Some of the rules listed below may seem very sexist, but France is still that kind of a place. I once started a job in Paris on the day of the firm’s Christmas party. My boss, a woman, nominated me, as one of the few men there, to open the champagne. She quickly regretted it when I let the cork fly out of the bottle. It bounced off the ceiling and hit her on the head. I and most of the other staff laughed, and it took her three months to start paying my salary.
Here are some more present-day food rituals that must be followed in la bonne société:
• At table, diners must always be seated man-woman-man-woman. This rule must be adhered to even if some guests are gay.
• At the restaurant, women order first.
• At table, there should always be glasses for wine and water. The water glasses should be bigger than the wine glasses. The wine glasses will probably be filled more often, but at least a token gesture towards sobriety has been made.
• Non-French wine should be ordered only in an ethnic restaurant or if all bottles of French wine in the restaurant have been smashed and/or drunk by visiting rugby fans.
• At a restaurant, waiters will ask who is going to taste the wine. Men usually do so.
• At home, the first few drops of a new bottle of wine should be poured into one’s own glass (in case there are any cork remnants). After that, women’s glasses are filled first, then men’s.
• When opening champagne, hold the cork and turn the bottle. Don’t let the cork go, and don’t try to sabrer le champagne (cut the top of the bottle off with a sabre blow) unless you are a fencing expert, otherwise the room will be full of champagne spray and flying glass.
• Before touching your food, it is polite to say ‘Bon appétit.’ And men should not start eating until the women have taken their first forkful.
• It is polite to discuss food at the table, but not (for too long, anyway) what you are actually eating. At the restaurant you should, however, ask your fellow diners what their food is like.
• There is a new fad in Paris that involves eating using only a fork that you hold like a pen or a chopstick. Obviously it doesn’t work if you’ve got a hunk of meat on your plate, but when eating anything lighter, like a salad or a plate of vegetables, it seems to be considered more refined to leave your knife on the table. When using the knife to cut meat, some French people hold the fork vertically like a skewer. Parisians think this is vulgar and (even worse) provincial.
• Knives should never be crossed – on the table, on worktops or in the sink waiting to be washed. This symbolizes conflict (probably about who’s going to do the washing-up).
• Meat may be served when almost raw (or in the case of steak tartare, totally raw). It will cause offence to send bloody, red-centred roast beef back to the chef saying it is uncooked. So remember the different stages of cooking when you are asked ‘Quelle cuisson?’ (‘How would you like it cooked?’) From raw to well done, they are: bleu, saignant (‘bloody’), à point and bien cuit. If you want it cooked all the way through, it might be best to say ‘Très bien cuit, s’il vous plaît.’ Some waiters might cheekily add an à l’américaine option, meaning as hard as a cowboy’s boot sole.
• Salad without dressing is not salad, it is a pile of ingredients. Even grated carrot needs at the very least a few drops of lemon juice. It is usual to make the dressing in the salad bowl, then tip the salad loosely on top. Don’t toss the salad until the last minute or it will go soggy.
• Never cut lettuce on your plate. This is because, long ago, when cutlery was made of iron, the vinaigrette made the lettuce taste of metal.
• Obviously you never cut oysters or mussels. Oysters should be loosened from the shell using the little fork provided, then slurped down whole. Mussels should be picked out of the shell using a mussel shell as tweezers. The French have no qualms about eating shellfish with their fingers. Seafood platters involve hours of tearing, twisting, picking and snapping, and that’s what the finger bowls (rince-doigts) or (in less chic places) towelettes in a sachet are for.
• Only eat shellfish in months that contain an ‘r’. This rules out the summer months when the sea is relatively warm and storage difficult. Most people ignore the rule when they’re eating by the sea, but eating oysters in Paris in August is for tourists with lead-lined digestive tracts.
• Never put a loaf of bread upside-down on the table. This is bad luck.
• If you want to wipe your plate (there is a verb for this – saucer, pronounced ‘sossay’), then use a piece of bread skewered on the end of your fork. It is not really the done thing to push the bread around the plate with your fingers, though people do it.
• Similarly, you are not supposed to dunk croissants or tartines (buttered bread) into your coffee at breakfast, but it seems a crime not to. No one will look askance if you do this in a café.
• When having a cheese fondue, don’t drop your bread into the saucepan. Anyone doing this will have to do a forfeit (gage), such as hopping around the table three times or (worse) doing all the washing-up.
Finally a couple of rules that are less about etiquette than about understanding the food put in front of you:
• Remember that a small furry animal is not cute – it is a meal in waiting. Comments like ‘poor little bunny’ will only provoke
