They Eat Horses, Don't They? Read online

  At a meeting in Paris in 1893, the chefs’ trade union voted to veto women from training as apprentice chefs in the kitchens of the great Parisian hotels and restaurants, on the basis that they wouldn’t cut the mustard. Cookery as a branch of domestic science, however, was clearly a very different kettle of fish, and was approved for the instruction of girls at school since ‘the rules of hygiene, sewing, ironing and cooking’ were considered an appropriate preparation for women, particularly of the lower classes, for future duties as keeper of hearth and home.11 Women who wished to make their way in catering were directed to areas considered more suitable for the feminine disposition than the creative genius of the chef-artiste: hotel management (women being considered especially suitable for managing the humdrum and routine), or pâtisserie. It is no accident that many of the leading schools of hotel management in Europe were founded by women, and that even today, the pâtisserie brigade in the kitchens of high-end French restaurants will be the one most likely to be headed by a woman. Those women who did branch out into the restaurant trade tended to focus on cafés or the auberges, rustic hotels with a few rooms offering traditional fare and convivial company: less champagne and caviar than a succulent joint of roast pork followed by hearty tarte aux pommes. There were French women who made this type of cuisine famous: the Mères Lyonnais, who put the city of Lyons on the map for such hostels; the celebrated Mère Poulard of Mont St Michel (who is said to have invented the illustrious Omelette Poulard, a cross between an omelette and a soufflé, still served in the restaurant named after her in Mont St Michel); and of course the famous Tatin sisters, who according to legend created the eponymous upside-down apple tart, or tarte tatin.

  THE ART OF THE TART (skip)

  Myths surrounding the genesis of tarte tatin – the world’s most illustrious apple tart – are legion. The story goes that it was invented by mistake in the 1880s by one of the Tatin sisters, who kept a modest auberge in the town of Lamotte-Beuvron (Loir-et-Cher), when she put an apple tart in the oven and forgot to add the pastry topping. The singed, crispy confection that resulted subsequently became a house special, and was elevated to the heights of the best restaurants when the food critic Curnonsky (see here) published the recipe.

  Louis Vaudable, the owner of the Parisian restaurant Maxim’s, who helped make tarte tatin a household name, gives an account of his ‘discovery’ that perfectly mirrors the way in which the male chefs of haute cuisine typically appropriated and subsequently mythologized the recipes of their female colleagues in the inferior domain of bourgeoise cuisine. His account should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt:

  ‘I used to hunt around Lamotte-Beuvron in my youth, and had discovered in a very small hotel run by elderly ladies a marvellous dessert listed on the menu under “tarte solognote”. I questioned the kitchen staff about its recipe, but was sternly rebuffed. Undaunted, I got myself hired as a gardener. Three days later, I was fired when it became clear that I could hardly plant a cabbage. But I had the recipe, and it became “the tarte of the Tatin sisters”.’

  From J. Barbary de Langlade, Maxim’s: Cent ans de vie parisienne, 1990.

  Behind almost every grand French chef in history, in fact, are the aromas of inspiration from the kitchens of their grandmothers: the rustic, feminine raw material from which the alchemy of male genius creates sophistication and refinement. The culinary nomenclature is telling: while the great male chefs of French history were traditionally accorded the professional title of Maître Cuisinier (‘Master Chef’), female cooks have traditionally been known by such homely names as Mère, Soeur, or Tante.

  However, the modern world of French haute cuisine continues to be a tough nut for women to crack. As late as 2006, only 6 per cent of French chefs were women, in contrast to 20 per cent of English chefs.12 The French state qualification for a chef – the ‘C.A.P. de cuisine’ – was only opened up to women in the 1980s. And even today haute cuisine remains a predominantly male calling, in which the prevailing attitude remains that too many female cooks spoil the broth. The leading industry body, the Association des maîtres cuisiniers de France, is virtually 100 per cent men, and large numbers of French chefs are alleged to be members of that ultimate old boys’ club, the Masons. The Association des maîtres cuisiniers de France caused a sensation in 2001, when it rejected the candidature of the female chef Anne-Sophie Pic – who subsequently went on to be granted three Michelin stars for her Maison Pic restaurant in Valence, was voted Chef of the Year in 2007, and awarded the Veuve Clicquot prize for Best Female Chef in the World in 2011.

  French feminists have naturally cooked up a storm over such alleged discrimination. The masculine/neutral French word chef has now undergone an unofficial feminist gender-reassignment, with the coinage cheffe. In the last five years or so, a truculent posse of new cheffes has mushroomed on the French scene – presenting cookery programmes on television, managing high-profile restaurants, or winning some of the many television cookery contests. Alongside the illustrious Anne-Sophie Pic, the crème de la crème of French cheffes, there are also other kitchen divas such as Rougui Dia (an exotically beautiful cheffe of Senegalese extraction, who caused a stir in 2005 when she was appointed head of the kitchens at the distinguished Franco-Russian restaurant Petrossian 144), Hélène Darroze of the Connaught Hotel in London, or Anne Alassane (winner of French ‘Masterchef’ in 2010). Nevertheless, in the rarefied world of haute cuisine, women are still very much in the minority.

  VIVE LES CRÊPES! (skip)

  The percentages of French people (of both sexes) who declared they could cook sixteen dishes identified as ‘classics of French cuisine’ were as follows (although the presence of pizza and couscous in a list of ‘classics of French cuisine’ might strike some as rather peculiar):

  ‘Les Français et la cuisine’, Ipsos/Logica Business Consulting, 21 September 2011.

  But what of the homelier space of the French domestic kitchen, where the cooking of la bonne femme has traditionally ruled the roost? The evidence suggests that, while they are still rarely chefs in restaurants, French women remain the cooks at home. According to a 2011 survey by the polling agency Ipsos, in the case of 72 per cent of French couples, it is the woman who does the cooking.13 Quizzed on whether they could cook any one or more of sixteen ‘great classics’ of French cuisine, French women on average felt they could cook just over half (9.8 dishes): the top three dishes were crêpes, followed by tarte aux pommes, then quiche lorraine and gratin dauphinois. In this respect, French women seem to be doing better than British women, who can on average make only seven dishes from scratch, according to a 2011 survey of 2,000 British women commissioned by the Good Food Channel (the most common dishes cooked up in British kitchens were shepherd’s pie, casserole and lasagne). In both the Ipsos and the Good Food Channel surveys, French and British women felt that they were less accomplished cooks than women of their mothers’ generation. Intriguingly, though, it seems that French people of both sexes actually cook less than their British counterparts. An OECD survey of 29 member countries in 2011 found that 63 per cent of French people cooked on an average day (just under the OECD average of 64 per cent), as compared to 75 per cent of British people.14 It appears, then, that while French women have a greater culinary knowledge and expertise than their Anglo-Saxon cousins, they, along with their male peers, actually exercise it less. The reason for this state of affairs is not hard to surmise. With the highest birth rate in Europe and one of the highest percentages of women at work,*15 France is a country where women are more and more pressed for time. Hence the continuing love affair of the French bourgeoisie for posh frozen food.†

  † To understand the French middle-class folie for frozen food, one needs to forget Iceland and think Picard, i.e. imagine something along the lines of Alain Ducasse on ice. Picard is one of the fastest-expanding of the French food giants, with a turnover of over €1.24 billion in 2008. Under the tutelage of a grand maître cuisinier, the chain specializes in high-quality frozen vers
ions of classics of French cuisine. Their celebrated moelleux au chocolat – a gooey French hybrid between a chocolate mousse and sponge pudding – alone sells over 2 million units a year. Picard has, however – in common with other frozen food chains – suffered a blip as a result of the ‘Horsegate’ crisis.

  So it seems that – contrary to popular wisdom – French women actually cook less at home than their British counterparts. Not only that, those who do want to earn their bread from their culinary skills struggle harder to break through the glass ceiling to the highest echelon of the profession. Which just goes to show that French women don’t have their cake and eat it, whatever traditional Froglit authors would have you believe. But hey, why stop the gravy train? Let’s continue to bask in the comforting glow of that myth of the rustled-up chicken julienne. In fact, I definitely feel like poulet tonight...

  Myth Evaluation: False. French women know more recipes than British women but French people cook less on average, and French women find it even harder than their British counterparts to break into the hallowed temples of haute cuisine.

  FRENCH WOMEN DON’T SHAVE

  O soft women’s beard, / Receive my verse like a kiss!

  THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, FRENCH POET (1811-72), ‘MUSÉE SECRET’, 1864

  The myth of the hairy French female is one of the most hoary of all Anglo-Saxon myths about the French. There are entire Internet sites where men debate whether French girls’ armpits, legs and/or other body parts are smooth as silk or a shaggy-bear hangout to be avoided at all costs. The myth of the hairy French female sits oddly with the other characteristics of the mythic French woman, a creature preened and groomed to perfection. Like the myth of French women stripping off on public beaches with abandon (see here), it illustrates the flipside of the ambiguous image of the Gallic female: cool, controlled and sophisticated on the one hand, but at the same time more ‘natural’ and ‘liberated’ than her puritanical sisters.

  The controversy concerning the presence of hair on any part of the female body other than the head is nothing new, the ‘hair versus bare’ debate having raged unceasingly since ancient times. The ancient Romans had a horror of furry women: Ovid, in his lengthy treatise on the arts of love, Ars Amatoria, called on women to ensure there was ‘no rankness of the wild goat under your armpits, no legs bristling with harsh hair!’16 The removal of female body hair has long been a sacred Islamic rite, and noble Muslim women in the Arabian courts of old perfected the technique of a full-body wax followed by depilation with a double silken thread – secrets that were revealed to Gallic women via Alexis Piémontais’ hugely popular and somewhat coyly entitled sixteenth-century tome The Marvellous Secret of How the Great Moorish Ladies Ensure that their Daughters Do Not Have any Hair under their Arms or Other Places. Western European art up to the nineteenth century almost invariably omitted any representation of female pubic hair, to such an extent that the art critic John Ruskin felt unable to consummate his marriage to his wife Effie on the grounds, inter alia, that her pudendum did not match that of the hairless female nudes of Michelangelo, and therefore was not correspondent with description nor fit for purpose.17 The rare works of pre-twentieth-century European art that do depict the female genitalia in their hairy glory – or gory hairiness, depending on your point of view – still disturb us today. Take, for example, Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, or ‘Origin of the World’: a shockingly realistic close-up depiction of a bristling female mons pubis which, when it was reproduced on a book cover in France in 1994, caused the police to raid several bookstores and summarily remove offending copies from the window on the grounds of indecency. A similar confiscation occurred in Portugal in 2009, when the painting was again featured on the cover of a book. The postcard of this painting is the second-bestselling after Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette in the souvenir shop at the Musée d’Orsay;18 and it has the distinction of probably being the only work of art exhibited at a major art gallery that was censored by Facebook when somebody attempted to post it on the site.*19

  * In February 2013, a sensation was caused by the discovery of a torso said to constitute the missing top half of L’Origine du monde, discovered by an art buff in a Paris antiques shop. Somehow, the painting seemed a lot less shocking when identifiable as an individual.

  On the other hand, reviled and vilified as female body hair has been in our history, cultures other than those of Western Europe have celebrated the bushy beauty of the female body in its unplucked splendour. In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, for example, hirsute ladies were traditionally held in great esteem, and until the Second World War, women of the Balkans were wont to snip off pieces of head hair to put in their stockings, to give the appearance of hairy legs.20 The hippie movement in the 1960s and 1970s heralded a brief Age of Aquarius when, for a short while, women could party unashamed of their body hair. In the celebrated 1972 sex manual by Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex, it was counselled that women’s armpits (and indeed regions further south) should ‘on no account be shaved’, so as to preserve their natural eroticism, and that deodorant for both sexes was ‘banned absolutely’. (The primitive-looking lovers in the graphic charcoal illustrations to the original edition of this book could have come straight out of the caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne.)

  The modern preference for smooth pits came into being as a result of a marketing campaign by American manufacturers of depilatory creams and razors in the early twentieth century. Until then, the only hair that Western women (other than prostitutes and chorus girls) felt compelled to remove was, for an unlucky few, facial hair; most of the rest of a woman’s body was discreetly concealed. In 1915, however, a landmark advertisement appeared in the May edition of the upper-class American women’s magazine, Harper’s Bazaar.21 It featured a woman in a toga-like evening outfit raising one arm to reveal a perfectly smooth armpit, with the headline, Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair. Thus began what has been dubbed the ‘underarm campaign’ – a blitz of magazine advertisements over the ensuing years designed to convince women of a need that they didn’t know they had, first in Harper’s Bazaar and then filtering through to the more middle-brow McCall’s by 1917. Women’s razors and depilatory creams showed up for the first time in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue of 1922, the same year the company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves. By then, the battle of the pits had been won by the smoothies. The battle of the legs was to come later, with the rise in hemlines and invention of stockings in the 1930s – the occasion for women’s magazine editors to declare war on the ‘thick forest of hair’ visible through the newly sheer fabric clothing covering women’s lower limbs. The advent of package holidays, sunbathing and the beach body firmly entrenched the image of tanned, hair-free female pins. A survey of American women from 20 to 81 years old in 1991 found that 81 per cent shaved their legs and/or their armpits.22

  The practice of hair removal travelled across the Atlantic in 1946, the consequence of the postwar arrival of the nylon stocking from the USA.23 An inquiry conducted in 1972 found that 80 per cent of the French women questioned regularly removed hair from their legs and armpits, although 43 per cent of them only did so when it was visible.24 Hardly a ringing endorsement of the hairy French woman myth, then. And what of French women today? There again, believers in French furriness will be disappointed. According to a nationwide survey of 1,016 French people conducted by the marketing group Ipsos for the depilatory brand Nair in 2006,25 77 per cent of French people considered it important for a woman to be free of body hair to be seductive. Of the women questioned, 83 per cent removed leg hair, 73 per cent underarm hair, and 54 per cent hair on the bikini line. A sizable chunk of French men declared they would be most displeased if their partner stopped shaving (44 per cent), and even more of the men under 35 declared that this would be a serious relationship issue (57 per cent). Oddly enough, the French will tell you, if asked, that it is German women who don’t remove body hair. But that is
another story.

  So French women are as busy plucking, waxing, threading, blitzing, depilating and electrolysing as everybody else. And they may even be venturing into more exotic pastures down under. For younger French women, the traditional bikini line wax or Brazilian triangle apparently are a bit passé, and the rage now is for a ticket de Métro (which is a… well, you can probably figure it out). There is even the increasingly popular total pelvic blitz, also known as the ‘Hollywood’ or the ‘Sphinx’ (the term ‘Sphinx’ allegedly derived not from the Egyptian monument but rather from the Sphynx, a naked breed of domestic cat originally created in Toronto in 1966).

  But fans of hair as opposed to bare can take heart that women in the laid-back Scandinavian countries are still out there, defending the bush: in March 2012, a group of Swedish feminists demonstrated their ‘hairy pits’ in Malmö as a protest against beauty fascism, calling for women to return to the wild and ‘reclaim the hair’. And believe it or not, there is also a free-spirited and hairy soul lurking in the depths of the plucked and perfected body of the archetypal French woman. If you don’t believe me, take a look at what was until recently the second most famous painting in the Louvre Paris (now in the Louvre at Lens) – Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple (‘Liberty Leading the People’). The picture – an unofficial national emblem – portrays the bare-breasted figure of Liberty leading France to victory against the oppressor, the Tricolore held aloft in one hand, and a bayonetted musket in the other. Take a good look at the armpit of Liberty’s right arm, the one brandishing the flag. No, look a bit closer. There! See what I mean?