The French do, of course, have a lot to get excited about. Ever since the first Neolithic tribes became sedentary in France, people have been spending their time dreaming up ways of preparing, cooking and preserving everything that the land, sea and air had to offer. Those TV documentaries that re-create the lives of Stone-Age peoples probably don’t apply to the French at all. Instead of grunting as they chewed through shapeless, blackened hunks of mammoth, the Stone-Age Frenchmen would have spent hours discussing what sauce to use, how long to cook the meat, and on what sized flame.
It’s no coincidence that the best Neolithic cave paintings in Europe are in central France. All those sketches of woolly mammoths were serving suggestions.
They would probably have got a lot more nourishment out of the mammoth, too. Whereas the Stone-Age Brits would have eaten the meatiest bits and fed the rest to their domesticated wolves, the French would have consumed all the organs, including the lungs and the brain, and every bit of the limbs, right down to the jelly inside the hooves (or whatever kind of feet mammoths have). They would then have made sauces out of any leftovers, to give a bit more flavour to the half-edible bits of the next animal they killed.
Hardly surprising that they didn’t have time to build Stonehenge.
Life Is a Finger Buffet
The French have retained some of their Stone-Age culinary traditions, and often display what looks like a total lack of hygiene. Food is manhandled, cheeses are sold when their rinds are mouldy, meat and eggs are eaten half-cooked or raw. Early-morning deliveries of food to restaurants are often left outside on the pavement, where, as everyone knows, dogs commonly leave unhygienic deposits.
In short, the French believe that bacteria have the right to live and breed, preferably in people’s stomachs.
Bread seems to be the biggest vector of germs. You can watch a boulangère squeeze a baguette, enjoying the crunch it makes, accept payment with the same hand, rummage around in her cash drawer, and then transfer all the bacteria in her coin collection to the next baguette – yours.
It is common to see waiters or cooks carrying an armful of unwrapped baguettes through the streets, or pulling an open trolley of bread. When the loaves get to the restaurant, they are often cut into slices by the waiters, who also handle money. The baskets of bread will be served at one table, fondled by the customers there, taken back to the breadboard, and leftover chunks of baguette will be used to fill up other baskets. So the piece of bread with which you soak up the vinaigrette on your plate might well have been squeezed by a boulangère, rubbed under a waiter’s armpit, fingered by a previous diner, and maybe even dropped on the café floor, before you pop it into your mouth. Yummy.
Even more appetizing – in cafés, you occasionally get a glass that smells of secondhand beer, probably because after it was last used it was just quickly swilled out with the upward-squirting glass rinser behind the bar. You have to hope that the previous drinker didn’t have gum disease.
And yet all this doesn’t seem to do anyone any harm. There are hardly any outbreaks of salmonella or E. coli poisoning in France15 and food allergies are almost unheard of.
An English expat in France once told me what happened when she’d eaten a snack with traces of peanuts in it. She’d started to swell up and get short of breath, and was afraid she was going to die. When the ambulancemen arrived, she told them ‘Je suis allergique aux cac-ahuètes’ – I am allergic to peanuts – and they burst out laughing. In their defence, the sentence does sound absurd in French. It would be like telling English ambulancemen that ‘My ketchup was radioactive.’
In the end, she was only saved because her mother, anticipating trouble, had found a technical name for nut allergy in a medical encyclopedia and written it down.16 The French can’t resist scientific names, which make everything sound more official, and the English girl’s password earned her a life-saving injection.
Every year, the country is swept by epidemics of gastroenteritis, but the French seem to regard these as rites of passage. The body gets sick, poops out the virus, and is stronger. A bit of disease is good for the digestion.
This is why on French beaches you see more adults than children with little fishing nets. The grown-ups are collecting shrimps from the rock pools, even on beaches in the centre of large resorts where the seawater might not be exactly clean enough to pickle your olives in. They will also pull mussels off the rocks, and anything that looks like an oyster will be taken back to the kitchen in a bucket and slurped down raw.
A resultant bout of food poisoning, which would scare most people off seafood for life, will be regarded as a bit of bad luck. A French friend of mine who spent a week vomiting after a mussel-gathering trip in Normandy was astonishingly philosophical about her experience: ‘The sewage outflow was round the other side of the headland, so we thought they’d be OK,’ she said. ‘My grandparents have been eating those mussels for years, and they never get sick.’ Sewage as vaccine. Not everyone’s cup of tea, even in France.
The French Get Fresh
British and American supermarkets have made a lot of progress since grapes used to come individually wrapped in cling film and the only homegrown fruit you saw were a few embarrassed-looking, over-polished apples. These days, farmers’ markets are reminding us Anglo-Saxons that food often comes from the ground rather than factories. But French markets don’t need to call themselves ‘farmers’ markets’. Even the most urban Parisian market looks as if it has one foot
