French Toast (5 page)

I did, of course, and elaborated the Rochefort Rule: To save an evening, serve plenty of wine. If the guests are relaxed enough, they won't notice the minor errors. I mastered the major challenges: Don't forget the bread, follow the order of courses, don't put the cheese in the fridge, and don't serve anything on the list of no-no foods, such as squid, oysters, and, yes, even snails or offal. Before I knew this, I prepared a meal with squid—yummy, yummy—and one of my guests almost threw up before asking if she could please have some ham. So much for squid, unless, of course, you poll your guests before dinner: “Do you eat squid, intestines of pigs, et cetera?” My husband and I eat all these disgusting animal parts—brains, ears, tongues, feet, you name it, so I have to remind myself that many people, even French ones, find them revolting.

Of course, I wouldn't make nearly as many mistakes now as I made then, either in terms of food or social codes. In the early days of my marriage, my husband's boss called unexpectedly from the airport to inform us
that he was in town. I would have let it go by saying, “great, nice to talk to you,” but my husband interpreted the underlying meaning of the call for my innocent foreign ears. This was not a casual hello. It meant, COME AND GET ME AT THE AIRPORT AND INVITE ME TO DINNER. Not being a good French housewife, I had literally next to nothing on hand. We had also just moved into our house, and barely had any furniture, let alone any foie gras. The boss ended up perched at my kitchen table in front of an improvised omelette. There was no bread (the bakery had long since closed), no cheese, and no salad, although there was a terrible dessert. The wine was not up to par. He hated the whole experience.

This disaster did, however, teach me that it is indispensable to have decent food on hand at all times. Unfortunately, to have food, you have to shop, and to shop for staples, you have to go to the supermarket, which is way down the line of relaxing experiences one can have in France. Every time I grocery-shop in this country, which is once a week on the average, I get an acute case of the supermarket blues. In the store, you are jostled, shoved, hit from behind, and squished. It's normal: If you can fit France into Texas—and France has roughly seven times more people—it's logical that there are more people and less space in the supermarket.

I thought I was alone in my dislike of the supermarket, but after polling my friends, I found I had a lot of company. “It makes me break out in hives just to think
about the weekly shopping expedition,” one friend told me. Outdoor markets are much more fun and I go to them often—but when shopping for a family, one is condemned to paying regular visits to the supermarket for the basics.

The general complaint: There's no one to bag the stuff! So the whole scene looks like Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times
with the reel speeding up and speeding up until everything falls apart. First, you are on one end of the line, getting out all your yogurt, milk, soap, and so on, then the checkout person is passing it through, and then, even before you've finished unloading the cart, you are suddenly on the other end of the counter, desperately stuffing it into flimsy tiny plastic bags.

In your haste, you see a shadow, a line of fidgety people behind you who watch as you stuff and stuff and can't quite get everything in. You still have to get in the lettuce and Q-tips and Pampers and figure out how you will get all this to the car without breaking the eggs, when you realize that the person at the cash register has finished checking it through and you have to pay.

As I bag in a frenzy, I suddenly have a vision of my mom's supermarket (Lund's in Minneapolis). As befits a northern climate, the percolator is always filled with fresh coffee, which people can sip as they shop. The aisles are wide; it is calm. A kid bags the groceries and takes them out to your car. Am I dreaming?

No wonder Parisian women look like they're in a
bad mood when they're shopping for groceries. (I say Parisian, because in the provinces, where life is slower, shopping in the supermarket can almost be a pleasure—it all depends on where you are.)

Now, let's move on to a few helpful hints on what to do when you're invited to dinner in a French home. Of course, much depends on what kind of French home (uptight or casual). When in doubt, be formal!

Other than learning that you should always have food, and preferably some fancy food, in your house, I learned that when invited, it's not always good to help out in the kitchen (I'm not much for being in the kitchen when I can be elsewhere, so this problem doesn't frequently arise for me). However, I did once trek back to the kitchen with a French friend and, to her horror, dumped what I thought was a bowl of water into the sink. It turned out that it was the syrup for her fruit salad. And she did not see the humor of the situation. So much for helping in the kitchen. Fortunately, most French dinner parties are as ritualistic as theater performances: The hostess is the star, and you're not supposed to mess up her act. This keeps people like me out of the kitchen. (More helpful hints on how to act at a dinner party will appear in the chapter on politesse: Stay tuned!)

I thought that with the importance the French attach to food and with the example of good eating habits and good food given them by their French families, my sons would grow up to teach me a thing or two about
la bouffe
. Wrong.

My French stepson is just fine on this score, as he was raised in a traditional French family. He's got a pretty ferocious appetite but eats only at meals. These French-American kids of mine, however, are a total disaster in terms of food (by French standards, that is). Why? The elder one was born with anti-French food taste buds and anti-French eating habits: He does not eat asparagus, any kind of tripe, snails, oysters, barely touches vegetables, and the only fruits he will consent to eat are bananas. He
adores
hamburgers, pizza, Coke, all that good American stuff. His idea of paradise would be to dispense with the French mealtimes and stuff himself with McDos. (Now that he is at college, that's exactly what he does, and his French friends are the ones who are astonished at his very un-French way of eating.) My younger son is not a total disaster. In fact, he will taste everything. So what's the problem? The problem is that he is capable of filling up on two full-course French meals a day, then loading up on Coke and cookies in between.

Now, this may not seem a major crime for an adolescent, but in my husband's family, it is. My mother-in-law is absolutely horrified to see her two half-French,
half-American grandsons guzzling Coke. When on one occasion I asked my sister-in-law what lessons she hoped would remain with her daughters, she promptly answered, “Good eating habits and NO FAST FOOD.” How disappointed they must be when they look at their grandsons and nephews. Oh well . . .

Anyway, there's hope for my two. One day, I heard the elder talking to the younger: “You know,” he told him, “when I was in the United States, I had to
ask
if I could have lunch. They were going to skip it! Can you imagine?” The younger nodded his head, commiserating over the American side of his culinary culture.

So I tell myself that at least they've been exposed to good food and good eating habits in a country where this is no laughing matter. And how funny it will be for them to look back to the days when it was their French papa who made them their favorite foods—
frites
and crêpes—while their American mother harangued them about developing good French eating habits.

A Brief Interview with Philippe

HARRIET
:
Have you noticed any difference in your eating habits since you married me?

PHILIPPE
:
Yes, I'm cooking a lot more
.

Attitudes toward sex in France are very different from those in the United States, and in a nutshell, less puritanical. Much of the reason for this is that Frenchwomen are far more comprehending and tolerant of men than their American sisters. In fact, Frenchwomen are
very
different from American women, a fact I was to discover and eventually appreciate.

Frenchwomen were another thing I had to master. One wouldn't think there would be much of a gap between a woman from one Western country and a woman from another, but there is.

Actually, I get along quite well with Frenchwomen, outside of Paris. But the Parisian woman can be a bit tough to take. The worst
Parisiennes
are to be found in
upper-class neighborhoods. These slim, elegantly coiffed and made-up creatures can really make you feel as if you just got off the boat, third-class, from Yemen. Even the salesladies in these neighborhoods start to get that way. I once went into a bakery and asked for the
miettes
, or crumbs, of candied chestnuts, which are less expensive than the whole candied chestnut. The saleslady looked at me with utter scorn: “We only sell whole chestnuts,” she replied imperiously.