RENAISSANCE OF FRENCH COOKING.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19033, 31 March 1930, Page 13

RENAISSANCE OF FRENCH COOKING.

Neo-Gastronomy Becomes A “ Craze

By

WILLIAM BOLITHO.

PARIS. : One of the most flamboyant idiosyncrasies of the French culture at present is neo-gastronomy—the renaissance of the art of eating and cooking. Just as ping-pong was the specific difference of the social aspect of the late nineties, just as diabolo was to 1903, and cubism to 1913, so this gastronom}’’ is to the France of to-day. No one has stvtdied “ crazes ” sincerely and unhumorously; they must have, however, a great deal of historical content and, perhaps, sociological clues. Thus I guess that the war privations —do you remember that perfectly abominable grey French war bread? lie somewhere in the cause of the present universal rush of the -French to table. Of course there was a vast deal of evasion of the food restrictions right up to the end among people who could afford it, much more than the English or Germans allowed themselves. But what is the good of being a republic if you cannot manage the laws? And, of course, there was always the dormant tradition of good cooking and respect for the cook in France. They have romanticised the whole history of the matter with their legends of the middle ages and the court of Louis XV, and so on. Foi; myself I believe that the high day of French cooking w'as no longer ago than the reign of Napoleon lll—the same date, in the sixties, as the universal prestige of Paris fashions and Montmartre holidays. No doubt at all they ate well before then, better probably than anywhere else in the world for at least a century, but you have only to compare the menus, which a whole literature of this neo-gastronomy is reprinting for us, to see that, before the revolution, in any case, their eating was, if more plentiful than than their underwear, just as rough. Champagne, we know, came into fashion with the Allied occupation of Paris after Waterloo. Wars* usually spread the use of luxuries, though all the last one was clearly responsible for, that I can see, was the rise in the consumption of cocaine and cocktail. In any case I suggest that two secondary causes for the craze are obvious enough. The first is a resultant of that complex made up of a new rich class, cheaper and better motor-cars and general restlessness, that they call “ Tourism.” In France, it needed armageddon to make the Frenchman take to his roads. For, as compared with most other races of mankind, he is like that clasfe of trees the landscape gardeners hate, which have a tap root, and so are especially difficult to transplant. Now once on his roads—be sure nothing but a subterranean eruption in the lie de France could make a Frenchman even provided with a car and, mad with wanderlust, quit the frontiers of his own country—the difficulty arose that cathedrals, chateaux and landscapes need a certain education or, at any rate, a certain state of soul to enjov The mind abhors aimless excursions. Yet for the first years the wheeled hordes .of Frenchmen and their wives had no reason to visit any place except archaeology or poetry. Count in certainly the privilege of sending back picture postcards to the neighbours, and even then the fun to a full-blooded

boot contractor to the army would be somewhat meagre. So the revival of good cooking in the special form most characteristic to it—what they call regional cooking-—if not created on purpose for the new tourist is, at any rate, extraordinarily apt to suit him. Nowadays he need not even pretend to visit churches, castles and ruins. In fact, it is somewhat chic to claim that these things are as boring as an exhibition of stuffed alligators, and that, let him tell you, the sole adequate reason for a journey of any length, any difficulty, into the very corners of the land is to taste Mother Whatshername’s omellette a la creme, or a game pie in a lost outpost of the Pyrennees that they make nowhere else, with a strictly local wine from behind the innkeeper’s woodpile to accompany it.

So the modern French tourists, that is to say, those who take up their option on modernity, travel to eat and drink to talk about it, for, to be sure, there is as much fraud and fake and pose about gastronomy as any other art. If on the one hand it is true that taste is the least ethical of those five trustworthy friends that hold off the mortal questioning of the Sphinx, yet every one in these thin days has not an appetite. And once outside bacon and eggs and coffee a sincere appreciation of the good things of the table and the cellar is not come by late in life. That is easiest to see in the matter of wines. A connoisseur of the music of the palate has either been born rich and, what is more, to a generous father and, what is more, to a father -who has the disinterested sensuality, which is one of the genuine stigmata of the arisocrat, or he lies. For the rest, France was always the country to eat and drink iii. It is a part of its civilisation; more than, allegorically, the flavour. And I believe that the neo-gastronomics, fake and true, have improved it to a point near that, say, of the nineties, when, though without the talk and the literature you ate well in both Paris and the provinces. Probably they have half saved us from that abominable standardised Grand Hotel menu beginning a consomme and ending with that vile banality, Peche Melba, which has now fled from Cannes and Deauville to become the last discomfort of great trans-At-lantic liners voyaging. (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)