France: Pardon my French

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This was published 9 years ago

France: Pardon my French

Acquired taste: tourists eating lunch.

Acquired taste: tourists eating lunch.Credit: Alamy

Anthony Peregrine delves into the occasionally scary world of Gallic cuisine.

My friend the restauratrice was redoing her menu for the 2014 spring and summer season. She thought an English version might look pretty sophisticated. Meat and fish were easy. Then we tackled the starters. "How would you translate gesiers?" she asked.

"I wouldn't," I said. "Not on a menu. 'Gizzards' don't invariably strike English-speakers as delicious. Or edible."

Big white edible snails, boiled and served with garlic sauce.

Big white edible snails, boiled and served with garlic sauce.Credit: Alamy

"They're wonderful in salads," she said.

"They might be, if you've had a lifetime's exposure to the eating of birds' stomachs," I said. "But, sprung on the innocent from under a lettuce leaf, they cause untold distress."

I suggested she leave the word in French and, if asked, say they were "little bits of meat". "Leetle beets of mit?" she said. "I can hear the cries of delighted diners already," I said.

Frog's legs with shallot cream.

Frog's legs with shallot cream.Credit: Alamy

You have to keep your wits about you in French restaurants. You think you're in for elegance - all mirrors, chandeliers and tottering desserts - and suddenly they're serving andouillette. This is a sausage of pigs' intestines. It looks, smells and tastes as if it should be in a toilet, a gastronomic challenge to equal anything slimy offered by New Guinean street vendors.

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I hate it with a hatred reserved otherwise only for bananas.

But my real, long-running bete noire is manouls - bete noire because it's an unspeakable sludge of sheep innards and disgusting bits of a calf, long-running because it's a speciality of my wife's home county, Lozere.

Andouillette, sausages made from pig intestines, a local specialty.

Andouillette, sausages made from pig intestines, a local specialty.Credit: Getty Images

I used to be polite, pushing the stuff around my plate until it looked half-eaten. I wanted to marry this woman. But that was then. Now, we're married, they suggest manouls, I order pizza and a truce is called.

Obviously, I'm not attacking French gastronomy. That would be suicide. I'm suggesting simply that the French have a larger spectrum of what constitutes food than we do.

They might contemplate something squidgy and white and salivate - while we're heads-down in a bucket. It's our loss, I think, because we're out of touch with the origins of food. The British food chain begins, vacuum-packed, in the supermarket. The French one starts in the field or sea, with the animals in all their gory sloppiness.

Almost all French people - hairdressers, barristers, dentists - reckon they're basically still peasants. And peasants don't do squeamish. They've never had the money. Having sold off the good stuff, they ate anything, by season - ears, intestines, thrushes, titmice.

Now, everyone can afford a Big Mac, but mainstream French cooking remains rooted. My in-laws go mushrooming every early autumn. Later, their farming neighbours kill the family pig.

Lots of people do this. That's why France's continuum of cuisine - from farmhouse via bistro to three-star Michelin palace - is the most interesting in the world.

Even so, you might like to avoid some of the continuum's more extreme manifestations.

Here's a brief summary of items that either I, or other visitors, have had trouble with:

ANDOUILLETTE

Pigs' smelliest slithery bits in sausage form.

BOUILLABAISSE

Marseille's fish stew tests the toughest fish fan. If you can survive mountains of some of the ugliest fish in the sea (weever and anglerfish, scorpion fish, conger eels), you can probably survive Marseille.

CERVELLE

Brains (calf or lamb). No matter how prepared, they always look like brains, so you're hoovering up the animal's fondest memories.

CHEVAL

Horse. Much frothing during last year's "horsegate" - horse meat in lasagne! - though, as far as I know, no one died, or even felt off-colour.

Horse is perfectly edible, though fewer and fewer French people eat it at home (it accounts for 0.3 per cent of French meat consumption), horse butchers are disappearing, and horsemeat, because it is prone to contamination, rarely shows up in restaurants. Le Taxi Jaune at 13 rue Chapon in Paris's 3rd is apparently an exception. It's a bit like beef but more marrowy. Steak-a-cheval, incidentally, isn't horse - it's but a beef steak or beefburger with an egg on top.

CUISSES-DE-GRENOUILLE

Frogs' legs. Well, not legs. Cuisses means thighs. It is a French attempt to make frogs seem sensual.

ENCORNET

Sounds like an ice-cream but is squid, which could be a surprise.

ESCARGOTS

Snails. According to some estimates, France eats 60 per cent of world snail production. They produce hardly any themselves, importing them from eastern Europe, Turkey and Indonesia.

It's a hell of a long way to come when you're more of a texture than a taste, dependent on accompanying sauce or butter.

FROMAGE-DE-TETE

"Head-cheese" had me fooled for a bit. It's brawn.

GRIVE

Thrush. The French like songbirds. This usually comes in pate form. Last jar I opened had a beak in it.

LAMPROIE

Lamprey. Perhaps only a Frenchman could stick his hand in a river, pull out this fabulously unphotogenic, eel-like beast with its sucker mouth, and conclude: "That looks tasty." It is significant that Britain's King Henry I died of his "surfeit of lampreys" in Normandy.

MANOULS

Please see above. I can't bear to go through all that again.

ORTOLAN

A bunting-like songbird. Because it's endangered it may not legally be trapped or eaten. So, in south-west France, it's illegally trapped and eaten. Traditionally, the bird is drowned in Armagnac, plucked, popped in the oven and then eaten whole, bones, organs and all, by diners with cloths over their heads.

President Mitterrand had several, as his final blowout, on New Year's Eve 1995. Then, apparently, he ate nothing else at all until his death eight days later.

PIEDS-DE-COCHON

Pigs' trotters, often breaded, always slithery.

Pieds-et-paquets is lambs' feet and stomachs simmered together in white wine - Provence's key weapon in keeping international tourism at bay.

POUTEILLE

Another killer from Lozere. It's pigs' trotters, lard, dubious bits of beef and, if you're truly unlucky, served at breakfast.

SEICHE CUTTLEFISH

Though it sometimes also refers to squid. As does calmar. There's almost a name per tentacle.

TETE-DE-VEAU

Fleshy bits of a calf's head.If this was, as claimed, Jacques Chirac's favourite dish, it kept him looking perky.

TRIPOUX

Sheep's belly stuffed with, inter alia, calf intestines. I can imagine circumstances in which I would eat this, but they involve nuclear war and the disappearance of every other foodstuff from the planet. Except bananas.

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