This is because the French still love eating fresh, seasonal produce. Like anywhere else in Europe, you can buy artificially ripened Spanish strawberries in the heart of winter, but come summer, the market stalls explode with Gariguette strawberries – long, pinkish-red, extra-juicy fruit with a flavour you just don’t get from the winter version.
A French summer holiday, especially in the southwest, has a bright-orange tinge to it – the colour of the flesh of Charentais melons. At many markets there will be stalls selling nothing else. To test whether they’re ripe you don’t squeeze them – you sniff their bottoms, doggy-style. Ripe ones smell of sweet melon (logical, really). And if they’re fully ripe, their flesh will be deep, dark orange and taste almost as if it were already laced with port.
A few weeks later, the figs start to arrive. The gooey red insides of a green fig, ripe to the point of eruption, are like naturally occurring jam – juicier and sweeter than any fruit you will find in the northern hemisphere at that time of year.
It’s the same for the purple Muscat grapes that are dusty-looking and a million times softer than the crisp, shiny, almost transparent torpedoes that are usually sold in English supermarkets. Squeezing them into your mouth is like drinking virgin wine.
The first days of autumn bring a muddy, smoky-smelling invasion of fresh fungus to every vegetable stall in France. Some are from the Chernobyl zone, but plenty of them have been delivered straight from French forests, just begging to be cleaned, fried in butter and enfolded in an omelette, providing one of the most erotic experiences you can have with an egg since a soft-porn film I once saw called something like Things to Do with a Yolk. But the mushroom-omelette experience is, if anything, even more pleasurable because it’s only possible for the few weeks when the best mushrooms are in town.
Not only is this food all seasonal, but it has often travelled just a short distance, so it’s extremely fresh. In many regions of the country, when you go to a restaurant, you can get a meal whose ingredients, apart from the citrus fruits, coffee and sugar, all come from within fifty kilometres of where you’re sitting.
The île de Ré, near La Rochelle, is my favourite place for this. The nineteen-mile-long island produces masses of seafood, all kinds of vegetables, its own wine, beer, meat, butter, cheese and more. Half a dozen fresh local oysters and a glass of the island’s white wine is one of the best snacks you could ever wish for, and will cost less than the price of a railway sandwich.
To put it simply, we Anglo-Saxons may have lots of celebrity chefs, but the French have celebrity food. I know which I prefer.
French Women Do Get Fat
A glance at the bodies on an average French beach will disprove the theory that French women don’t get fat. The same goes for men and children. There are plenty of people in France who have fallen victim to the attractions of the junk-food, no-exercise diet.
But over all, the French do get less fat than others. Mais pourquoi?
Here is a typical week’s worth of midday meals served at a certain Parisian establishment. Read it and try to guess who was eating this food.
MONDAY
Beetroot salad with croutons, lamb couscous with semolina and
boiled vegetables, sweetened yoghurt, seasonal fruit.
TUESDAY
Grated carrot salad with lemon-juice dressing, roast pork with
mustard sauce, peas, Gruyère cheese, fromage blanc
with fruit in syrup.
WEDNESDAY
Lettuce and avocado, fried steak with flageolet beans,
Saint-Nectaire cheese, fruit cocktail.
THURSDAY
Potato salad with tarragon, turkey curry with green beans,
Pyrenean cheese, seasonal fruit.
FRIDAY
Carrot, cabbage and sweetcorn salad, cod in hollandaise sauce,
rice with vegetables, Camembert, chocolate cream.
So who was eating these lunches? The regulars at a menu fixe restaurant? The workers in one of Paris’s museums? The staff of Air France?
No, it’s a typical week’s worth of canteen menus in the schools of Paris’s 4th arrondissement.
On only one day, a Thursday late in the month, were French fries on the menu. On only two days was there no fresh salad as a starter, and that was because it was replaced once by a soup and once by an onion tart. On 17 eleven days, the dessert was a seasonal fruit.
The French don’t need a celebrity chef to tell their schools how to feed kids. And they are strong believers in educating the taste buds of the young generation. Not just to ensure future customers for French farmers, but also to try and make sure that the kids don’t turn into three-hamburgers-a-day food yobs.
Make no mistake, French kids love to go to fast-food places, and dream of having French fries with every meal. But schools are places where you’re supposed to learn les bonnes manières, and that includes the ‘right’ diet. The menus aren’t monastic – there are lots of sugary desserts – but they are obligatory (except for religious variants), and educate the palate just as compulsory long division shapes the mind. There are probably more herbs, spices and types of cheese in a month’s school menus than some American children eat in a lifetime.
French adults carry on this meal-eating habit gained in youth. Office workers rarely gobble a sandwich at their desk. The majority of office workers I’ve dealt with will go and have a sit-down meal at lunchtime, either at their canteen or a café or restaurant. You might think that this would encourage gluttony, but in France restaurants are not judged purely on the quantity of food per portion. And even if French people do take two hours for lunch (which is, honestly, not often the case on workdays), they will spend half the time talking rather than eating. Coffee alone will take twenty minutes.
Of course, lots of people don’t have time for a full sit-down meal. If a company doesn’t have a canteen, it is usually obliged to give
