First Encounters: French Food II
Silence, deathly silence. Then the conversation went back to where it had been five minutes before. What had I said that provoked such a hostile reaction?
It was the late 1960s and I was talking an after-lunch walk with old French friends S & G on one of their annual visits to my family in England.
This was part of the second of my encounters with French food. The first encounter that I have already described was with the very plain food served by a very distinguished family, a family that played a part in our lives for years and years.
About that time, my brother returned from school one day to say that one of his teachers was looking for a family who would take in a young French man about 19 years old.
So S. came to stay. For my father, who had read Modern Languages and Economics at Cambridge, it was a welcome chance to practice his French and for both parents, who as farmers found it impossible to get away, a stream of visitors helped satisfy their curiosity and urge to travel.
While he was with us, S met a young compatriot who was doing a year of her nursing training at the local hospital and a few years and many visits to us later, they married and set themselves up in a small flat in Paris. S, who was quite an intellectual but who had lost all family in the war, worked as a salesperson, G, his wife, worked shifts as a nurse. Their flat became a stayover place for our family in Paris, though never more than a night or so because it was small.
Both of them thoroughly enjoyed food, S in particular. When we visited, we always had good food. But it had little to do with cooking in their tiny kitchen. True, once I remember G as a special treat had bought a small piece of beef filet neatly tied with string that she turned until browned in an orange Le Creuset casserole in the morning and reheated in the evening when she got back from work.
What made the meal though was the take out: the baguette, a bit of pate or perhaps oil cured herring for a starter, a salad, cheese, perhaps a bought pastry. I remember realizing that living in a town was not all bad foodwise because you could buy all these things.
And by the by they had wine, something the other family never served en famille, and something that at that time my family never had either, far too expensive. It took some years before I realized that the excruciating headache that prevented me enjoying my first trip to Versailles was in fact nothing but a hangover from the previous night’s dinner.
But back to that awkward conversation in England. By now I was in my mid twenties. At university I had discovered the English cookbook author Elizabeth David who captured the hearts of my entire generation, at least that part of it that had the money to go to university. Her prose was so transporting, so enchanting that it quite overrode my own experiences in France. This was what France was REALLY like. And of course I learned her Mediterranean Cooking and French Provincial Cooking by heart.
So when I went for a post-lunch walk with S & G I turned the conversation to food. How had S and G put up with the food at my family’s house all those years? I asked them. After all they were FRENCH. It must have been a burden they had to bear in return for gorgeous country to roam in and so many historical monuments to visit that they seemed inexhaustible.
That’s when they looked at me with such scorn. They said nothing more but politely changed the conversation. I felt myself shrinking like Alice in Wonderland when she ate the mushroom, I felt a blush flood up my face.
That food at my family’s house. That had not been something to put up with. It had been something they had anticipated and relished, something that all the take out places around their apartment could not offer, something they did not have time to cook.
Milk and cream from cows milked that day, new potatoes and green beans and raspberries from the garden, eggs laid that morning by the bantams, meat from animals that had names, three home-cooked meals a day, that a French couple who loved food had cherished for a decade.
And I, in the name of sophistication and the reading of a woman who had never seriously cooked in England, had denigrated it. And had spurned and disdained my mother’s extraordinary accomplishment in making such extraordinary food seem so ordinary.
They were puzzled. I was humiliated.
Never again would I so cavalierly dismiss my mother’s work.
Should have stuck to Grigson (she even lived in Wiltshire), or read David’s books on English foods?
One thing that I an curious about is how people talk up David as the biggest influence post-war eating habits in England, but there is very little mention of the influence Grigson who was writing more or less at the same period.
There is also a lot being talked up by current chefs/cooks et al about how they are reinventing/re-introducing British cuisine, in a fashion that suggests that people stopped cooking British cuisine between 1950 and 2000. Yet Grigson (and others) published a steady stream of very high quality cookbooks/articles on British foods from the 60’s onwards.
Adam, you’re talking decades of difference. This was not “about the same time.” At least not for a young woman like me coming to maturity then. Mediterranean Food was 1950, French Provincial Cooking 1960.
Grigson’s Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery did not appear until 1967 (about the time of my conversation with our French friends) and because it was presented as primarily French (actually lots of English stuff in it) it did was seen as part of the David exaltation of French food.
In short, Grigson only began publishing when David had shaped the ideas of a whole generation of people like me. Even then after French pork, when she went on to the utterly amazing and wonderful Fruit and Veg books, there was noting particularly English about them, quite the reverse.
During this time, my guru for English cooking was the underestimated Mary Norwak whom I read in the Farmers’ Weekly.
Then Grigson (and David) finally began publishing about English food. Like you, for lots and lots of reasons, I am now much, much more a fan of Grigson than David.
But for the story I tell here, Grigson had not yet made an appearance.
I guess it really is almost 20 years difference, then roughly another 20 years or so of publishing at the same time. I still have trouble getting my head around the impact of David’s first two books. I rarely see earlier (50’s-60’s) editions of the of these, so I think that I have assumed that much of her influence has been given to her retrospectively. Your story suggests that this wasn’t the case and that the country was actually full of young women and new wives voraciously reading these books and going on to make Baekenoffe instead of Hotpot.
I don’t suppose that this will make you feel any better, but it is still very common to hear people talking down British food. In a variation on the theme I have been busy telling people here that food in the UK is by and large better quality and in greater variety then what is here in Australia. If you were desperately poor you might be better off in Australia, but for middle-class professionals like me (and the vast majority of people I know), you would be better off in the UK. Obviously this doesn’t win me to many converts.
Any trendy, mini-skirted, Biba-going, University-educated girl with aspirations in mid-sixties Britain was a David fan. I’ll post photos of my battered copies.
I have to confess that I have never really read Grigson but what I thought was captivating about Elizabeth David was the literary qualitity of her writing as much as the recipes.
Discovering her books in my early twenties tuned me into a life long lover of good food. I still remember sections of and quotes from French Provincial Cooking which I have not looked at for twenty years.
I think you speak for many people in Britain, Paul. It’s just fascinating to compare this with the current Julia Child frenzy in the US.