Chapter 48 french appetite

Fifteen years ago, in Singapore, I walked a long way from the Metropolitan Hotel where we stayed to the zoo with a friend who is now a well-known writer in France, listening to him talk about French cuisine along the way.Later, in Singapore, Mr. Chen Ruixian, who was working at the French embassy at the time, invited me to eat at a French restaurant named after Marco Polo. Complete and orderly.He was originally a qualified gourmet, and he sat by and talked about the mysteries of French food in a leisurely manner. All this is my enlightenment on French food. The French Ministry of Culture launched a campaign to awaken the sense of taste in 1990, and the French Ministry of Education also approved a series of culinary art lectures for primary school students, and teachers were required to receive high-level training from culinary experts.This posture is undoubtedly to promote the traditional food culture to the level of mainstream culture with the power of the state for popularization, which is rare in other countries.As the world's top tourist country, French scholars have designed food-themed routes on the basis of investigating culinary heritage, making their food culture an international phenomenon.

From a historical perspective, the Romans' victory over Gaul (ancient France and surrounding areas) really boosted Europe's appetite.The Gauls were savage and martial, and their appetites frightened the Romans, and Rome was already paying attention to luxury and pomp, so they combined pomp and appetite, and the consequences are not difficult to imagine.All absurd ideas are connected with eating. Sometimes the cakes rolled out at banquets are so big that they can hide musicians and carve fountains.Spectacular but brutal, the taste is actually hard to describe. Here I want to mention the Medici family that I have carefully investigated in Italy before.In the 16th century, this family intermarried with the French royal family, bringing the excellent cooking skills of Florence, and the food in Paris began to rise from ostentation to delicacy.Parisians are smart, and they were already tired of the extravagant eating and drinking scenes that are far from the needs of the tongue, so they created with heart under the inspiration of the chef in Florence, and soon surpassed the teacher, and gradually formed a French style that pays more attention to taste and sentiment. Food.

Of course, the appetite is still good, and the ostentation is still great, especially among the royal family and nobles. At that time, the high-level cooking skills mainly served them.For example, for Louis XIV, more than 300 people arranged meals for him in the palace. When eating, various trusted ministers sat around and watched him swallow a large amount of food with elegant demeanor and standardized etiquette.I read in a book that the amount of food he swallowed at one time was unbelievable and could be called an inhuman appetite.Showing elegance despite an apparently inhuman appetite, is the attitude of a French court aristocrat.Reminiscent of the Empress Dowager Cixi serving more than a hundred dishes during meals, but she just picked a few chopsticks nearby.Even if you don’t eat it, you still take pictures every day. This is a Chinese-style ostentation.Both scenes are tiresome.

After Louis XVI was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court, he actually ate six pieces of schnitzel, half a chicken, and a pile of eggs on the spot. His appetite was so good that he was dying. Food culture is actually a bit of a waste for a good appetite.The emperors of Louis's dynasty in France had such good appetites that the lower gourmands rejoiced and the higher gourmets sighed.You can eat so much in one meal, how can you taste it carefully?If you don't know how to taste, there is no food.Emperors with a weaker appetite may taste it, but not necessarily, because tasting is a comparison, they lack the coordinates of comparison, and later lost their sensitivity to comparison.

I think it's similar in China.The dining table in the palace is luxurious and rich, but there is nothing delicious.The chefs knew that the emperor did not know how to taste, and their cooking skills have deteriorated over the years.Therefore, in order to attract customers, some restaurants now pretend to be named after the royal family and make up stories about the royal chef.If it is really the royal family and the royal chef, experts will not go in, so as not to think of the poor emperor who is chewing wax under the watchful eyes of the eunuchs. The rise of French cuisine is thanks to the Revolution.That revolution caused the royal family and nobles to lose their privileges, and then a large number of chefs lost their jobs, so they could only go to the society and open shops.Before that, the French people were like ancient China, with some traveling taverns and dim sum shops.

The chefs thought that they would face a messy and vulgar world when they stepped out of the palace, but unexpectedly the situation was much better after they came out.In the catering market, the competition turned into the competition of chefs in the end. They were robbed by the bosses, and their status and remuneration were greatly improved.As time goes by, I feel better and better about myself, and I no longer have to be so submissive and submissive as in the court.Some of the chefs even start writing, elevating cooking experience to philosophy and art, and firmly believe that they are on par with Rodin and Debussy, and only on par with Saudi Arabia and Picasso.

I have written one after another, and it can be said to be voluminous when I put it on the bookshelf.Many scholars in China always limit the word culture to the scope of books, so they do not admit that food can become culture, drinking tea can become culture, and they even doubt whether TV is culture. I think they are bullying China. Practitioners don't capitalize on the problem of writing books.If you go to France and take a look, a chef’s personal anthology is arranged like a classic, and there are a lot of diagrams, quotations, notes, examples, and inductions when you flip through it. Let’s see how our scholars deny the food culture.

In fact, even in terms of culture, the works of these chefs are more in line with international conventions than those of many scholars, because they do not only examine the legacy of their predecessors, but must use their own creations and insights as the backbone of their elaboration.Creation begins with careful selection in the vegetable market every morning, which is very real; insights break through the empirical category and rise to the general realm of life. Such chefs are often very proud, and they only create a little creation for high-level appreciators every day, and they don't want to pay attention to customers who they think are not up to the level.The so-called lack of class in France does not necessarily refer to the standard of wealth. On the contrary, it probably refers to those modern rich.

The pride of French chefs is sometimes expressed as an extreme professional reputation.They are willing to kill themselves if they fail to make a bad dish at an important banquet, or are downgraded in the evaluation of gourmets.Such tragedies have indeed happened, and the kind of cultural people who seem to be full of integrity but only know how to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages can really be compared to be speechless.But in my opinion, this professional reputation of French chefs is just excessive vulnerability caused by excessive pride. In this regard, Chinese chefs are much more solid. Some of them have a good reputation, but they hardly write books due to their cultural level, and they don't think of themselves as artists or philosophers.Lack of innovation is their shortcoming, but food is different from technology after all, relying on a deep ecological foundation rather than ever-changing inventions.It would be great if French chefs and Chinese chefs can make some adjustments and complement each other in their respective behaviors.

The high development of French cuisine is related to the texture orientation of French culture, which I admire very much.Texture is not vulgar, elegant but not abstract, all kinds of poems and books are deposited into food, clothing, housing and transportation, gestures and gestures, and then the daily ecology is used to reflect on culture and correct culture. This kind of warm cycle is intoxicating. However, the French tend to lose control and lack restraint when it comes to beautiful things.Even some well-known cultural people have a surprisingly good appetite, and are willing to talk about it in books.There were Balzac, Hugo, Maupassant, Dumas, Flaubert, and Zola who were particularly enthusiastic about the conversation, and the ones who had the most appetite were probably Balzac and Hugo.In fact, literati have a good appetite, which is probably a common practice in the world. I remember that when I used to have dinner at school, I always found that the tables of the old professors were quickly swept away, while the tables of the workers were always empty.But Chinese literati can talk about food but are unwilling to boast about their appetites. There seems to be some obstacle, and they are not as frank as French literati.

In my opinion, there is only one problem that needs to be brought to the attention of French friends, and that is that they spend too much time on food every day.In many restaurants in France, the serving speed is extremely slow, making people wait forever. This is almost the main reason why we often have to give up French food during our stay in France.But all the French friends seem to be less impatient than us. As soon as we take a seat in a restaurant, the concept of time is completely cut off.Of course, this can be regarded as a kind of leisurely enjoyment, but according to reliable statistics, the effective working hours of the French people are far less than that of the Americans, and the time is eaten up by eating. It is precisely because of this that American fast food, which was hated by famous chefs in the past, has gradually become popular among the younger generation in France. It is no longer embarrassing to be deported for a can of Coca-Cola in a formal restaurant. The principles of time, economy and arbitrariness have become the life principles of the next generation, and it may be the classical principles of French cuisine that need to be introspected.