French Kids Eat Everything (19 page)

One thing that is not on the Society of French Pediatricians' list is a mention of the standard North American protocol:

Start these new foods one at a time, at intervals of every 2 to 3 days. If symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, or rash develop, stop immediately and contact your doctor
.

When I was a new mom, this kind of statement terrified me. Giving my baby food could cause diarrhea and vomiting? Yikes! As a result, I was extremely cautious. By the time she was one year old, Sophie had been introduced to a relatively small number of vegetables (yam, green peas, potatoes, squash, and carrots), and her diet was heavily reliant on cereals (buttered bread and crackers).

Her cousins, meanwhile, had graduated to leeks, zucchini, and much more. This is typical. By the time they are a year old, French kids are eating a lot of vegetables. They are offered grains and cereals at every meal, but these make up only a relatively small part of their diet. By the time they are two years old and likely to show signs of neophobia or oppositional eating, most French kids have tried (and eaten) more foods than many American adults. This continues into their teens. In the research reports that Christelle sent to me, there were also studies by French nutritionists of food
dislikes
. I read these with a growing sense of astonishment, as I couldn't believe how many foods French children had apparently tried. In the Top 20 on the list of “foods I dislike/hate” were things like oysters, beef tongue, cooked endive, turnip, liver, brain (source unspecified), tripe, creamed chestnuts, and kidney. Now, with the possible exception of turnip, many American parents (including me) have not tasted most of these foods, much less introduced them to their children. But French kids are regularly served all sorts of foods and see their parents eating and enjoying them. That's how they learn to believe in the Golden Rule of French Food:
Il faut manger un peu de tout
(One has to eat a little bit of everything).

Reflecting on all of this, I became more and more worried.
It was now mid-January, and weeks had passed since I had initiated The Plan. My failure had made me feel pretty helpless. For Sophie, in particular, it felt like it was too late. I worried that she was too old (although she had only just turned six). She already hated trying new foods. And I could relate—I didn't particularly like trying new foods either, despite knowing that expressing a personal food preference was, for the French, the height of bad manners.

Sandrine consoled me by pointing out that Sophie was eating well at the
cantine
. It was true that lunchtime meals were sometimes the highlight of her day. The week before, just after school had started again after the Christmas break, Sophie had come home from school with her face glowing. “Maman, I got the
fève
!” (I got the bean!). Seeing the puzzled look on my face, she laughed and explained. The
cantine
had served a special dessert: the
galette des rois
. A tiny figurine was hidden in one—but only one—piece. One lucky child at each table would have the piece with the figurine and be the
reine
(queen) or
roi
(king) for the rest of the day. Sophie showed me her paper crown and, clutched tightly in her hand, the
fève
, which was not a bean at all, but rather a tiny porcelain figure of a little queen, complete with crown. Of course! It was the
Fête des Rois
(the Christian feast day of Epiphany), when children across France eat a special cake served only on this day and delight in the role reversal that accompanies it.

Thinking of Sophie's story, I realized Sandrine was right. She
was
ready to start adapting to French Food Rules at home. But I wasn't sure if
I
was ready. I still felt overwhelmed. On top of parenting and working full-time, I had to plan my children's dietary diversification as if I were grooming them to be Michelin-starred chefs? My first thought was to rebel. But the cookbooks were so enticing that I kept opening them. Paging through one of the baby cookbooks one day over my morning coffee, I suddenly thought:
Why not take them back to the beginning? They hadn't tasted all these vegetable purees, but why couldn't they start now?
The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. I would serve the purees as soups. This would eliminate my daughters' most frequent objections to the new foods: their appearance and texture. Once they'd learned to like the taste of something new in a soup, I could gradually move on to introducing it in other forms. After all, that's exactly how French babies learned. In fact,
la soupe
was still a favorite evening meal for the French.

It will be a kind of “food rebirthing
,” I thought (although this was so hippie-sounding that I kept the term to myself). We'd pick a dozen vegetables and reintroduce them over a month. This would be our own family version of the kohlrabi experiment. I found inspiration in a cookbook by Cyril Lignac, the
cantine
crusader I had heard about from Sophie's teacher. I had brought one of his cookbooks home from the library and enjoyed reading his astute sayings, which summed up the French philosophy nicely. My favorite was “In order to like a food, you first have to
tame
it.” I liked this idea, which suggested a gradual process of getting to know one another, of becoming intimately acquainted with something. As I read in another book that Christelle had sent to me (
La naissance du goût
[
The Birth of Taste
] by psychologist Natalie Rigal), this involved exploring new food with all of the senses—sight, smell, touch, taste, and even hearing.

This gave me some interesting new ideas about how to deal with potential refusals to eat the new things I'd be preparing. We'd try taste training, just like at school. If the kids didn't want to taste the food at first, I could ask them to smell it, or describe it. They'd still be encountering the new food (and making progress, from the French perspective). But I had also learned from my research that actually getting kids to taste the food (even a little bit) was the trick to teaching them to like it. So by the third time it was on the table, the kids would
have
to taste it. But they wouldn't have to eat it. As per the French approach, I wouldn't provide substitutes, but I wouldn't force them into eating either.

Poring over the cookbooks, I enthusiastically drew up our week's “tasting menu,” as I decided to call it. I'd introduce one new vegetable per meal, in soup form. It would be served as a starter. After a little bit of hesitation, I picked leeks and spinach. They were both “mild” vegetables, according to the French, and the bold green colors would make it a challenge. I added red pepper because it was one of my favorite things to eat. And I included a simple red lentil puree, so that at least one of the soups would have a denser texture. For familiar comfort, I also chose carrots, hoping they'd be an easy winner.

The soups would be simple, I decided, and would be the same consistency as baby purees. Each would have only one or two primary ingredients, so that the tastes of the vegetables would come through. None of the recipes would have salt or spices (except for a bit of salted butter dabbed on top). Once the girls liked it, the food would reappear in a main dish (or in its raw form) later that week. And once they had learned to get used to new tastes every night, I'd start introducing the other French Food Rules, like banning snacks. But first we would make new food fun.

These ideas were inspiring, but one thing made me hesitate. The mess and extra work of making purees was not something I had been looking forward to. But once again the French proved their ingenuity when it comes to anything culinary. Some smart person had invented precisely what I needed—and what many French parents rely on. The “BabyCook” (
beebee-kook
, as my husband charmingly pronounced it) made a proud appearance on our countertop. Shaped like a little chopping machine, but with a unit on the side that you could fill with water (like the coffee makers in hotel rooms), the BabyCook would steam, blend, and puree your vegetables to the perfect consistency, all in one container (and reheat or even defrost them later if necessary).
Voilà!

We were now ready to start off with Phase One of The Plan (version 2.0). Proudly, I pasted my menu on the now-crowded fridge.

It was my husband's idea to feature fancy names for each dish. It didn't matter that the kids couldn't read yet: we read the names out to them, and everyone had agreed that they sounded more appetizing (or at least funny). Philippe got the idea from the
cantine
at the local school, which had menus that sounded more appealing than even fancy restaurants back home.

“It's all in the marketing,” he told me one day, having driven Sophie home after listening to her talk with Marie about the beet salad they had eaten at lunch. “Half of it is in the visual presentation—the tablecloth, the cutlery, the napkins, the serving dishes—but half of it is in the names. Even young kids feel more interested if something has a nice name.”

At the time, I didn't really believe him. But it was the first voluntary contribution he'd made to The Plan, so I decided to humor him. I remembered something I'd read in an in-flight magazine about marketing food to your kids—something about placing fruits and vegetables in attractive bowls, and giving things fancier names. The French call this
l'art de la présentation:
the art of presenting food.

Our French friends were only too happy to make suggestions, especially about making the kids feel that the table was a special place. Buying cute cutlery sets for the kids was one suggestion. We put out a request, and the girls soon had Babar, Barbapapa, Tintin, and the Petit Prince to choose from. Mamie brought over small bowls with little hand-painted scenes of children dressed in traditional Breton costumes; they had been personalized, with the girls' names embossed on the outside of each bowl in a lovely cursive script. Placemats covered with horses appeared in the house—a gift from Papi, who loved taking the girls for pony rides. These, I hoped, would make the introduction of new foods a lot more fun for the girls.

Still, I was hesitant about actually reinitiating The Plan. What if it failed? A week passed, and I kept putting it off. Part of the reason, I had to admit to myself, was that I myself was rather picky. As a child, I tended to eat just a few favorite things (McChicken sandwiches, grilled cheese with ketchup, and applesauce). As a teenager, I usually microwaved myself some dinner and ate it alone at the table. Our parents ate later, sometimes in front of the TV. Everyone spent a lot of time in separate rooms. I got an after-school job at McDonald's and later at the local drugstore (but kept eating at McDonald's). So it was no surprise, I reflected, that I hadn't introduced the girls to much variety. I didn't tend to eat a varied diet myself. But the problem was that Sophie and Claire were likely to become hardened neophobes if they didn't start eating new things, especially given the fact that they hadn't had the benefit of exposure to eating new things when they were younger.

Nearly a week passed by, and I hadn't made a single soup. Finally, Janine took matters into her own hands. Unannounced, she showed up late Friday afternoon at the house with a
panier
full of groceries. “I'm here for dinner!” she said gaily. “Go finish what you were working on!” she insisted, gently shepherding me from the kitchen. A few minutes later, the smell of frying onions wafted from the kitchen. Like most French women, Janine is an excellent cook. What surprised me most about her everyday cooking was how few flavorings, herbs, and spices she used: onions, parsley, garlic, white wine, salt and pepper. With this, Janine managed to produce a miraculous array of dishes, usually in less than half the time it would take me. And both she and the kitchen were always immaculately clean. I envied her no-fuss, no-muss approach and found it slightly mystifying. How could something so simple to prepare taste so good?

Our kids also loved her cooking. “
Mamie, ça sent bon!
” Sophie exclaimed when I brought the girls home from school. Their
goûter
was a real treat: Mamie's favorite. Fresh, still-warm baguettes were sliced into five-inch-long pieces and then slit open lengthwise. Keeping the baguettes almost closed, Mamie spread the insides with salted butter from our local farm (which changed color almost every week, depending on what the cows were eating). Then she took a bar of dark chocolate and split the pieces into little chunks, tucking them one by one into the slit. One end of the baguette was wrapped with a paper towel (so little hands stay clean) and handed over to the eagerly waiting children.
Yum!