French Lessons Read Free Page A

choice of a different market every day, and they seem to be in no
danger of suffering from lack of customers. On the contrary, they appear to be
getting bigger and more popular. I remember Coustellet market twenty years ago,
when there were no more than ten or twelve small vans in the village parking
area. You could buy local vegetables and fruit, some goat cheese, half a dozen
eggs, and that was about it. Today, the market has grown until it covers nearly
an acre, and in high season it’s packed every Sunday morning.
    It’s not only what the French eat that sets them apart from so many
other nationalities but how they eat it. They concentrate on their food,
sometimes to such an extent that they put aside the joys of arguing with one
another. And they are determined to extract the last ounce of pleasure from a
meal, a tendency that my old boss Mr. Jenkins liked to describe as
“making beasts of themselves.”
    There is a wonderful
photograph taken, I think, in the 1920s, that shows a group of men in suits
seated around a table. They are about to eat spit-roasted
ortolan
s—
tiny larklike birds that are now a protected
species. But before taking that first crunchy mouthful, they must observe the
ritual of appreciating the bouquet. This is the moment that has been captured
by the photographer. There they sit, these respectable, well-dressed men, each
of them bent low over his plate with his head completely covered by a napkin,
so that the fragrant steam can be trapped, inhaled, and properly savored. It
looks for all the world like a coven of hooded monks saying grace before having
lunch.
    No doubt when the
ortolans
are finished there will be a
little sauce or gravy remaining on the plate. Too exquisite to leave, this
final treat will have to be dealt with in the correct manner, using a piece of
purpose-built cutlery that only a Frenchman could have invented. It resembles a
spoon that has been flattened, leaving no more than the hint of a lip along one
side. The sole function of this ingenious utensil is to scoop up what is left
of the sauce in a genteel fashion (thus avoiding the plebeian habit—one
that I love—of using bread as a mop).
    As it happens, there is a
socially acceptable way to do even this if the cutlery doesn’t run to a
full set of equipment. You take your bread, tear it up into small pieces, and
then use your knife and fork to steer the bread through the sauce until you
have cleaned your plate. I learned this at a dinner party some years ago, where
my host was delighted to instruct me on some of the differences between English
and French table etiquette—and, of course, the superiority of the French
way of doing things.
    As a boy, I was taught to keep my hands under the
table when they were not occupied with knife or fork or glass—a curious
habit, my host said, and one that encourages mischievous behavior. It is well
known that hands at English dinner parties have a tendency to wander under the
table, squeezing a thigh, caressing a knee, and generally getting up to no
good. In the best French households, the rule is the reverse—idle hands
must be kept on the table. Dalliance cannot be allowed to interfere with food.
First things first is the rule, and, during dinner at least, fondling is
prohibited.
    Hastily putting my hands back where they should be, I asked
if there was a logical reason why the French, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, almost
always set the table with the forks facing downward. Was it, I wondered, to
protect tender and well-brought-up fingers from being pricked by the tines of
the fork? My host looked at me with an expression I’ve seen a hundred
times before on a hundred French faces—half-amused, half-puzzled. How
could I be so ignorant about something so obvious? Forks are placed like that,
of course, in order to display the family crest engraved on the back.
    Learning about food—learning to eat—is a series of edible
adventures and surprises. For instance, just when you think you