(Le diner chez Sophie...yes, fine cuisine, but first, superlative munchies for the aperitif ritual, accompanied by this perky rabbit-eared gadget for serving up the toothpicks; who says the French are stuffy?!)
I am back from France. I am back with a newfound love for foie gras, which I think I just thought I liked or pretended to like more than I did (gasp!).
I also bring back a renewed wonder at the learning process of a person growing up French in French culture. I base these observations from a field study including pointed questions of real French people, maybe about 8-10 of them. They include people I like to call friends in Angers - Pierre, Sophie, and Anne-Sophie; and Jean-Luc in Nantes, as well as the superb concierge/front desk man at the Hotel La Perouse in Nantes (we also talked about food) who spent some time in St. Louis, Missouri. And of course I base this on the advanced studies in French cultural/gastronomic life done in the kitchen over meals with the family in Paris, my hosts, Anne and Jean-Louis, at surely the most elegantly unique "bed and breakfast" ever.
I fell in love with foie gras over a lovely dinner at Sophie's house outside of Angers in a village-like atmosphere of her backyard that is a grassy knoll along the water. Along with the other elegant food items for the before-dinner aperitif time, which included Anjou specialty rillaud prepared by her husband, Sophie says she has made a foie gras. She swears it is an easy recipe and that I could make it too. Well, I confess I did not realize you had to "make" foie gras. I know, I should be ashamed of myself. She asks if I would like to have some. Uh, yes.
I follow Sophie into the kitchen to check into this.
I am surprised to see her take out of the refrigerator a big fat roll of stuff in plastic wrap that looks like an on-steroids roll of refrigerated Nestle Toll House cookie dough. This thick round of stuff in plastic has string wrapped around it. Sophie is unwrapping. I can't help but pick up some of the strings. She chides me for getting my hands all greasy because - attention - it was very fatty. And, yes, she is right. Very slippery, fatty those strings from being wrapped around that plumped plastic wrapped foie.
I learn that hers is made with white wine and is well cooked. This I figure explains the lighter color for this - far lighter than I had ever seen for a foie gras (ok, have only had twice: Jeffrey's in Austin (now closed alas) and Boulevard in San Francisco (before the ban)). This foie gras was a revelation. Maybe it was the thinner slices. Or the well-cooked style of it. I had 3 slices. This is a lot in foie gras terms. Especially when dinner is not even served yet.
At Christmas time Sophie says, there may be several foie gras made to get everyone through the holidays. Heaven forbid one run out of foie gras over the holidays. (Yea, I hate it when that happens.) Indeed, she says, one of the most treasured holiday moments: on Christmas morning, early, one makes up with coffee and perhaps takes just a tiny smidgen of foie gras onto a piece of toast for Christmas morning breakfast. She sighs wistfully. Done. I am convinced. I will ramp up the gourmande-ness this holiday season chez moi with my very own foie gras recipe, and it would be Sophie's, and we will smear it onto Poilane bread from Paris.
I would learn the next day, from Anne-Sophie who would accompany me to the opera in Angers that sunny Sunday afternoon, that there is an ugly side to foie gras preparation. No, not the gavage. The actual making of it. I learn this as we sat outside the opera house in Angers at a cafe near the small harbor, with the Chateau d'Angers to our left, the opera house with its wide open enormous 3-story tall sliding glass doors to the right, and the Maine river, a tributary of the Loire River, in front of us. Here, over a glass of red wine and slices of wild boar sausage, I have my disenchantment. I learn the making of foie gras requires extracting and tearing out by hand all sorts of tendons and strings of stuff. This sounded disgusting even in French. I am sad. There will be no foie gras making at my house after all. I cannot even handle touching boneless chicken breasts some days.
I also learn though from Anne-Sophie that she has a signature foie gras recipe too. She does hers with cognac or armagnac and will do it to a mi-cuit, or less well done on the cooking time. And so obviously families can have their own foie gras recipes and thus very strong opinions about a proper foie gras. I asked if this is a problem when individuals marry and they are brought into a household with a conflicting foie gras philosophy. Oh, yes, she says. Not a problem with her extended family though, where her style of foie gras is warmly welcomed.
I would have foie gras again on Monday at lunch, at a really lovely restaurant in the countryside, Le Rabelais, to break up a day full of meetings that Pierre had organized for me.
Here, Pierre tells me about a fish on the menu, sandre, and how the wine chosen matches this local fresh fish based on how the vines grow and how the soil lends itself to a particular type of vine and a particular type of grape.
The next day, Tuesday, I would be in Nantes, with another colleague, Jean-Luc, also hosting me for meetings. A couple of slices of foie gras and aged ham atop greens was the special entree of the day at the hip restaurant along the Loire that was our lunch venue.
And, yes: I said yes to the foie gras. I tell Jean-Luc I am smitten with foie gras and share my newfound knowledge from Angers.
But, really, I ask him--though I have been going to France for years I just want to know from the source: how is it that everyone with whom I had dined thus far has what seems to me an elegant and high-level vocabulary and knowledge that only (very generally speaking) food magazine writers in the US have, such as the fact that the vines for a certain wine grow to a certain depth that will create a particular taste that goes so well with the fish from the river nearby, or that the aged quality of this particular cheese means it goes better with this particular wine.
It is the French connection with their food he tells me. They just feel connected to it. So they want to know, and they grow up knowing about these issues, being surrounded by others who also are asking or telling where it came from, who made it, and why or how it's here. And so agreed the concierage/front desk man at l'Hotel Perouse in Nantes, when I brought up this subject on checking out the next day from his lovely hotel. I tell him I am intrigued by the signage at his minimalist yet delicious "buffet" about personal responsibility about the buffet to avoid waste, the local sourcing, the organic everything. I mention my conversation the day before with Jean-Luc about this connectivity the French have with their food.
He says he did not realize he was different, as a French person, until he was in a gourmet club in St. Louis. Not that there was anything not lovely about everyone there. He loved St. Louis and his time there. It just was not until then that he recognized the difference in his and his wife's profound attachment to the food and the sourcing and the ritual of the food. I asked how: how do you get that way? Where does it come from? He says you just grow up with this to be like this. Your parents are like this. Their parents were like this. It's part of the environment. As natural as learning the language that describes that food.
Of course many similarities can be said to exist here in the US. There is organic produce. There is slow food, concerns for sustainability, and community gardens to avoid sourcing from far afield. But it's just different at the basic level. Having said that, I myself am still so not French, though Anne in Paris described me one night as "presque française" (almost French). I have yet to learn moderation but am getting there. But I have learned one thing. Again on this trip, I am told that for my French family in Tours back in my student days of 1985 to call me "gourmande" (meaning likes to eat, loosely), well, that was a huge compliment. And it remains so.
Or so they tell me, as I take that third/fourth/fifth slice of foie gras...
Comments