth, I was oblivious to the effects such a regimen could have on waistlines and totally dazzled by cream or butter-based sauces which, of course, I tried to imitate and incorporate into our family production.

Fortunately, it was the time when the much lighter Nouvelle Cuisine (and smaller portions) came into fashion. Nouvelle Cuisine was part of a modernization process that challenged many established practices, favored seasonal, quality ingredients over the masking role of traditional cooking itself. It also introduced a strong visual component inspired by Japanese modernism. (1)

I heartily embraced this revolution. (2)(3)

At home, for guests or even for ourselves, we would prepare traditional thick sauced dishes like Poulet Vallée d’Auge (Calvados and cream), Poulet au vinaigre (vinegar and cream) or Homard à l’américaine (Cognac, wine, tomato, and butter), but also more “modern” preparations, imitating new luminaries like Pierre Troisgros, Paul Bocuse or Michel Guérard.

As an example of “discovery,” I should mention Gratin Dauphinois, the ubiquitous baked dish of sliced potatoes and cream, which I had never liked before but which, prepared properly i.e. freed of any melted cheese, acquired a theretofore unknown delicate flavor. It is still a regular festive vegetable dish at our table. (4)

The principle for cream sauces is miraculous and identical in all recipes: Make a reduction of an aromatic liquid element - broth, wine, brandy, etc. - and throw in one cup or two of crème fraîche in the pan. Brought to a boil, the cream thickens until the desired consistency is obtained.

Butter-based sauces are trickier and less forgiving as they are more unstable emulsions. Starting from a reduction, you add butter little by little, stirring constantly, on low fire. You cannot take your eyes away for one second: if it is overheated, the silkiest sauce may break down into infamous fat bubbles. It does not wait and must be prepared at the last minute.

For my taste, both sauces offer potential for variety and complexity and are a marked improvement over flour-thickened sauces whose taste ends up being dominated by roasted flour. Actually, in all recipes calling for flour thickening, you can just skip that operation and enjoy a thinner, purer, cleaner-tasting sauce or juice. What’s wrong with thin?

Olive Oil: Health in a Bottle (5)

Somewhat, without quite knowing it, I was ready for much lighter fare. With greater affluence, we started travelling. In Italy, Spain and Crete, we had an illuminating experience of a new kind: We discovered olive oil.

At that time, we also befriended a half-Lebanese family in Paris who generously shared much of their traditional repertory, already weaned of the oily excesses probably encountered locally. This was still another time of discovery and marveling: from chick peas to pine nuts and okra to eggplant purée.

We had used olive oil before, gingerly, as one of our ingredients. But its use became suddenly more systematic, replacing other cooking mediums in most of our family recipes. The resulting taste is obviously different, more neutral, often better, at other times disappointing. In most cases, the ingredient taste itself is rather enhanced, and knowing that you eat well and healthily just adds to the pleasure.

For some ingredients, like scallops for example, it may be hard to decide between sautéing with olive oil (clean and healthy result) or butter (unmatched and sinful taste combination). Both are good, but the latter is irresistible.

By the way, olive oil was always used in the south of France, along the Mediterranean coast, but rarely elsewhere in the country. In the last few years, it has left its regional ghetto and become a key component of modern French cuisine where it gloriously shines, alongside butter and other animal fats.

Olive oil also provides me with daily intellectual and emotional connotations. It was a symbolic staple of the entire Mediterranean world for hundreds (or thousands?) of years. When sprinkling raw tomato slices with fruity olive oil, I am transported to the olive tree groves of Andalusia or Tuscany. I even travel in time, to the Roman Forum, or to Socratic conversations in Athens’ heyday when Western civilization was born, a very affordable cultural luxury indeed.

Looking back on my French journey, I went from pork and goose fat to butter to olive oil, just as I moved geographically from the Southwest to Paris and back down to rural Languedoc.

This is where I live now, surrounded by gorgeous vineyards... and olive groves. And the olive oil I use now couldn’t be more local!  

(1)    The art of cooking had been to improve mediocre ingredients through permeation with stock and overuse of sauces.

(2)    Actually, I was no purist then. I must confess that, although I have developed today a guarded attitude for the general overuse of garlic, we also consumed at the time a great amount of garlic butter under the form of Escargots de Bourgogne of 5 or 6 different sizes, sold in the XV arrondissement by a strangely snailish looking man. Apparently, this shop, la Maison de l’Escargot, still exists today, but we have moved to more sophisticated allegiances. Nevertheless, I sinned and I apologize.

(3)    My favorite all-time source of recipes came from Fernand Point, a pioneer of this culinary revolution. I like it because it looks like he had an idea of ingredient combinations and quickly jotted down his notes without quantities, leaving the balance to the reader’s common sense. His most famous quote says it all:   " Du beurre ! Donnez-moi du beurre ! Toujours du beurre ! "

(4)    Modern brain research has amply demonstrated that our sense of smell and taste is routinely overshadowed by our memories and emotional recollections. This is why the gratin dauphinois prepared in the early evening in the Troisgros kitchen for our baby son has never been surpassed. Left in the hotel room overnight, it was irresistible and we could not help finishing it the next morning before going down for breakfast.

(5)    The Mediterranean diet and its backbone, olive oil, has been the object of intense scrutiny in the last 20 years, after it was discovered that life expectancy in many Mediterranean countries was far better than in richer Northern European and North American countries. Olive oil contains a large amount of monounsaturated fats, which reduces bad cholesterol rates and cardiovascular risks and provides beneficial antioxidants as well.