Edward Behr - The Food and Wine of France: Eating and Drinking from Champagne to Provence

W e live in a time of innovation and forgetting. For food and drink, its a time of excitement. Compared with twenty or thirty years ago, we know an astounding amount, and the information continues to accumulate: about ingredients, cuisines, cultures, nature, diverse science, technology, the economics and the politics of food. It seems as if the popularity of food as entertainment will never stop growing. In ambitious restaurants in France and other countries, the quality of raw materials and the aspirations and achievements of many cooks have leaped upward, drawing customers expectations with them. The worlds cuisinestheir structures, ingredients, techniques, recipesare taken up, celebrated, exploited, ignored, tossed out the window, put on the shelf with the rest, according to the cook and what feels right at the moment. High-end cooking, and the more affordable cooking influenced by it, is wide open and seems destined to become only more and more international. Not so long ago I thought that North Americans in particular were becoming increasingly knowledgeable and discriminating about food and drink. But no individual can master more than a sliver of the information now available. Consumers, and often chefs and writers, in the face of so much information, seem to have become overwhelmed and to have pulled back. Theyre more likely to skate over the wide, enchanting surface. Weve retreated to what we can easily knowwhats new, whats fun, whats happening, what tastes really good right now. (The popularity of innovative, often captivating new cocktails, with no roots and no background to think about, makes perfect sense for our time.)

When we live so much in the moment, we miss a lot. Good French food is very, very delicious. Other food may be as good, but none is better. French food is generous, sensual, obvious, subtle, both simple and complex. A lot of modern inventive food by comparison is wildly abstract and austere. The deliciousness of French food is overt; its about appetite.

Into perhaps the early 1970s in France, which was about fifteen years before I began to visit there regularly, by most accounts you could eat well practically anywhere, going on the looks of a place and the menu posted outside. For a very long time, however, without good advice, it has been the easiest thing in the world to eat badly in France. The reasons arent so surprisingthe pressures of industrialization in an industrialized country, the passing of a generation rooted in life before the Second World War, and the aftershocks of Nouvelle Cuisine, which called so much into question. Slowly, here and there, as a charcutier or a ptissier or a chef retired, the losses accumulated. Now when you eat out, you must know where to go. And if you do, its a great time to eat in France, particularly in the high-energy small restaurants of Paris.

But where French cuisine once towered, its influence has famously shrunk. The sauces at the center of classical cuisine have been seen as outmoded for decades and are all but ignored, in France as everywhere. The old dishes too are mostly gone, except the stereotypical selection in a retro-ish bistro, and even those dishes may not be intact. To be clear, I mean coq au vin, gratined onion soup, sole meunire,salade nioise,frise aux lardons,moules frites, steak frites, steak au poivre, moules marinire, skate with brown butter and capers, sauted kidneys in mustard sauce, tripes la mode de Caen, blanquette de veau, pot-au-feu, tarte Tatin, a simple lettuce salad with vinaigrette (which was always available in any restaurant, whether it was on the menu or not). In Anglophone countries, to the extent a French restaurant still exists, its just another ethnic alternative. Weve forgotten a lot about France.

And yet French food still holds a fascination and power. Theres a widespread sense of its present or former greatness and of the greatness of French wine and cheese. Western chefs continue to rely on French technique more than any other. Nothing from the West is nearly systematic enough to replace it.

But what is French food? My aim is to reintroduce it, to present some of the people responsible for it, and to say that its much more than whatever you probably think it is. More than the cuisine of sauces and former stodginess, more than the cheese course, more than delicate pastry, more than three-star tables, much more than the anthropological set of bistro and brasserie dishes. Though its all those things. And deeply anchored in time and place. The wines are equally linked to place and often go further back.

I dont hesitate to look at the obvious: at Champagne and the baguette, to understand their essence; at the classic cheese Comt, whose link to its terroir may have been the first to be confirmed by scientific study; real Provenal cooking, which is a cuisine of the poor; the succulent Burgundian parsleyed ham; the Alsatian kugelhopf, one of the best of all cakes. But also the less obvious: the goats-milk cheese Banon, made by a nearly disappeared technique and ripened in chestnut leaves; the deliciously rank andouillette, made of intestines and stomach; the burnt regional pastry called tourteau fromag; the curious French gingerbread, seemingly unleavened, at least as it was originally made. Among wines, theres Loire Cabernet Franc, an outstanding partner to food; the contradictory Sauvignon of Sancerre, with its two opposing forms; the unsuspected wines raised under a veil in the Jura; and, from the seaside border with Spain, Banyuls, made by killing the fermentation with a dose of alcohol and then oxidizing the wine in such a way that the taste miraculously forms a bond with chocolate.

Ive tried to present French food, not in any methodical way but suggestively, evocatively. Its crazy variety, the love of richness and offal, of perfect young vegetables, of the highest level of artisanshipall are completely contemporary. I have no particular plan, except to go roughly from north to south and to stress the wealth and sometimes the surprises. And the utter deliciousness of it all.