French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew (Vintage Departures) - Softcover

Mayle, Peter

 
9780375705618: French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew (Vintage Departures)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375705619 ISBN 13: 9780375705618
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A delightful, delicious, and best-selling account of the gustatory pleasures to be found throughout France, from the beloved author of A Year in Provence.

The French celebrate food and drink more than any other people, and Peter Mayle shows us just how contagious their enthusiasm can be. We visit the Foire aux Escargots. We attend a truly French marathon, where the beverage of choice is Château Lafite-Rothschild rather than Gatorade. We search out the most pungent cheese in France, and eavesdrop on a heated debate on the perfect way to prepare an omelet. We even attend a Catholic mass in the village of Richerenches, a sacred event at which thanks are given for the aromatic, mysterious, and breathtakingly expensive black truffle. With Mayle as our charming guide, we come away satisfied (if a little hungry), and with a sudden desire to book a flight to France at once.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Mayle is the author of fifteen books, nine of them novels, including the beloved bestseller A Year in Provence. A recipient of the Légion d’Honneur from the French government for his cultural contributions, he lived in Provence with his wife, Jennie, for more than twenty-five years. Mayle died in 2018.

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Peter Mayle, francophile phenomenon and author of "A Year in Provence, brings another delightful (and delicious) account of the good life, this time exploring the gustatory pleasures to be found throughout France.
The French celebrate food and drink more than any other people, and Mayle shows us just how contagious their enthusiasm can be. We visit the Foire aux Escargots. We attend a truly French marathon, where the beverage of choice is Chteau Lafite-Rothschild rather than Gatorade. We search out the most pungent cheese in France, and eavesdrop on a heated debate on the perfect way to prepare an omelet. We even attend a Catholic mass in the village of Richerenches, a sacred event at which thanks are given for the aromatic, mysterious, and breathtakingly expensive black truffle. With Mayle as our inimitably charming guide, we come away with a satisfied smile (if a little hungry) and the compelling desire to book a flight to France at once.

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The Inner Frenchman
The early part of my life was spent in the gastronomic wilderness of postwar England, when delicacies of the table were in extremely short supply. I suppose I must have possessed taste buds in my youth, but they were left undisturbed. Food was fuel, and in many cases not very appetizing fuel. I still have vivid memories of boarding school cuisine, which seemed to have been carefully color-coordinated--gray meat, gray potatoes, gray vegetables, gray flavor. At the time, I thought it was perfectly normal.

I was in for a pleasant shock. Not long after I became the lowliest trainee in an enormous multinational corporation, I was instructed to accompany my first boss, Mr. Jenkins, on a trip to Paris as his junior appendage. This was the way, so I was told, to start learning the ropes of big business. I should count myself lucky to have such an opportunity at the tender age of nineteen.

Jenkins was English and proud of it, English to the point of caricature, a role I think he took some pleasure in cultivating. When going abroad, he announced his nationality and armed himself against the elements with a bowler hat and a strictly furled umbrella. On this occasion, I was his personal bearer, and I had been given the important task of carrying his briefcase.

Before we left for the great unknown on the other side of the English Channel, Jenkins had been kind enough to give me some tips on dealing with the natives. One piece of advice was a model of clarity: I should never attempt to get involved with what he referred to as "their lingo." Speak English forcefully enough, he said, and they will eventually understand you. When in doubt, shout. It was a simple formula that Jenkins claimed had worked in outposts of the British Empire for hundreds of years, and he saw no reason for changing it now.
Like many of his generation, he had very little good to say about the French--an odd lot who couldn't even understand cricket. But he did admit that they knew their way around a kitchen, and one day he was graciously pleased to accept an invitation from two of his Parisian colleagues to have lunch; or, as Jenkins said, a spot of grub. It was the first memorable meal of my life.

We were taken to a suitably English address, the avenue Georges V, where there was (and still is) a restaurant called Marius and Janette. Even before sitting down, I could tell I was in a serious establishment, unlike anywhere I'd been before. It smelled different: exotic and tantalizing. There was the scent of the sea as we passed the display of oysters on their bed of crushed ice, the rich whiff of butter warming in a pan, and, coming through the air every time the kitchen door swung open, the pervasive--and to my untraveled nose, infinitely foreign--hum of garlic.

Jenkins surrendered his hat and umbrella as we sat down, and I looked with bewilderment at the crystal forest of glasses and the armory of knives and forks laid out in front of me. The trick was to start on the outside and work inward, I was told. But the correct choice of cutlery was a minor problem compared to making sense of the elaborate mysteries described on the pages of the menu. What was a bar grillé? What was a loup à l'écaille? And what in heaven's name was aioli? All I had to help me was schoolboy French, and I hadn't been a particularly gifted schoolboy. I dithered over these puzzling choices in a fog of almost complete ignorance, too timid to ask for help.

Jenkins, quite unconsciously, came to my rescue. "Personally," he said, "I never eat anything I can't pronounce." He closed his menu with a decisive snap. "Fish and chips for me. They do a very decent fish and chips in France. Not quite like ours, of course."

With a sense of relief, I said I'd have the same. Our two French colleagues raised four surprised eyebrows. No oysters to start with? No soupe de poissons? The company was paying; there was no need to hold back. But Jenkins was adamant. He couldn't abide the texture of oysters--"slippery little blighters" was how he described them--and he didn't care for the way soup had a tendency to cling to his mustache. Fish and chips would suit him very nicely, thank you.

By this time, I was already enjoying a minor revelation, which was the bread. It was light and crusty and slightly chewy, and I spread on to it some of the pale, almost white butter from the slab on a saucer in front of me. A slab. English butter in those days was highly salted and a lurid shade of yellow, and it was doled out in small, grudging pats. At the first mouthful of French bread and French butter, my taste buds, dormant until then, went into spasm.

The fish, a majestic creature that I think was sea bass, was ceremoniously presented, filleted in seconds with a spoon and fork, and arranged with great care on my plate. My previous experience of fish had been limited to either cod or plaice, heavily disguised, in accordance with the English preference, under a thick shroud of batter. In contrast, the sea bass, white and fragrant with what I now know was fennel, looked curiously naked. It was all very strange.

Even the chips, the pommes frites, didn't resemble the sturdy English variety. These chips, a golden pyramid of them served on a separate dish, were pencil-slim, crisp between the teeth, tender to chew, a perfect foil for the delicate flesh of the fish. It was lucky for me that I wasn't required to contribute to the conversation of my elders and betters; I was too busy discovering real food.

Then there was cheese. Or rather, there were a dozen or more cheeses, another source of confusion after years of having only the simple choice of Cheddar or Gorgonzola. I thought I recognized a vaguely familiar shape, safe and Cheddar-like, and pointed to it. The waiter insisted on giving me two other cheeses as well, so that I could compare the textural delights of hard, medium, and creamy. More of that bread. More signals of joy from the taste buds, which were making up for lost time.

Tarte aux pommes. Even I knew what that was; even Jenkins knew. "Excellent," he said. "Apple pie. I wonder if they have any proper cream." Unlike the apple pies of my youth, with a thick crust top and bottom, the tart on my plate was topless, displaying the fruit--wafers of apple, beautifully arranged in overlapping layers, glistening with glaze on a sliver of buttery pastry.

Too young to be offered an expense-account cigar and a balloon of brandy, I sat in a daze of repletion while my companions puffed away and considered a return to the cares of office. I was slightly tipsy after my two permitted glasses of wine, and I completely forgot that I was responsible for the all-important Jenkins briefcase. When we left the restaurant I left it under the table, which demonstrated to him that I was not executive material, and which marked the beginning of the end of my career in that particular company. But, much more important, lunch had been a personal turning point, the loss of my gastronomic virginity.

It wasn't only because of what I had eaten, although that had been incomparably better than anything I'd eaten before. It was the total experience: the elegance of the table setting, the ritual of opening and tasting the wine, the unobtrusive efficiency of the waiters and their attention to detail, arranging the plates just so, whisking up bread crumbs from the tablecloth. For me, it had been a special occasion. I couldn't imagine people eating like this every day; and yet, in France, they did. It was the start of an enduring fascination with the French and their love affair with food.

It is, of course, the most whiskery old cliché, but clichés usually have their basis in fact, and this one certainly does: Historically, the French have paid...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375705619
ISBN 13 
9780375705618
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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ISBN 10:  0375405909 ISBN 13:  9780375405907
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001
Hardcover