WHAT IS FRENCH FOOD?

France is the greatest country for bread, cheese, and wine, and its culinary techniques are the foundation of the training of nearly every serious Western cook and some beyond. When I write that, the statement seems so strong that for a moment I feel nothing I can add will stand up to it. I pause, and then I think of underlining the point by saying that bread, cheese, and wine form a trinity of fermented foods that have sustained France for centuries and more—wine was introduced to Provence by the Greeks, bread was already being made by the Gauls when the Romans arrived, and the Romans introduced hard cheeses. And maybe it’s key, even in this age of vegetables, that of all countries France has the most appreciation for meat. As to the vegetables, especially around Paris, France developed advanced market gardens, as well as a gastronomic culture built partly around the halles, where all sorts of raw materials were sold. No other Western country has taken haute cuisine to such an advanced level, which is not at all to diminish France’s less elaborate and rustic cuisines. Then there are the country’s practitioners of other highly evolved gastronomic crafts—charcuterie, pastry, chocolate, confiserie. When I talk with accomplished winemakers, cheesemakers, charcutiers, pâtissiers, they’re so committed, sincere, careful, and intelligent.

And yet if you sat down to a meal in France, could you, could I, answer the question: What makes this food French? You might have obvious clues: bread on the table throughout the meal; a cheese course; wine with lightness, complexity, and a long aftertaste; food with harmony, freshness, and complementary flavors. Yet you can find those things in other Western countries. More indications might be butter in the cooking, sauces containing stock, a famous French dish or two. If you’re attuned, you might possibly recognize a high-level professional meal as French by its analytical precision paired with a strong sensuality, a combination pursued nowhere else to the same degree. But with any French food, apart from well-known old-fashioned dishes, it’s very hard to say whether it is truly French or, if so, what makes it that way.

In its diversity, French food was always messy to define. And it’s confusing that there are two Frances, Paris and the rest. Paris leads, with its concentration of wealth and power, sophistication, and steady influx of energizing outsiders from other parts of the country and abroad. As consumers, Parisians, especially, have become more demanding of raw materials—their freshness, flavor, sustainability; the use of organic and biodynamic methods. And the food changes because the French look outward. They like new things; they’re modern.

The old French way of eating was stiffer and involved more ritual. The biggest break with the past may be that people don’t want to be so serious when they eat. Like the rest of us, the French want to be relaxed and have fun. In restaurants they aren’t focused on cultural knowledge and intellectual engagement. They’re looking for food that’s simpler and yet contains diverse influences, more variety and stimulation. They’re much more open than they were to mashups of flavors, dishes, cultures, sensibilities. It’s not necessarily a problem to combine raw with cooked, for instance, going far beyond a garnish of chervil or lemon. Maybe few people any longer expect the food on a plate to automatically make sense or even to know what that might mean.

The critic and historian Bénédict Beaugé writes more insightfully about modern French cooking than anyone else. He’s anchored in facts, and he certainly takes an intellectual approach. He has collaborated on books with the celebrated chefs Pierre Gagnaire and Michel Troisgros. One of his recent books, purely his own, is Plats du Jour: Sur l’Idée de Nouveauté en Cuisine, devoted to three hundred years of the pursuit of newness in fashionable cooking. A few years ago Bénédict said, “People don’t want a complex cuisine, and even critics may not understand more complex cuisines.” He wasn’t criticizing, he was just commenting.

Richard Olney in the 1980s asserted that what more than anything else made a meal French was the logical structure of a menu: the sequence, the build, the relationships, the steady stimulus from beginning to end. Now I begin to think even the idea of a menu will disappear. But at the moment I write this, Bénédict says that at top restaurants in Paris there’s a slight decline in the lengthy, chaotic tasting menu in favor of a more classical structure, even as fashions continue to come in from abroad, especially Japan.

Paris restaurants and their customers have a two-century-long history together. When service was, and is, very good in France (it could always be awful), both you and your server understand your roles. You bring an interest, a respect, even a sense of purpose, and at least a minimum of knowledge of what’s likely to be on offer. In a small place, the proprietor might be the server. (Once, in a now-gone Paris bistro, the chef-owner realized we weren’t French, and she called from the kitchen window, “You ordered a salad. Does that mean you want the kidneys grilled?” No, I’d meant it when I asked for the kidneys sautéed and with Madeira; the salad was for afterward. She wanted to be sure we were playing our parts, so she could play hers.) The server knows you are there to accomplish something serious, even if that serious thing is pleasure, and knows it’s the server’s job to assist. The server shares the view that not only is the sensual an important part of life but even that it’s unbecoming for anyone not to know how to enjoy good food and drink. I’ve certainly never heard it spoken, and it sounds a little grand to say it, but the server seems to believe that knowing how to enjoy yourself at the table is a part of French civilization. But is that relationship disappearing, too much a part of the old seriousness?

When a surge of energy occurs in French food, it seems to start in Paris bistros. The first economy-luxury restaurant, though no one put it that way back then, was La Régalade, launched in 1992 out in the 14th arrondissement. To run it, the chef Yves Camdeborde left the luxury of working with Christian Constant at the Hôtel de Crillon; instead he pursued a bistro where placed on your table to start was a terrine with a knife stuck in it, accompanied by the requisite bread, mustard, and cornichons, all for you to help yourself at will. The price of a meal was a bargain. When I spoke with Camdeborde at the time, he invoked with admiration the names of the great chefs of Nouvelle Cuisine. But at La Régalade he made humbler dishes—authentic, “classic,” and yet “one improves them always. . . . You add more seasoning, more spices; you always remove butter, cream, grease. You use more olive oil.” And why cook traditional food? “Because I like to eat traditionally and drink traditionally.” Camdeborde came from Pau in the Béarn in the southwest. The menu reflected that, and you could hear it in his accent. In his region, he said, “the cooking remains strong. One stays very long at the table chez nous. Everything takes place at the table. You talk, you discuss. . . . On est très, très traditionnel chez nous.” In 2005 he opened Le Comptoir du Relais off Boulevard Saint-Germain, a more luxurious place still based on tradition.

The genre of highly skilled, sometimes very free cooking at moderate prices became bistronomie: bistro plus gastronomie. The phenomenon of “natural wine” started in France, and added to the bistro mix were natural-wine bars, such as Raquel Carina and Philippe Pinoteau’s still-admired Le Baratin. Pierre Jancou opened Racines in the Passage des Panoramas and moved on to other places, strongly underlining the organic and sometimes biodynamic origins of his food and drink, and coming up with the English phrase “more than organic.” The chef Iñaki Aizpitarte’s Le Chateaubriand became the most famous of the innovative genre, filled with customers from around the world. But is any of the latest French food, at whatever level, evolving in a way that’s distinctly French? In a word, no.

A vital cuisine requires a mass of people eating, talking, cooking—converging on a point, however large—and that mass grows smaller as fewer people cook. The best-known, really distinctive dishes could survive indefinitely, and the regional cuisines are still alive, although they’ve long since ceased to evolve, apart from becoming more modern, which is to say less regional. The French who cook at home, especially in cities, don’t necessarily cook specifically French food. Immigrants have brought their own cuisines, influencing the rest.

France is big—the biggest country in Western Europe, with both Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts as well as the heights of Mont Blanc. The land, although it changes a little as the climate grows warmer, provides much of the diversity of French food and drink. It’s the most enduring component.

Some foodstuffs have disappeared or nearly so. The market gardens closest to Paris have given way to housing. Small wild birds have become endangered and are no longer caught. Meats overall, as Bénédict Beaugé, who does cook, has told me more than once, are not what they were. Restaurants tend to serve a cheapened version of their regional cuisine, except the luxe places, which can prepare a dish exceedingly well, although they often revise it until it’s almost something else. (You might find the dishes unadorned at one of the fermes-auberges, “farm-inns,” which at their best offer local dishes made from the farm’s own and other local products.) Haute cuisine kitchens and those inspired by them are more and more international, enriched by takings from around the world. Chefs talk more and more across borders.

French food at times, as I’ve seen when I’ve questioned a producer, still reflects the analytical approach that the French take to almost anything. This approach explains, I think, the technique in the kitchen, including the fonds (“stocks”) of classical French cuisine (as set in stone by Escoffier), as well as the detailed rules of each appellation (given in its cahier des charges). It supports the balance and harmony that are still typical of much French food and drink, and it’s surely allied to a respect for the past, which for better or worse can inhibit a chef from taking chances.

No tendency toward rational thought explains the extraordinary diversity in traditional French food and drink. Mere variety comes from a red-wine eel stew, Basque dishes hot with Espelette pepper, the surprisingly conservative taste of chicken braised with forty cloves of garlic, and the thick, even funky old-school version of Provençal oil, whose earthy flavor runs through the traditional cooking. Canned sardines with bread and butter are very French, as are radishes with butter and salt and dark bread. The range of cheeses is so famous it’s almost beyond mentioning, from wide flat tender wheels of Brie to hard, aged Savoie cheeses with their clean, primordial mountain flavors. On the other side of the country are hot buttered Breton buckwheat galettes with a glass of lightly bubbly Breton cider. Dessert can consist of a glass of densely sweet wine tasting of noble rot, one of the greatest joys of all.

The wackiness of some things, not just Banon cheese, vin jaune, and tourteau fromagé, is totally in tune with some contemporary cooking. Aligot, the long stringy cheese-potato purée from Auvergne, is theatrically prepared for you, the spoon raised overhead with long strings still attached to the mass in the pot. There’s intensely perfumed Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, like drinking a rose. The small Burgundian cheese Époisses, with its stinky orange rind, may nearly collapse from its own creaminess. Nice has squares of socca, the vast flat chickpea pancake (borrowed from Liguria) with a grinding of black pepper. And it has pan bagnat made of the much-discussed ingredients of a salade niçoise put inside a fresh long roll and set aside for the bread to begin to imbibe the juices. The curiously sweet-and-sour peasant pounti from the Rouergue is a loaf made of eggs, flour, chard, salt pork, and prunes. Civet de lièvre is braised hare served in its blood-thickened sauce. Tête de veau is calf’s head taken from the bone and cooked slowly in water for two hours, often served cold in long, narrow slices and its fatty gelatinousness cut with a vinaigrette. Familiar and yet very special are all the textures based on flour and butter, including brioche, croissants, éclairs, and millefeuilles. And the different, triple textures of the elusive perfect macaron, with its outer crunch, inner soft filling, and tender resistance between.

If the standard for a great meal is that it affects you emotionally, that’s much more likely to happen with something that you’ve never before encountered and is unique to where you are. And it’s more likely to happen with traditional food, as your reactions bounce back and forth along the line connecting past and present. When you don’t bring cultural references, you don’t know all that’s going on, but still the excitement is there.

France continues to offer a powerful experience of food and drink, dazzling and fascinating, if you know where to look. There’s haute cuisine, no longer uniquely French, but defined by its luxury, fashionableness, and utter refinement. And the rest of French food ranges so wide as to be beyond definition. You may think to yourself that you’ll know it when you see it, but very often you won’t. It’s a huge source of fun and enjoyment.

The last French cooking to change the way the rest of the West thinks about food was Nouvelle Cuisine, forty years ago. It too began in Paris bistros. After that, despite the work of some exciting chefs, such as Joël Robuchon, there was no cohesive style, no broad source of energy. Then in the 1990s, Spanish chefs drew the world’s attention, followed in the 2000s by the New Nordic chefs, with their deep exploration of place by way of ingredients.

I can imagine a fresh wave of energy coming from France and rippling outward. It would come from looking back to the Frenchness of food that’s so nearly forgotten it seems new. France has such an extraordinary gastronomic wealth that it seems it almost must for a time return to the center. There are the dishes, the foods themselves, the volupté and sense of appetite, the calculated flow and surprise of a menu. If a new wave did come, it would surely freely appropriate and combine anything it liked from classical, bourgeois, and regional cuisines down to the most rustic, and probably add whatever was new at the moment. I can see French cooking becoming again part of the zeitgeist. Swept into the currents that animate our time.

Written by Edward Behr in "The Food & Wine of France- Eating and Drinking from Champagne to Provence", Penguin Press, New York, 2016, chapter 32. Digitized, adapted and illustraded to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.