A restaurant with rooms, somewhere in the south of France. At 9am, a perfectly simple breakfast is served: coffee, croissants, apricot jam. But what’s this? On a side plate, sits a rectangular slab of primrose-coloured butter, its dimensions exactly the same as those of the croissants. I’m not big on Instagram, but at this point I can’t resist. Placing a sugar cube beside it for scale, I photograph the butter and post it with the ecstatic (I may mean slightly hysterical) caption: BREAKFAST IN FRANCE. THIS IS HOW TO LIVE!
Some part of me longs to believe that the French still live superior gustatory lives to our own. Their melons are sweeter, their lunches longer, and no one worries about how much fat is in anything – or so I tell myself. Over supper the night before, a friend and I had talked of the inexpensive set menus we both remember from long ago family holidays, the pair of us competing to reel off the predictable but delicious courses: carrot rappée to start, confit of duck with potatoes and frisée to follow, some cheese and then chocolate mousse or creme caramel to finish. We agreed that there’s lately far too much burrata abroad in la France profonde, burrata being shorthand for the way the country’s restaurant menus have become blurry and fussy. But now I begin to think there may be hope. In what other country would this quantity of butter be considered an essential component of a decent breakfast?
Then again, perhaps I’m just clutching at straws. In the end, there’s no getting away from it. A certain kind of French food – traditional, beautifully executed, basic in the best sense of the word – is now more loved and celebrated in Britain than in France, where it tends to be cooked by those who first fell for it, as I did, in childhood. I’m thinking of Henry Harris’s lovely Clerkenwell restaurant, Bouchon Racine, and of the pop-up Broche Rotisserie, which is the work of Sam Browett and Reuben Johnson, two brilliant young chefs whose day job is at Noble Rot – but you will know your own places, of course. And isn’t it really quite odd, when you think about it? Nostalgia, which must take some of the blame for Brexit, has also given us homegrown cassoulet and tarte tatin.
Not that I’m the only one to notice this reversal. I come home from my holiday to a parcel in which I find a copy of Between Meals, a new edition of the 1962 collection of essays by that great American eater AJ Liebling, to be published next month by Penguin Modern Classics. A droll account of the time Liebling spent eating and drinking in 1920s Paris under the tutelage of his friend, the screenwriter Yves Mirande (“one of the last great around-the-clock gastronomes of France”), this is a book that may do rather well in present circumstances; the pieces within are just the thing for anyone who pines for a nicely roasted guinea fowl followed by a crisp, cold slice of vacherin (I mean the pudding, made of ice-cream and meringue, not the cheese). Liebling’s account of eating escargots is the best I’ve ever read, though admittedly this is niche territory. (“Mirande finished his dozen first, meticulously swabbing out the garlicky butter in each pot with a bit of bread that was fitted to the bore of the crock as precisely as a bullet to a rifle barrel …)
But they’re also, more helpfully, perspective inducing. Some of Liebling’s moans will seem all too familiar. He also agonises over what may soon be lost: the tastes, the skills, the relative cheapness and simplicity. At one moment, he even worries about the shortage of young people who are able and willing to work in kitchens. “It is harder every year to recruit boys for the long, hard, dirty apprenticeship at nominal pay that makes a cook,” he writes, before going on to rage at France’s growing predilection for “short order” chefs.
Turning the book’s pages hungrily, you begin to think that while some things disappear for a reason – for instance, oysters dyed red, white and blue – others will survive, come what may, and if that happens to be here in Britain rather than there, in France, well, so be it. Travel is increasingly exhausting, a realm of delays, cancellations and bad sandwiches. How nice to be able to count on a good terrine and poached apricots without even having to renew your passport.
