First Encounters. French Food I

Never to be forgotten.  That’s how certain first encounters are supposed to be.  The one you love. The ocean. French food.  A friend has asked me to record my first encounters with French food.  So here’s the first.

It was the late 1950s.  Nice English fifteen year olds did exchanges with nice French fifteen year olds.  The pall of World War II still hung over Europe and foreign travel was a big deal. Our parents had been to Europe perhaps once, perhaps never.  They were sending their children on a great adventure, just about affordable because all that was required was the travel money. Like everyone else in my class I filled out the forms supplied by the exchange agency.

The school called my parents.  I had been assigned, for reasons unknown, to exchange with the son of a very important French family, with a father who was a senior French politician, diplomat, and intellectual.  Completely unworldly, this left me utterly unfazed.

I somehow got to the family summer (and ancestral) house in the Jura.  We were escorted on the Channel crossing but even so I discovered with a shock that porters were not kind people who carried your luggage for free.  The eldest son met me in Paris, fed me on a sandwich from a rotating automat (wow), and put me on the next train.

Madame had written my mother.  She hoped she’d understand but they had no running water in the house.  The one toilet was across the graveled entry yard.  Not so different from home actually though we had had running water and two toilets in the house for the past decade.  And the house was pleasant.  Tall rather than long, very bare, what furniture there was valuable antiques, a ping pong table in the entrance hall, and a run down garden that produced nothing but red currants outside the dining room.

I never went in the kitchen, a sliver of a room off the entrance hall where Madame cooked with the wife of the couple who looked after the house.  The husband kept rabbits in a cage in the yard and was a dab hand at twisting their necks.

I had no expectations about the food.  I had no idea that French food was supposed to be anything special.  I suppose I was relieved that I liked what we had. It might for all I knew, after all, have been like the food the poor boarders in my school had to live on.

The food was good.  For breakfast there was milky coffee from a bowl (my first real coffee drinking) with fresh bread, unsalted butter, and good jam (except Sundays when the village bakery wasn’t open and we had what tasted to me like a stale bun but I later realized was the much-heralded brioche).

The main meal at midday consisted of a vegetable soup, a sliver of meat, boiled potatoes and perhaps another boiled vegetable, and a green salad, and perhaps a bit of cheese and fruit.  I was shocked that the family ate red currants with sugar instead of made into jelly to serve with lamb or game.

I don’t remember what we had in the evening. Not much, I think.  Bread and cheese.

All in all, it was pretty similar to what I was used to.  The bread was long, not square. I had my first taste of petit suisse which I thought would be ice cream and definitely wasn’t. The local cheese was different from Cheddar but equally good (our families exchanged cheeses for years thereafter).  The main meal came in stages not all at once.  I missed a good cup of tea and didn’t think a tisane while reading Paris Match or Tintin made up for it. Once we each had a very fancy pastry from the pastry shop in the town about ten miles away.

Weekends were special.  Monsieur arrived from Geneva where he was representing the French at an international convention. “Le chocolat suisse” cried the five children in residence (the two oldest were not there) hurling themselves on their father.  He doled it out, one square each.  During the rest of the week, if we went swimming in the river in the afternoon, we had a chunk of baguette and a square of chocolate to put in the middle.

One other food experience stuck in my mind.   Eric (my exchange partner) and I were sent on a tour to visit interesting places and family friends. One was the widow of a famous French philosopher. One was a cardinal.

And the third was a family who still lived in the chateau that their ancestors had built in the 14th century on the south side of Lake Geneva (googling I find that at least some of them are still there).  I’d never stayed in a medieval castle before.  I was stunned by my tiny bedroom in a tower with a view through a tiny vertical window to the lake.  I was fascinated by the tiny pebbly beach and the waters of the lake lapping at the walls of the chateau.

But the food.  If I remember right about thirty family members lived in the chateau.  There was a huge dining hall with a long table.  One of the family acted as cook.   He brought in a big tray.  It was covered with a slab of yellow stuff.  It had some kind of sauce on top, tomato perhaps.  We each got a square.   That was dinner?!

I now realize it was polenta.  And times were hard.

Never to be forgotten, in those days before ethnic restaurants (in fact I’d only eaten out in a restaurant once or twice in my life) this was my first experience of anything other than English food.  But stock, cream, sauces.  Not a trace.  Nor of any of the other dishes that we tend to associate today with French food.

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