Foods of France

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Foods of France

It is perhaps misleading to talk about a national cuisine when, like much of French life, produce and cooking are subject to extensive regional variation. True, certain staple dishes appear on most menus (cassoulet, bouillabaisse etc), but local landscape and climate still determine many of the dishes served up in restaurants and homes. For instance, in Brittany the sea yields clams, perfect topped with shallots, parsley, butter and breadcrumbs (praires farcies); while in Burgundy, the famous vineyards attract luckless snails, to be simmered in wine and then bathed in garlic and parsley butter (escargots à la Bourguignonne).

Attitudes to food have changed in the last 20 years. Fewer people now linger over the two-hour lunch, a reduced share of income goes on food and the diet tends to be less calorific than of old. Such are the pressures of modern life. Some cite new eating habits as indicative of the French battle between modernity and tradition. Yet the passion remains and French cooking continues to evolve. The late 20th century fad for nouvelle cuisine has abated, but its taste for innovation and for fine fresh produce is increasingly applied to the traditions of country cooking (cuisine du terroir), now back in fashion. Supermarkets have latched on to the rediscovered taste for seasonal, small-scale food production. Of course, on local market stalls and in the small town charcuterie or boulangerie the trend never went away.

What is Terroir?

The word may have ancient connotations but terroir is a fashionable, if hard to quantify, facet of modern French cuisine. The term embraces land, climate, culture and produce, an intangible catch-all for that sense of place so important to the regions’ food and wine. So, that wild boar stew from just south of Orléans only tastes as good as it does because the ingredients flourished in the physical and climatic conditions unique to the Sologne forest. More traditionally, the term terroir has been applied to wine, used to describe the unique combination of soil, climate and topography that generates a particular vintage.

AOC Standards

One downside of having so much great food is that everyone else tries to rip if off. In an effort to safeguard regional produce from pale imitation, the French government devised the complex Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC). Any food bearing the AOC standard will have been traditionally made with ingredients drawn from a specific area and will conform to set standards. Only such produce can bear the name of its locale. Butter from Poitou-Charentes, walnuts from Grenoble and mussels from the bay at Mont St-Michel all wear the AOC badge with pride. As with terroir, the use of standards like the AOC has lapped over from the world of French wine.

Five Key Dates of French Food

1. 1533: Italian aristo Catherine de Medici marries into French royalty and, under her guidance, the Court gets passionate about its food for the first time.
2. 1691: François Massialot reveals the recipes of Louis XIV’s kitchen in Le Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois, effectively launching haute cuisine.
3. 1765: When Parisian soup maker Monsieur Boulanger offers customers at his tavern a choice of dishes, the world gets its first restaurant.
4. 1902: Auguste Escoffier pens La Grande Culinaire; 500 recipes of the rich, sauce-based cooking that would dominate 20th century French cuisine.
5. 1969: Food critics Millau, Gault and Gayot identify 48 chefs creating lighter food focused on fresh produce, recognizing nouvelle cuisine for the first time.

Regional Specialities: Truly Local Tastes

North and North-west

Lush, fertile Normandy, laced with orchards and grazed by brown and white Normande cows, is the milk churn of France. The region abounds in fine cheeses such as Camembert, Pont-l’Evêque and Livarot, while rich butters and creams infuse the local cuisine. Seafood is another staple: nowhere in France catches more oysters or scallops. Normandy is also the home of brioche.

In Brittany, the diet is similarly guided by fish and seafood. Towns have become famously allied to their catches: oysters in Cancale, crabs in St Malo and lobsters in Camaret. Primeurs (spring vegetables) grow well ahead of globe artichokes and leeks where the soil allows, and cereals are used for crêpes and their buckwheat cousins, gallettes. Saint Paulin and Campénéac, both semi-hard cheeses of monastic origin, are made here too.

Picardy and Nord-Pas-de-Calais are largely overlooked in the gourmand’s France, yet both harbour some worthy local fare. Cuisine from the Nord takes its lead from vegetables and fish. In Picardy, highly prized pré salé lamb is reared on the salt marshes of the Somme Estuary for a distinct flavour, while the region’s opulent summer fruits are used to make sorbets.

Three AOC foods from the North-west:

1. Carrots from Creances (Normandy)
2. Coco de Paimpol – white haricot beans (Brittany)
3. Oysters from Belon (Brittany)

North-east

In Alsace, with its strong Germanic flavour, cuisine reaches furthest from the French norm. This divergence hasn’t stopped the recent rise in popularity of the region’s robust food across France. The fertile landscape is regal veg territory and, in the plains around Strasbourg, the white cabbage is king. Cured pork and sausage are also fundamental to the diet – charcuteries sell some 200 local specialities – while the pungent rind-washed Munster Fermier is the AOC cheese of choice. Forests yield fruits and berries that end up in breads and tarts.

In the wilds of Lorraine and the Ardennes the woodland serves up wild boar, venison and mushrooms, while carp, pike and trout are all caught in the rivers and lakes. Pork here comes in many forms, from pâté to suckling pig, salt cured belly pork to saucisson, but the most famous remains the dry salted, air cured jambon d’Ardennes.

Paris and Île de France

Paris, despite what people from Lyon may tell you, is the gastronomic mecca of France. Although the city doesn’t retain a definable menu of its own, it soaks up produce and culinary expertise from across the country, bringing together a wealth of excellent markets, delis, bistros and restaurants. Migrants have also brought Paris the flavours of world cuisine (especially North African and Vietnamese) – tastes that are gradually spreading out to the rest of the country. The capital’s hinterland clings to its shrinking agricultural backcloth. Market gardens and orchards support fruit and vegetables, and the celebrated likes of Montmorency cherries and white Argenteuil asparagus still grow in the region, even if the towns that gave them a name have been largely swallowed by the suburbs of northern Paris. Salad vegetables provide the principle crop of the Île’s main agricultural area, Seine-et-Marne, to the east of the city. Here too, the ancient province of Brie continues to make its famous cheese.

Centre and East

The realities of rural life in the Massif Central emerge in the Auvergne’s unpretentious cuisine. One-pot cooking blends humble ingredients like cabbage, green lentils, potatoes, bacon and game into hearty stews. Cured meats and smoked and blood sausages are local specialities. While terroir is similarly pivotal to Burgundy’s famous cuisine, recipes here enjoy the subtleties of wine, mustard and cream. The strong Burgundian cheese, Epoisses de Bourgogne, washed in the marc de Bourgogne spirit, is eternally popular, and the region is also home to that national treasure, coq au vin.

In Lyon, French produce reaches its apex. Myriad eastern elements – from Charolais beef to Bresse chicken and, above all, charcuterie – collide and the city takes full creative advantage to stake its claim as the nation’s gastronomic HQ. In Franche- Comté and the Savoyard and Dauphiné Alps, the upland herds produce some of the country’s finest cheeses and cured meats.

Three AOC foods from the Centre and East:

1. Poulet de Bresse - chicken (Lyon, Burgundy and Jura)
2. Lentille verte du Puy - green lentils (Auvergne)
3. Noix de Grenoble - walnuts (Alps)

Three great upland cheese dishes:

1. Raclette (Franche-Comté and Savoy): Traditionally, the Raclette cheese is melted in front of the fire (most people now use a Raclette machine) and then smeared over boiled potatoes, onions and gherkins. It’s that easy.
2. Fondue Savoyarde (Savoy): A warm mixture of Beaufort, Comté and Gruyère cheeses cooked with white wine. Simply douse your hunk of bread in the bubbling pot and enjoy.
3. Tourte au Reblochon (Savoy) A round Reblochon cheese baked in a pastry crust. Reblochon was first made when 14th century farmers cheated the milk tax inspectors by not fully milking their cows. The second, secretive milking turned out to produce great creamy cheese.

West

French cooking took shape in the Loire’s royally connected kitchens and tradition has it that you still find the nation’s purest palate amid the region’s fertile landscape. In Anjou and Touraine the Loire Valley’s protective climate is perfect for apples and pears, and the sandy soil ideal for asparagus. Perch, shad, zander, pike and salmon are all served fresh from the region’s rivers, often bathed in a beurre blanc(wine, butter and shallots) or simple sorrel sauce. The Loire’s legendary goat’s cheeses include Crottin de Chavignol. On the coast, the peninsula of Guérande offers up a rich harvest of sea salt. Further south, the Dordogne dribbles foodie class. Pigs (or more likely dogs these days) snout for elusive black truffes and duck and geese livers are fattened for foie gras and confit. Duck and goose fat flavours everything, from soups to sautéed vegetables. Autumn brings the region a rich walnut harvest. Foie gras, confit, cèpes mushrooms and truffles spread into the Bordelais where the warm Garonne valley also supports plums, peaches and pears. Shellfish flourish on the coast west of Bordeaux, as they do along much of the Atlantic seaboard.

Three AOC foods from the West:

1. Walnuts from Périgord
2. Butter from Poitou- Charentes
3. Selles-sur-Cher – Loire goat’s milk cheese dusted with ash

South

French cuisine finds its bite in the country’s southwestern corner. Petulant red chillies are an essential ingredient in Les Pays Basque, used to flavour everything from jambon de Bayonne to ttoro, an Atlantic answer to bouillabaisse. Across the Pyrenees, the scrubby, sun drenched lands around the Mediterranean support a colourful crop. Provence, with its tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, olives and figs, enjoys a southern European diet. Traditional peasant soups and stews, often fish-based, are flavoured with the region’s bountiful wild herbs. Pieds et paquets is famously Provençal: lambs’ ‘feet’ and tripe ‘packets’ slowly cooked with garlic, wine and cured pork. Languedoc, similarly blessed with fresh produce, reputedly cultivates the best garlic in France, while neighbouring Roussillon digests paella in accordance with its Catalan spirit. In Corsica, rosemary, lavender, fennel and thyme, sourced in the island’s wild maquis undergrowth, blend with tomatoes, olives and lemons to flavour mountain-reared mutton, pork and beef.

Three AOC foods from the South:

1. Olives from Nyons (Provence)
2. Chasselas de Moissac table grapes (Midi-Pyrenees)
3. Piment d’Espelette chillies (Les Pays Basque)

Three southern stews:

1. Cassoulet: Languedoc’s humble stew has become a French legend. Soaked haricot beans are cooked with wine, garlic, tomatoes, onions, herbs and pork (duck if your luck’s in), and then topped with breadcrumbs. Three inland towns – Toulouse, Carcassonne and Castelnaudary – all claim the superior version.
2. Stufatu: In Corsica, the traditional peasant’s casserole contains beef, mutton or wild boar, languidly cooked in wine and tomatoes to create a thick sauce. As befits Corsica’s Italian ancestry, Stufatu is often served with pasta or polenta.
3. Bouillabaisse: Another national icon born of humble origins, the soupy Provençal stew originated among Marseilles’ fishermen who would throw the small, unsellable characters of the catch into the cooking pot. Garlic, tomatoes and saffron usually find their way into the stock, served with bread and a chilli mayonnaise called rouille.

Staple Diet: Bread, Charcuterie and Cheese

Bread

Consumed with virtually every meal, bread is integral to the French eating ritual. Freshness is calculated in hours not days, and most boulangers will bake at least twice a day to ensure both lunch and dinner are accompanied by fresh bread. The French like their bread crusty: the baguette was an innovation designed to get more crust from your loaf. Although bread consumption fell steadily in France during the 20th century (the French eat one fifth of the bread they did in 1900), the modern taste for produits du terroirs has seen baking traditions regain ground in the last decade. In bakeries across the country the humble baguette, its even slimmer cousin, the ficelle, and the fatter pain increasingly share shelf space with crusty and chewy pain de campagne, rye breads and others made with nuts, wine, olives or meat.

Bread Etiquette:

• Don’t nibble at your bread before the first course has arrived
• Use your fingers to break the bread – don’t cut it with a knife
• It is okay to mop your plate with the bread
• Don’t ask for butter to spread on your bread – the French rarely do
• You’re unlikely to get a separate plate for bread – put it on the table.

Charcuterie

In France, the traditional necessity of preserving meat bred such creativity that it seems harsh to describe charcuterie as a mere staple foodstuff. Sausages, tripe, pâtés, blood puddings, cured hams, terrines, rillettes: charcuterie encompasses all manner of meat products, straying well beyond the traditional pork boundaries to embrace everything from goose to wild boar, veal to chicken. Charcuterie, like all French food, is a patchwork of regional tastes, a mélange from which a few choice cuts have emerged as nationwide favourites. And, in common with all traditional French produce, charcuterie is also enjoying something of a renaissance, from the boudin blanc (a pork or chicken sausage) of the north to the jambon de Bayonne (salted, air-cured ham) in the south-west.

Best of the wurst: unusual charcuterie

• Jésus: air cured saucisson sec from Lyon supposed to resemble the swaddled baby Jesus
• Fromage de Tete: take a pig’s head, strip off the meat and set it in a thick, flavoured aspic to make a popular brawn
• Crépine: white, lacily veined fat encasing a pig’s stomach, removed and often wrapped around sausagemeat.

Cheese

At first glance cheese seems emblematic of the nation, but in truth it’s a food defined by local variation. When de Gaulle grumbled about governing a country with 246 different cheeses, he alluded to the trials of presiding over the different regions and the French themselves. The parallel is apt: mass production and regulation attempt to harness the spirit of great French cheese, yet consumers retain most affection for the rule breakers, for the unpasteurized (lait cru) fermier cheeses so important in the prevailing taste for terroir.

Today, around 500 variations of cheese are produced in France, from the cooked and pressed Beaufort of Savoie, to the soft and creamy Gris de Lille, rind-washed for three months. Factory-made cheeses are exported around the globe; others (most will tell you the best) are produced on family run farms, in monasteries or even mountainside huts, and sold on local markets. Certain varieties of cheese can fall within more than one of these categories. For instance, the anodyne factory Brie has its cottage industry cousin.

Getting it right: five slices of cheese etiquette

• Going back for seconds of cheese is very poor form: it’s about taste, not quantity
• When the cheese tray comes round, only sample up to three different cheeses
• The biggest faux pas of the lot is to cut the nose off a soft cheese. Cut slices from the rind of the cheese to the centre, as if carving up a pie
• Use wine to clean the palate between cheeses
• Don’t remove the rind from a cheese before serving; connoisseurs won’t be impressed.

Eating Habits

Breakfast: Often just a bowl of café au lait and butter and jam on yesterday’s bread. Croissants and pains au chocolats tend to be eaten at weekends or on special occasions.

Lunch: While still considered the main meal by some, in urban areas the midday grande bouffegenerally loses out to something in a baguette, a croque monsieur (ham and cheese toastie) or, deep breath, a hamburger.

Dinner: The French still enjoy an ornate evening meal when opportunity allows. It won’t begin until eight but, once it does, expect a minimum of three courses washed down with different wines (all of which will be French). If a main meal was taken at lunch, dinner is more liable to be a salad or quiche.

French Markets

Every French town or suburb has at least one food market a week, often more. Produce is local and seasonal, and some of the stalls will be staffed by the producers themselves. But browsing the market is about more than buying food: it’s a social experience, a place to catch up on gossip where no self-respecting French woman would be seen without her make-up. As for how to behave, watching the old dears is your best bet. They always know the best stalls, where invariably they will prod and sniff the produce before parting with any cash. Most markets are open by 08:00 and finished by 13:00; avoid the first hour or two, unless you want to compete with local restaurateurs.

Farm fresh

If you can’t wait for the farmer to come to market, go to him. Many farms sell direct to the public: everything from eggs to foie gras, honey to snails can be purchased where you see a vente directe sign.

Extract from Speak the Culture France, a Thorogood publication, recommended by the Institut Français
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Copyright © 2009 Thorogood Publishing