British restaurants are facing tough times, what with staff shortages, rising business rates and increasing food costs, but at least most people agree that cooking in this country is better than it has ever been.
Not so poor old France, which is coming under assault from both sides of the Channel. This year its trade and tourism minister, whose main job, one would have thought, would be to talk up the country’s culinary output, admitted that French cooking was in the doldrums, outgunned by foreign gastronomy. Now it has been given both barrels by our own Delia Smith.
In an article for Noble Rot magazine, she laments that it is very hard to find classic French cuisine in France any more because “something tragic happened. In 1977, French chef Michel Guérard launched what he called cuisine minceur, which evolved out of the nouvelle cuisine adored everywhere by foodie snobs.” Butter, cream and flour were banned, portions got smaller, and sauces became “dots like Smarties” or smears across the plate.
Now, I don’t want to pick a fight with a national treasure, and I’d agree French restaurant cooking isn’t all it used to be: you certainly can’t fetch up at any roadside bistro and dine like a king, as many would have claimed a generation ago. But to blame it on the influence of nouvelle cuisine, a fad that was already dying out in the early Nineties, strikes me as absurd. She’ll be telling us she had to pop in for a Big Mac on the way home next.
The real reason the “gutsy flavours, earthiness and simplicity” of classic bourgeois cooking that she remembers from the Seventies are harder to come by is that it has been swallowed up not by blobs and smears and tiny portions but by changing tastes and commercial pressures.
Restaurants were often family concerns that depended on long unpaid hours in the kitchen to create those simple but time-consuming dishes, but the “professionalisation” of the industry has put paid to that.
With a 35-hour working week has come a dependence on cheap Identikit dishes bought in from outside catering companies. You think every restaurant selling the ubiquitous confit de canard or pâté de maison has a maman out the back making it from scratch? And pizzas, burgers and fried chicken are as popular in France as they are here, with the benefit of providing much more attractive margins.
• Can this writer convince the French to fall in love with British food?
The truth is, you can still find old-school classics if you seek them out. The famous bouchons of Lyons, where they will leave you to help yourself from huge terrines, are as popular as ever, and the brasseries of Paris remain impervious to fashion.
On my last visit to Brasserie Lipp I managed to compose a meal that was pretty much made entirely out of butter, cream and carbohydrates. At Auberge de la Mole near St Tropez, which Smith goes on to praise in the same article, they serve classic southwestern dishes such as pâtés, duck, tournedos Rossini, without any of the silly swirls of coulis that the French admittedly often go in for.
The British chef Calum Franklin, who this year opened Public House in Paris serving British pies, says he’s noticed a definite turn back towards more traditional French cooking. “You’ll find more savoury pastry, more charcuteries coming on to menus. You just have to do your research. After all, you can eat badly anywhere in the world.”
Dining and Cooking