We Hate France

(because it’s so far away)

Now it’s our turn to heap scorn and abuse upon those supercilious, arrogant Gauls, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys (as Groundskeeper Willie so aptly described them), those singularly unAmerican, wine-swilling Frenchmen, and –women, and Frenchchildren for that matter, who think they’re so big, who pretend they don’t speak English when all you want is a lousy ham and cheese sandwich, who saunter along the streets of their precious Pa-ree with that Gallic smirk, with a Gaulois hanging from the corner of their mouth, and those silly scarves around their necks—O puh-leeze! those scarves—and their fancy French shoes, who needs so many fancy shoes?  You’d almost think they’re trying to make us feel inferior, unsophisticated, bumpkinish in the extreme.  Sadly, they don’t have to try.

    And think of the things they eat and drink—the cheese, the wine, the bread, all fermented, bacterial (I mean, would there be a France without bacteria?)—rotten, in a word.  Hey, I didn’t coin the phrase, but you gotta wonder: if you are what you eat….

    So we’re changing our baguettes to Freedom Sticks and our boules to the Mighty Bread Cannon Balls of Liberty, and…ah, what’s the use, I just can’t do it.

     We love France, we love the French, and French bread and wine and cheese, the French cities and the French countryside, French trains and cute little French cars, French movies and French music.  There may be nothing about France we don’t like.  Maybe the scarves.  Ah, hell, we even like the scarves.

      So on the weekend of Bastille Day (which commemorates the start of the French Revolution with the capture of the Bastille, a state prison, on July 14, 1789) we celebrate France and the French, and the long friendship and alliance between our country and theirs, and all the good things that have come out of it (Franco-American SpaghettiOs being one rather poor example).

    Our affection for France is grounded in food and language, and has grown through several vacations there in the past few years.  On a trip to Paris this past March we undertook arduous research into the state of Parisian boulangerie.  For you, dear customers, we stuffed ourselves to near explosion on the pain au levain and currant bread from the famous Poilane bakery, on olive and bacon breads from Michel Moisan’s bakery Le Pain au Naturel, on shallot bread and canelles from Poujaran, on madeleines and walnut bread at Kayser.  And that was just between meals. 

    You might think you could walk into any French bakery and purchase wonderful bread, but it’s not so.  In fact, increasing industrialization in bread making (as well as in cheese making and other traditional food products) led to something of a crisis in France a few years ago, so that even the French had to admit that their bread wasn’t so hot.  So a program was launched to encourage the return to traditional methods and materials.  Now all over Paris you will see the “Artisan Boulanger” banners flying outside the bakeries, and therein you can expect to find a creditable loaf of bread.  (Our guide on our bakery tour was Patricia Wells’ Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, a must for serious eaters in Paris.)

    As we prepared for that March trip, friends and family worried that we might encounter anti-American sentiment, what with our nation preparing to launch a war which the French government vocally opposed.  And indeed, we did receive a vicious dressing down, when we attended the annual National Antiques and Ham Fair (I kid you not) just outside Paris.  The subject was not war however, but cheese.  A cheese and sausage vendor from the Auvergne grew livid in denouncing the American prohibition on import of unaged raw milk cheese.  Pasteurization was ruining French cheese he cried, look at what you’ve done to our beautiful Roquefort!  He said a lot of other things we didn’t quite get.  To avoid an international incident, we bought some of his sausage, and a piece of raw-milk Reblochon that we smuggled into the country (if you were coming back from Paris on a Northwest flight on March 17, that might be what you smelled….)

    In addition to Paris, we’ve spent time in the Loire, in Burgundy, and in Beaujolais (so you can maybe guess another of our guiding interests).  Zipping along the narrow country roads of rural France in a rented Peugot is a pure delight.  In the Loire there are broad vistas of the meandering wild river, of vineyards and orchards, and of course the famous chateaux.  Not a dramatic landscape, for the most part, but such a welcoming one.  You pass through village after village so quaint, you could get sick of it if it weren’t also so genuine.  In everyone’s backyard there seems to be a potager, a soup garden with monumental leeks and cabbages, and a patch of flowers, an apple or a chestnut tree, well-tended but informal, a little scruffy around the edges, the gravel paths dotted with windfall fruit.

    Every little town has a bakery or two, and a charcuterie where you can buy a chunk of paté or a few slices of salami, a bit of salad, maybe some carrotes rapées or celeri remoulade, a half bottle of wine (cheap! so cheap!).  Go find yourself a nice grassy spot with a view of the river, rip into a fresh baguette spread with rich paté de campagne—ça, c’est paradis!  (If you’d like to see pictures of some of our French picnics, just ask, we have lots; wherever we go, we take pictures of food and dogs.)

    French country markets are another great source of entertainment, if you’re entertained by food, or by people watching, or scenes of a traditional way of life, centuries old and still much the same today.  There is all the local produce of course, and always a cheese vendor who, even in the tiniest villages, offers an array that makes even our best cheese shops look like mini-marts.  In season you’ll see hares and pheasants and other game for sale, and wild mushrooms, and fresh fish and oysters, though you may be a couple hundred miles from the sea.  In the town of Julienas, in the Beaujolais region, we came upon a young woman baker selling the most awe-inspiring bread we’ve ever seen, great golden couronnes, and slabs of crusty wonder two feet square, and boules and baguettes and I can’t think what else.  Overwhelmed, we were.  At a sleepy weekday morning market in a town that could reasonably be described as the middle of nowhere.  If you think the French passion for food has become a bit of a cliché (and I will admit, I once did think that), one visit to the market will change your mind.

    Throughout the French countryside there are wonderful little hotel/restaurants serving regional food and wine (often at amazingly reasonable prices).  There you taste the true gout de terroir, the taste of the countryside.  You can enjoy a three-course meal, a bottle of wine, maybe a cognac or a marc, all prepared and presented with care and respect (sometimes what strikes us as arrogance in the French is nothing more than manners), and then all you have to do is weave your way happily upstairs to bed, to dream of the croissant, the baguette, the café crème that awaits you in the morning. 

      Oh, my, but here we are back in Saint Paul, which is not so bad, especially when we’ve got our own markets, our own local delights, and long lazy summer days to enjoy them.  This week’s recipe features a new bread this week, or a new shape of bread at any rate: small round flat loaves brushed with olive oil, just the thing for making  pan bagna, a zesty summer sandwich from the south of France.  You can also use a baguette, for a sort of giant sub sandwich version.  Take it to the shore of the Mississippi or one of our lakes, open a bottle of chilled rosé from Bandol or the Languedoc (ask at Thomas Liquors, Solo Vino, or your favorite wine store).  Sure, it’s not a picnic beside the Loire, but then, a little imagination can go a long way.

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