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  The very creation of the dish escargots de Bourgogne is the stuff of legend. According to the story, in 1814 the great French politician and diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (commonly known simply as ‘Talleyrand’) asked his chef, Antonin Carême, to create a dish for a dinner in honour of Tsar Alexander I. Carême, who came from Burgundy, conjured up the buttery, garlicky confection, which became an instant classic, as integral to the French festive season as that other French fetish which has been known to discomfit some foreign visitors, foie gras.

  Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: ‘I bet that if we called this something like “escargot”, tourists would eat it.’ Then they had a hearty laugh, because ‘escargot’ is the French word for ‘fat crawling bag of phlegm’.

  DAVE BARRY’S ONLY TRAVEL GUIDE YOU’LL EVER NEED (1991)

  In days gone by, the chasse aux escargots or snail hunt used to be as popular a family pastime in France after a shower of rain as blackberry picking in England, or frog giggin’ in Texas. Many an ageing Frenchman’s eyes will mist over in fond recollection of childhood days spent poking about under bushes for choicely glutinous specimens, which once caught would be fattened up on a diet of thyme leaves, prepared for cooking with a generous covering of salt, washed several times to get rid of the slime, and then plunged into boiling water. The classic Burgundy snail used to feed on the famous vineyards of its original home, to be collected by peasants and sent in baskets by train to the chic restaurants of Paris. But today the Burgundy snail is virtually extinct, and there are tough restrictions on snail-gathering in the wild. To satisfy the massive demand for escargots de Bourgogne, the French escargotiers now import vast numbers of snails from Central and Eastern Europe, where they are gathered in the wild by local villagers. In fact, if you order escargots de Bourgogne in a French bistro, the snails will most likely have come from Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Romania or Ukraine. The one place they are more or less certain not to have come from is Burgundy.

  Everyone is delighted by the tree-shaded terrace, but when the menu arrives a shiver runs through the group.

  FRENCHMAN DESCRIBING AMERICAN EXPRESS TRIP TO VERSAILLES, QUOTED IN RENÉE-PIERRE GOSSET, LES TOURISTES À PARIS, 1950

  There is much confusion among the French, as well as everybody else, over the term escargots de Bourgogne. This may refer to the actual Burgundy snail, but most often it refers to the celebrated dish that is cooked à la Bourguignonne – i.e. ‘in the Burgundy fashion’ (the culinary myth attributed to Carême.) The Burgundy snail is defined as the species Helix pomatia and is not specific to Burgundy – hence it can, and usually does, nowadays come from Eastern Europe. The species Helix lucorum comes from Turkey and is often passed off either as the actual Burgundy snail, or as a dish cooked in the fashion of escargots de Bourgogne. Snail farms in France produce the Cornu aspersum or gros/petit gris, which is the only variety you can safely be assured is well and truly French. Unfortunately, real French snails are rare these days.

  Does it matter that a Burgundy snail is no longer a snail from Burgundy? Surely all snails are created equal? Not quite. The hitch is that gastropods have a high rate of retention of toxic metals and other substances from the soil (including cadmium, lead, zinc, copper, mercury, arsenic, and radon). So, along with all that garlic and butter that accompanies your Polish/Romanian/Ukrainian snail, you could in theory also be ingesting Chernobyl fallout. Not to mention the fact that certain unscrupulous dealers have been known to chop up the giant African snail, or achatine, and try to pass it off as the genuine thing (unfortunate, as it can play host to a parasitic worm that causes a type of meningitis). Better to stick with the home-grown French molluscs: at least you know what they (and consequently you) have eaten. Best of all, you will definitely put a frog in the throat of that snooty Parisian waiter if you ask, before you order the escargots de Bourgogne, whether it’s Helix pomatia, Helix lucorum, or Cornu aspersum on the menu. He’ll never think of the Rosbifs in the same way again.

  Myth Evaluation: Partly true. The French aren’t as partial to frogs’ legs as everybody thinks, but they are avid consumers of snails.

  THE FRENCH ARE THE WORLD’S NO. 1 CONSUMERS OF CHEESE

  A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.

  JEAN-ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN (1755–1826)

  The French: a nation of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, as Groundskeeper Willie infamously said in an episode of the animated TV series The Simpsons. While the allegation of simian affiliation is contentious, to say the least, and cowardliness the subject of another chapter (see here), cheese eating is incontrovertibly something that the French do a lot of. Cheese is to France what the hamburger is to America, or chicken tikka masala now is to Britain: part of the national heritage. In fact, the average Frenchman eats around 26 kg of cheese a year (compared to 15 kg for the average American, and 11kg for the average Briton).23 ‘How can one be expected to govern a country with 246 different cheeses?’ General de Gaulle once complained. By introducing 246 protection orders, of course. Actually, de Gaulle underestimated quite badly the number of cheeses produced in France. The real total is closer to 1,000. Many are produced in the French regions by local craftsmen or artisans from raw cow’s milk, and are now protected under European law by the AOP label (Appellation d’origine protégée, formerly the AOC label or Appellation d’origine contrôlée).24 Cheese, more than anything produced in France (wine excepted), embodies the French concept of terroir: that is, the idea that the food we eat is not an anonymous, factory-made product but rather a living, breathing entity with a personality according to what it is, where it comes from, and what has been done to it. ‘Good cooking’, the renowned French food critic known as Curnonsky (in real life Maurice Edmond Sailland; see here) once wrote, ‘is when things taste of what they are.’

  The AOP label is designed to protect this concept. Thus, the cheese that for many is the king of French cheeses – the AOP blue cheese Roquefort – can only be made from the raw milk of the Laucane sheep, fed on pastures within a pre-defined zone of the Aveyron département and surrounding regions, ripened with the mould of the genus Penicillium roqueforti, and aged in the damp, cool caves of the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. Roquefort has been made in the caves of this town on the hills of the southern part of the Massif Central since time immemorial. The story goes that a local shepherd, spotting a beautiful shepherdess in the distance, was in such a hurry to pursue her that he left his lunch in the cave. Returning much later to retrieve it, he saw that the bread and cheese had gone mouldy. He tasted the cheese, and a pungent legend was born: in the words of Curnonsky, ‘the genius of Roquefort’, which ‘brings with it the powerful scent of the earth and the fragrance of the prairies; whose presence seems to open a window onto the horizons of far-flung landscapes’. 25

  If life was once blessed for the French cheese-makers, however, it is tough for them nowadays. Sneaky EU legislation restricting the use of raw or unpasteurized milk (the key ingredient of artisanal cheese, and the only true milk for connoisseurs) has nibbled away at regional French cheese production, as has listeria hysteria fanned by the international press. For real cheese enthusiasts, pasteurization is a nuclear bomb that annihilates every organism in the milk, good or bad, including not only bacteria, but also friendly gut flora.*

  * Despite the bad press surrounding raw milk, a 2008 study by the French agricultural research institute INRA (Institut national de la recherche agronomique) entitled Qu’est-ce que le lait cru? stated that Listeria monocytogenes had been more frequently detected in pasteurized milk than raw milk.

  Pasteurized milk is no longer a living organism, bursting with unseen life and the feral flavours of the beast from which it came, but a mere white liquid containing proteins, fats and lactose, produced by the mammary glands of female mammals. Similarly, pasteurized blue cheese is no longer milk’s lea
p to immortality, but a dead substance streaked with visible fungal mycelia.*

  * With pasteurization, the bête noire of French artisanal cheese, the French have been hoist with their own petard. It was a Frenchman, the chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who invented the technique that is coming back to haunt them.

  Raw milk cheese made up only 15 per cent of French cheese production in 2011, and the number of local cheese shops or fromageries reduced by three-quarters in the thirty-odd years from 1966 to 1998.26 For the big beasts among the French industrial dairy producers, cheese is France’s money-spinning ‘white oil’. But for small artisanal cheese-makers, it’s a different story. According to the Association Fromages de Terroirs (Association for Regional Cheeses), more than fifty regional cheeses in France have died out in the last thirty years. This has not been helped by the refusal of ageing peasant farmers to pass on their trade secrets. The Lyonnaise cheese known as la galette des Monts-d’Or, for example, which had been produced for 400 years, died out in the 2000s following the death of the last producer, who refused to divulge the secret recipe.27 Other regional cheeses are in danger as we speak: only three producers in the Loire, for example, continue to produce the bright, orange-rinded Fourme de Montbrison, made out of milk from the cows of the Haut-Forez. Où sont les neiges d’antan? the famous French chansonnier Georges Brassens once sang, quoting the medieval poet François Villon. Gallic cheese lovers might do well to respond, Mais où sont les fromages d’antan?

  THE BIG CHEESE OF FRENCH FOOD CRITICS (skip)

  Maurice Edmond Sailland (1872–1956), a.k.a. ‘Curnonsky’ or the ‘Prince des Gastronomes’, was France’s most celebrated food critic of the early twentieth century. He was the poet, or rather conductor, of French cheese: according to him, the northern French cheese Maroilles was ‘the sound of the saxophone in the symphony of French cheeses’. Sadly, he did not assign instruments to the other cheeses of the French orchestra, so the musical qualities of Camembert, Brie and Comté remain a subject of speculation.

  Curnonsky had a passionate dislike of cheese boards, considering that a meal should be finished on a single note rather than a cacophony of different flavours. He also took the French notion of terroir, or the connection between the thing eaten and its environment, to uncharted lengths: he went so far as to advise ‘... never eat the left leg of a partridge, for that is the leg it sits on, which makes the circulation sluggish’. He was also partial to asking for his beef to be cooked ‘pink as a baby’s bottom’, and referred to French fries as ‘the most spiritual creation of Parisian genius’. Gertrude Stein wrote that Curnonsky resembled a ‘physically amorphous creature, not dissimilar to an unfinished tub of butter’. Restaurant owners quaked in their shoes to see him waiting to be served at one of their tables, his crisp white napkin tied under his many chins. He died falling out of the window of his Parisian apartment, reputedly because he felt faint from being obliged to follow a diet.

  The French press has been busy lamenting the fact that French people today seem more interested in spending their money on mobile phones and fast cars than the traditional Gallic priority of fine food. Television interviews, conducted in the street by the French state broadcaster France 5 in January 2012, revealed that many French people did not know the difference between ‘raw’ and ‘pasteurized’ milk.*

  * 29 January 2012, France 5, La Guerre des fromages qui puent. Gilles Capelle / Galaxie Presse / France Télévision.

  They bought cheese in bulk and put it in the freezer. They did not even know the difference between any old Camembert and a Camembert de Normandie AOP. Few people do. The difference arises from the fact that the villagers of Camembert in Normandy lost an attempt to have their cheese protected in 1926. Therefore, Camembert can come from virtually anywhere these days – Egypt, Tasmania, Ecuador or even Thailand. Camembert made in the traditional way in its original home is, however, protected, under the name Camembert de Normandie AOP. It is hard to find this even in French supermarkets – you have a better chance at the local fromagerie, if it still exists. The aroma of a true Camembert – should you ever be lucky enough to find one – has been compared to the whiff of God’s feet, and divinely odoriferous it is indeed. The French, it is feared, are losing their savoir-faire, traditionally handed down through the generations. Their tastes are changing. The palate of the new generation no longer favours the pungent, feral bouquets of the cheeses of le terroir, preferring instead the processed blandness of Babybel or La Vache qui rit (The Laughing Cow).

  Roquefort should be eaten only on one’s knees.

  ALEXANDRE BALTHAZAR LAURENT GRIMOD DE LA REYNIÈRE (1758–1837)

  But France’s position as top cheese nation faces yet greater threats than growing domestic indifference and ignorance. For, while the French are deserting Fourme d’Ambert for Squizzi the liquid cheese in a tube, foreigners such as the Americans are discovering the hallowed French concept of terroir. In the 1980s, germophobic Britain and the United States elevated pasteurization to an Eleventh Commandment. Now, cheesed off with the blandness of factory food, the nation that invented Cheez Whizz has taken artisan cheese to its bosom with all the zeal of a convert. Stinky cheeses are suddenly all the rage in the USA, ‘mold-ripened’ the new ‘rotten’. In recent years, the production of raw-milk cheese in the USA has multiplied by thousands. Artisanal cheese-makers are springing up everywhere: New York, Vermont, Los Angeles, Wisconsin. Le terroir – a concept unknown to the English language until a few years ago – is the buzzword on the lips of every new graduate of food technology. In New York, artisanal cheese from the Broadway terroir is even produced in a skyscraper in the city centre.*

  * It is intriguing to speculate on the defining characteristics of the Broadway terroir, if it were ever to be granted an AOP. Carbon dioxide, photochemical smog, and emissio`ns from motor vehicles spring to mind.

  In Vermont, a former financier who quit Wall Street for a life of artisanal cheese-making blasted a dozen caves into a hillside when he found that he lacked the right conditions in which to mature his crop. Already, Michelin-starred restaurants in New York offer half-French, half-American artisan cheeses on their cheese boards (a few years ago, it would have been 100 per cent French). As the ultimate insult, an advertisement in 2011 by the Québec government agency funding new business projects, Investissement Québec, featured a Québecquois farmer herding his sheep across the fields, with the strapline: ‘Soon it will be the French who are eating my cheese.’ French cheese loyalists are in despair. How long will it be before French cheese goes the same way as French wine? Just as the Old World châteaux grands crus have been ousted by New World upstarts such as Jacob’s Creek and Oyster Bay, it is surely only a matter of time before classic Gallic cheeses such as Crottin de Chavignol, Pont-l’Évêque, and Picodon de l’Ardèche are replaced by Twig Farm, Slyboro, Redwood Hill or Cowgirl Creamery.

  Worse still, not only are the French turning away from their own artisanal cheeses, but they are not even the number one cheese consumers in the world today. The global cheese-eating champions are – perhaps surprisingly – the feta-loving Greeks, who consume an impressive 31 kg of cheese per person per year.28 The Association Fromages de Terroirs considers the issue a deadly serious one, and has even launched a cheesy calendar featuring scantily clad women with names like Mademoiselle Cantal and Mademoiselle Gruyère posing astride cheese wheels, in a bid to sex up the image of the dowdy fromages régionaux. There is now a Diplôme Universitaire Fromage et Patrimoine (University Diploma in Cheese and Patrimony), offered by selected French universities in collaboration with cheese industry specialists, in an attempt to transmit ancient cheese-making savoir-faire to the lacklustre younger generation.

  If you believe what you read in the French press, there’s a New World conspiracy out there to stamp out the glorious heritage of Gallic cheese. But – much as the French like to blame everybody else for their regional cheese crisis – the problem really lies at home rather than abroad. The French need to
rediscover pride in their second-biggest olfactory legacy after perfume. They need to stop scoffing the processed stuff, and buy their own regional cheese. Now, that would really wipe the smile off the face of the laughing cow.

  Myth Evaluation: Not true. The laurels for the cheese-eating champions of the world go to the Greeks.

  THE FRENCH CONSUME A VERY GREAT DEAL OF GARLIC

  There are five elements: earth, air, fire, water and garlic.

  LOUIS FELIX DIAT, FRENCH CHEF (1885–1957)

  Since time immemorial, people have praised and vilified the humble Allium sativum in equal measure. Garlic – the poor relation of the alliums, a family of loftier legumes that also includes the leek, shallot, onion and chive – has traditionally enjoyed a quasi-mystical status for its culinary, medicinal and vampire-exorcizing qualities. The French chef and restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, patron of London’s prestigious Restaurant Français in the late 1920s, is reputed to have said, ‘It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.’ Famed for its medicinal properties, garlic was used as an antiseptic on wounds by shepherds long before Joseph Lister was born or Louis Pasteur confirmed its antibiotic properties; and as late as the First World War, the British government appealed to the public to donate their home-grown garlic for the wounded. Indeed, garlic was so widely used to treat battlefield injuries that it was known as ‘Russian penicillin’.29 Henri of Navarre, later King Henri IV of France (1589–1610), had a clove of garlic rubbed into his lips as a baby to protect him against evil and remained faithful to the herb all his life, consuming a clove a day for its alleged aphrodisiacal properties. He was said to have ‘breath that would knock a bull flat from twenty paces away’.30