Lili’s dîner presque parfait: American Thanksgiving in in the south of France

By Eric Van Vleet

We recently wrote on this blog about our obsession with the French reality TV show Un dîner presque parfait. After watching so many episode we had realized certain commonalities for throwing a quality French dinner party. While this was mainly academic interest at first, we had the ability to put these ideas into practice Saturday night. While we did not fully follow the format of having five consecutive parties for each participant, Lili and I hosted four French friends for our own dîner presque parfait. We had discussed this party with friends for a while and finally arranged it as our time in France was sadly coming to a close. Also, sorry about the photo quality. We need an actual camera...

For our dinner, we already had the theme of American Thanksgiving. Why not introduce our French friends to American food on its greatest culinary day? Yet some problems immediately arose. Our oven, if you would call it that, is a glorified toaster oven. A whole turkey could not fit in it. Sweet potatoes are available but only from large chain stores. Cranberries are not at all common. So we quickly realized that we could not replicate an American Thanksgiving for them. In a nod to the French, we decoded to serve the meal in courses and not all at once as in the American Thanksgiving tradition. Serving it in courses, made our meal last roughly four hours, which is almost un-American, but very common for French social gatherings.

Yet when in France, with the greatest produce, cheese and meat that anyone could hope for, why try to exactly replicate an American meal? So as our guests would recognize, we put a French twist on typical American Thanksgiving based largely on what was seasonal and available. I say we, but this was largely Lili’s effort in designing and executing the menu. In giving credit where credit is due, Jacques Pepin’s video on how to debone a chicken was invaluable.

The meal started with an aperitif of that Italo-American staple, meatballs and gravy. Lili used a combination of ground beef and pork from our local butcher, which she mixed with dried oregano, salt, pepper, fresh shallot, fresh garlic and hand grated day old baguette. As it is not the season for tomatoes, she used canned tomatoes, which she added to a sofrito of onions and garlic and then added homemade chicken stock and bits of chicken, which she reduced for 20 minutes. She then browned the meatballs on each side and let them simmer on low heat in the sauce to help absorb more flavor. We served the meatballs with an interesting aperitif called Le Fou d’Ecausses, which is a low alcohol sparkling wine that drinks much more like a sweet cider.These meatballs were the biggest hit of the night as was the drink. Lili had impressed them right from the start.

As on Un dîner presque parfait, we had our game or (animation) after the aperitif. I decided to have us play trivia about Thanksgiving and the history of some of the foods we would serve. While people in general like something with more physical activity, we were offering as a prize, sea salt infused with Piment d'Espelette, a French hot pepper. I decided to make the questions multiple choice, so people were shouting out answers quite rapidly, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. We made the mistake that many contestants make of not paying much attention to the decoration. We made no hand-drawn turkeys nor cornucopias. We just stuck with traditional Thanksgiving colors and focused almost entirely on the food.

For the appetizer Lili made a soup inspired by an American baked potato. She used homemade chicken stock, caramelized onions, cream, salt, pepper and potatoes. For the French twist, she added fried crispy duck skin (gratton) and put this on top instead of bacon. As we wanted to focus mainly on beer to bring a more American character, we served it with 3 Monts, a French beer in the bière de garde style, one of the few indigenous French beer styles.

During this course, talk shifted to politics with many Trump jokes abounding. They tried to reassure us that Marine Le Pen could not win in the second round of France’s run-off elections, but they remembered how Lili had assured them that Trump could win, even when almost no pollsters said it was possible. Since Lili has spent a lot of time volunteering with old conservative French ladies who see themselves in Marine Le Pen, while our friends are progressive university students in Toulouse who hang out with like-minded people, they cannot believe her victory is possible. Though we desperately hope they are right about the impossibility of her victory, after Trump and Brexit, one can never be so sure.

For the main course Lili, with Jacques Pepin’s help, had deboned and gallentine-d two chickens. She stuffed them with Toulouse sausages, fennel, French cornbread, turnips, butter, salt and pepper. She baked these in our counter top oven to serve as the turkey substitute. To make things even better, she added thinly-sliced potatoes in with the chickens to absorb their succulent fat. For the side we made a monster serving of mac and cheese made with Comté, young Cantal, young Gouda and an aged goat’s-milk Gouda cheese. For an extra French twist, we added day old croissants for the crust instead of the usual breadcrumbs. One common complaint by contestants of Un dîner presque parfait is that the food is too heavy and I fear our guests found mac and cheese far too heavy, while they appreciated the work Lili put into the gallentine. We served this course with what was to be the best beer produced in Lot and one of the best French beers that we have tried, called Walk on the Wine Side by a tiny brewery called Les Alcolytes. It is essentially a winter warmer aged in local Malbec wine barrels. There was a lot of delicious wine flavor in there, though it did not take on an almost black Malbec color.

For the dessert Lili made a Florentine Chocolate Tart, which includes a ganache of melted dark chocolate, egg yolks and cream. For the local twist we added hazelnuts and walnuts bought from the farmers market into the ganache. The crust was simply made of butter, digestive cookies and sugar. The good thing about the dessert is the dark chocolate cuts down on the sweetness. Contestants often complain on Un dîner presque parfait that the dessert is sweet and too copious. We were already handing out cups of American coffee and Armagnac to get the digestive processes started.

Yet, too critique Thanksgiving as being overblown and too heavy is to misunderstand the whole point of Thanksgiving. The point is to have everyone passed out on the couch a few hours later. No one should feel like taking a brisk jog after the meal or being able to contemplate eating again a few hours later. The fact that the entire family gathering is based around food is very French, I see now the heaviness of the meal though is fairly foreign in these parts. Eating American-inspired food is one thing for the French, eating it in American quantities is another.
Overall, we had a wonderful time entertaining our friends, who have previously shown us what French hospitality is all about. They have invited us to share Christmas, New Year’s and various village parties that resemble the most idealized portrayals of French rural life imaginable. It was nice to try to show our thanks for all they had done. Even if the food was a bit too heavy...

The Dangers of Defending a Singular “Frenchness”

By Eric Van Vleet

The journalist/writer Adam Nossitier recently published an essay in the New York Times that is incendiary to anyone who loves rural France. The title states his case well enough: “As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’”. Nossitier focuses particularly on the town of Albi, which has a population of 49,000 and is located in the département of Tarn about an hour northeast of Toulouse. It is a beautiful town. The historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home to the grandiose Sainte-Cécile Cathedral and also the well-done Toulouse-Lautrec museum. Such attractions make Albi a prime tourist destination. But attracting tourists is not Albi’s main issue, according to Nossitier.

Nossitier describes its “withering” as the continuous closure of businesses in its historic center. He had been to Albi decades before and found it thriving, but upon his return this January, he found it to be “withering”. While clothing stores and shops selling tourist goods remain open, bakeries, grocers, butcher shops and cafes have closed in the town center. It is these closures, which Nossitier argues indicate a declining ‘Frenchness’. These shops acted as spaces for people to meet and exchange gossip. Vacant stores and dwellings further corrode community ties and the ‘vitality’ of the town is lost in these processes of “devitalization”.

Albi is not the only town “withering”, according to Nossitier, but many other “provincial” towns throughout France are experiencing the same phenomenon. He makes the bolder claim that this “withering” makes voters in such places all the more willing to support the extreme-right Front National  party and its candidate Marine Le Pen in the upcoming election even when they previously voted for left-wing or centrist candidates. He says that Le Pen claims that she can defend not only France, but “Frenchness”. Such appeals by Le Pen to some static notion of “Frenchness” are troubling. For Americans, we can hear some echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with a French twist. Each make campaign promises not to diverse groups of people living in large urban centers, but people in smaller towns with predominantly white populations that have faced long-term economic decline and yet fear change like immigration.

Nossitier argues that the opening of big box stores spurred processes of “devitalization” in Albi, which began during France’s Trente Glorieuses (a period  of peak economic vitality and prosperity from 1945-1975). Instead of supporting downtown local grocers and other businesses, people used their increasing incomes to shop instead at chain big box stores that offered more choices at lower prices but little in the way of community. Competition from these suburban big boxes drained downtown businesses of their customers in Albi and similar French towns. The havoc that Wal-Mart has wrought on many American small towns is not dissimilar.

The same broad narrative fits the town of Cahors, which is a small provincial capital an hour north of Toulouse and an hour and a half from Albi, where Lili and I have been living in France. There is a street filled with former merchants’ buildings where at best 20% of the businesses remain open. In other parts of old town Cahors there are still are bakeries, butcher shops, cafes and grocers. The city only really comes alive on Wednesday and Saturday markets. Even if it has fared better than Albi as it has multiple bakeries and butcher shops, Cahors can appear to be “withering”, especially on Sundays and Mondays.

While clearly business closures and the sprouting up of chain big box stores are not favorable trends for Cahors or Albi, and should be combatted, the concept of “devitalization” is a lot more complicated than Nossitier claims. Again Cahors is vital on market days. Many businesses depend on these days for their earnings. Business is also highly seasonal. Shops seem to make their entire year during the summer. Therefore on a market day in August, Cahors is anything but “devitalized”. Business cycles are far more varied than in large cities like Paris.

Nositier fits all of this talk of “withering” and “devitalization” in the context of a potential rightward political swerve for such places.The big questions this article raises for France in an election year is if one must choose between this kind of “withering” “Frenchness” of today or that of the “vital” past. Yet such a choice is unrealistic, just as unrealistic as returning the America the great to the 1950s as Trump wishes. Nossitier nostalgically wishes that Albi could return to the city as it was on his first visit, vital in the midst of its economic “glorious years” before chain stores and suburbanization. If only this is the sole inflexible version of “Frenchness”, then there is no doubt why it is “withering”. There seems to be little political possibilities in such a narrow definition of Frenchness that wants to turn back the clock. Few if any places are still experiencing such rapid economic growth or are free of suburbanization or chain stores. Rolling back such sustained macro-economic trends is ambitious and admirable as a continued political project, but likely of little electoral practicality in the short-term.

Instead of hoping for the return of some ideal “Frenchness” that is “withering”, change is not so simple or somehow resoundingly negative. No doubt “Frenchness” may be in part composed of artisanal bakeries, local butcher shops and locally-owned cafes all located in a walkable, historic city center. As well, it is an increasingly multicultural society in large urban areas, just as it is in the housing blocks outside small and large French cities where people have comparatively fewer opportunities and higher rates of employment than in old town Albi.

Yet “Frenchness” is even more than that. It can be a life organized around twice weekly market days, alternating with days without shopping. It is the land of the 35 hour work week  that people have fought to defend as well as their universal socialized medicine. Firing and hiring people is complicated. France has half as many people living below the poverty line than in the US but double the unemployment. France provides its citizens with relative stability compared to the US, a quality of life that is likely far better than having more diverse shopping outlets that have extended hours.

The kind of pessimism and obsession with a “withering” national identity as expressed by Nossitier, Le Pen and Trump seems to be running rampant. Politicians need to censure Marine Le Pen’s race-baiting, and instead demand equality that brings the aforementioned benefits to all French people in large cities as well as in the provinces. It is a glorious country that does not need ‘defending’ from outsiders nor is it in some state of imminent “withering”. There is work to be done to be sure, but there is so much that is glorious and thriving even in places like Albi and Cahors. Instead of falling under the spell of a Le Pen that France is in need of some kind of anti-Europe savoir, there are viable left-wing candidates with a far more vision and expansive ideas of “Frenchness”. France would far more likely to be “devitalized” the more narrow “Frenchness” is defined and the more people are convinced their wonderful country is in an inexorable state of “withering”.

How to Read a Wine Bottle: The Politics of French Wine Labels

By Eric Van Vleet

Most people’s first instinct upon grasping an unopened bottle of French wine is not to read its labels. While wine is above all a sensual experience, there is no reason it cannot be an intellectual if not political one as well. Labels help you learn about the regions and the people who produced it; this information will only help you to enjoy the wine more. French wine labels provide a staggering amount of information in such a small amount of space.

This abundance of information comes in no small part because the French wine industry is thoroughly regulated. The government has tried to protect its winegrowers and winemakers from increasing global competition. Wine labelling then is a political act as well that attempts to promote French wine against outside competition. These regulations and labels are anything but simple. They create a frequently changing vocabulary all their own. Decoding them is not just a matter of translation, but is fairly complicated for even French native speakers to understand. Being fascinated by wine and a general nerd about food and drink, I will try to guide you through the fascinating labyrinth of French wine labelling. After finishing this guide you can choose not only a wine that is delicious, but also one that fits your political beliefs as well.

First, don’t even go right for the main label. The foil capsule

covering the cork is a rich source of data. For all French wine, there will be two numbers. From left to right the first number will indicate in which département (an federal administrative unit much like an American state) the wine was produced. Each département has a number. Lot’s, for example, is 46. Therefore you already have some geographic information.

The next number probably is far less interesting as it is the number the government has given to that winery. Yet the presence or absence of the word recoltant between these numbers is telling. Having the word recoltant (harvester), actually a shortened version of Propriétaire-récoltant (harvester-owner), means that the grapes were harvested, vinified and bottled all on site. Therefore there is not a mixture of grapes from many different places, or a combination of wine from different stages, but instead from a single vineyard that completed all viticultural and vinicultural practices themselves. If you want to experience terroir, the glorious fusion of local soils and climates combined with thousands of years of human wine-making knowledge and practices that produces something that is irreproducible elsewhere, choosing a recoltant wine is a good first step in exploring the unique terroirs of France.

On the neck of the bottle also printed on this foil, is another telling label, that of the vignerons indépendant, which is a label that attempts to maintain independent winegrowers and winemakers in an age when many French wineries are owned by multinational corporations or financial speculators. This organization of independent winemakers also tries to maintain the diversity of different winemakers and their techniques in France. The difference between the recoltant and a vigneron indépendant is then an allegiance to a larger political cause as well as difficult to codify values like the pledge to “respect one’s terroir”, “respect for tradition” as well as commitments to hold tastings and to “take pleasure in presenting the fruit of one’s labor and one’s culture” (a fascinating French word for both the English world culture and also for agricultural techniques). By buying such wines you can help to support these values, while this label does not automatically increase the price of these wines.

Moving to the main label itself on the center of the bottle, you’ll see that often French wine labelling is increasingly moving away from the fancy fonts and pictures of luxurious chateaus. Whether a marketing ploy, an attempt to make their wine look more hip or to be eye-catching in large shops littered with bottles adorned by sketches of chateaus, the label itself can show some of the vineyard’s sensibilities. One of the best vineyards in the Cahors AOC, Clos Troteligotte, has a wine called K-pot with the catchphrase Sans Protection, which means roughly in English “without the use of a condom/protection”, because it is a red wine made with “natural” yeast and without sulfites. They are discarding all the winemaker’s tricks of “protection” of a uniform product which usually relies on sulfites and industrial yeasts. Needless to say, with such a sense of humor they do not put grand chateaus on their bottles.

While American wine labels often tout the grape varietal or varietals used in the wine, the French instead often label wine by different types of protected geographic labels. Champagne is not merely a sparkling wine made with Champagne techniques. Instead it has that title because it comes from the Champagne region of France and adheres to many, many rules that govern the entire process, including a set number of grape varietals that one can grow. Therefore by knowing about the AOC you will know about the grape varietals if they are not actually listed on the bottle. Only if vineyards follow these well-defined rules can they gain the lucrative appellation d'origine contrôlée (designation of controlled origin), the AOC label for their region. By 2005, there were 472 AOC wines in France, which are geographically delimited. While there are many large AOCs that very widely in quality (even the not massive Cahors AOC area has roughly 180 different wineries, each making many different wines), the AOC is often a mark of quality.

It is the highest rank a region can achieve. While not a foolproof way of selecting a wine, the AOC label is a safe bet. If you can combine it with a recoltant and/or vignerons indépendant label, then it’s even better. Many of the labels discussed here are not mutually exclusive.

Below AOC, there is the indication géographique protégée (protected geographical désignation), (IGP) which often is not as strict as an AOC, but can produce wonderfully drinkable wines like the whites and rosés produced within the Côtes du Lot IGP. As the French government modified its classifications to be in accordance with European Union-wide rules, the IGP classification replaced the vin de pays (regional wine) labelling system in France. These IGP wines are definitely worth checking out if one is burdened by too many choices in the wine shop.

Finally, there is merely vin de France (French wine) which does not have to abide by any of the strict AOC or less strict IGP criteria and is merely wine produced in France. The main label cannot indicate any other geographical information, even though clearly it was produced in some specific locale. Therefore this vin de France can be used for wine grown outside any AOC or IGP geographic area or even from wine within these areas but for people who do not want to abide by the grape varietals or practices associated with AOC or IGPs. For these reasons, this is the category that has the widest variation. You can find fascinating wine made by rebels who buck trends and produce a vin de France that is much better than many of the AOC producers, just as you can find boring industrial wine that is cheap for a reason and sold under this label. I would suggest that you should do some research before buying a more expensive wine labelled vin de France as it is so much less defined than an AOC or even an IGP.

A growing trend in French wine is organic production (vin biologique/vin bio). French organic standards also carry the European organic label (AB). Winemaking and winegrowing includes a surprising number of herbicides and pesticides, so organic wine is well worth considering. The Nature and Progress label (Nature et Progrès) is even stricter in some ways than the organic label. This wine contains less sulfites, often uses ‘wild’ yeasts and the picking of the grapes is often done by hand (vendange à la main), which has long been a reason for the community to join together and party after the work was done, but has grown increasingly rare amidst a highly mechanized wine industry. In select cases vineyards will not have the Nature and Progess label but instead have a vendange à la main (harvested by hand) label.

Finally there is even an incipient certification scheme for biodynamic wine (Biodyvin), a system of viticultural that conceptualizes the farm as linked not only to its surroundings but as well as to happenings in the universe. It is a kooky and engrossing concept, and one that we will cover in a later post. This Biodyvin label for these biodynamic wines is uncommon but the popularity of these wines is justifiably growing as they are often incredibly unique and in some cases have the vast complexity of a good gueuze or lambic beer.

Even with all of these labels, and I am surely still missing some, but must stop somewhere... here’s the takeaway...You can see how the different wine labels are trying to achieve different things. The recoltant and vignerons indépendant labels are trying to protect the amazing combined abilities of viniculture and viticulture in one place. The AOC and IGP labels are trying to create and defend a regional character for wines based on a codified practices and grape varietals, while the label Vin de France treats French wine as something of a singularly wonderful assemblage. While these labels are more concerned with political-economy, organic, Nature and Progress and Biodyvin labels to varying degrees are a critique of the negative environmental effects of winegrowing and winemaking. You can mix and match labels. A single wine might carry nearly all these labels at the same time. One does not have to choose geography over political economy over the environment. While finding the perfect match of labelling might take some time, many will be delicious wines that are trying to save the glories of French independent viticultural/viniculture all while limiting their negative ecological impacts. All in all, let French wine labelling guide an enriching drinking experience and not to overly complicate it.

Un dîner presque parfait: A Window into French Dinner Party Culture?

By Eric Van Vleet

We never had a television before in France and so passed our screen time either with Netflix or podcasts. This time around, our rental has basic cable so we have become anthropologists exploring the French TV ‘culture’. While most shows are either unintelligible or unappealing to us, we stumbled upon on one true gem: Un dîner presque parfait (A Nearly Perfect Dinner). Here is the hyperlink to watch it. It’s a free and amusing French lesson!

Un dîner presque parfait is a French reality TV cooking competition that pits five contestants, none of whom who usually know each other, all from the same city who take turns throwing a themed dinner party. Their peers judge them on a scale of 1-10 based on three criteria: 1. Food, 2. Table decoration and 3. Ice-breaker/game (animation). Each meal includes an aperitif (drink and small bites), entrée (the starter/appetizer), plat (main course) and dessert. Contestants judge each other periodically throughout the night in a secret location, so the host does not exactly know their ratings. Only at the end of the five days are the scores revealed often to shock and awe, anger and joy. There is often a lot of emotion for a 1000 Euro prize.

The show gets surprising mileage out of such a simple and repetitive concept. Watching it, a television anthropologist can learn surprising things about France, or at least those willing to be on the show. You soon learn how many people are striving to become D-list French celebrities. The show has featured dating show contestants, other reality TV stars, a former Miss France and actors/comedians who often flail in the kitchen, as they are only marginally famous in France for anything but their cooking skills.

These “celebrity” exceptions aside, you learn that there are generally some really talented home cooks who come on the show who have no interest in becoming reality TV celebrities. Watching them work is a pleasure. Their menus are often shockingly ambitious and it is not rare that they appear to pull them off. You also learn that these wannabe chef contestants have an amazing collection of silicon baking devices in many shapes, immersion blenders, reusable whipped cream dispensers (siphon), agar-agar powder, blow torches, pastry bags with different tipped nozzles, digital scales and many other kitchen toys. Whenever contestants have such equipment, the quality of food is remarkably high. If amateurs are cooking this well, there is no doubt why the overall quality of food in France remains so high.

You also learn that among these contestants there is an oddly causal form of racism/exoiticism that is often somehow innocent, but no less startling. Twice contestants have had “Mexican”-themed dinners that were about as authentic as a similar dinner party as hosted by Trump. They seem to expect their host to be dressed up like Mariachi and speak in a Speedy Gonzalez accent. The food as well is less authentic than Taco Bell, but is a hit as long as it is not too spicy for a French palate that often does not endure any heat.  When throwing a dinner party based on a faraway country, the lesson from the show seems to be go really broad as possible in order to woo your invitees.

Even with France’s economic slump being central issue of the upcoming elections, there are still a surprising number of unemployed contestants on the show. These unemployed people range from 20 to even 50-years-old. Maybe they are hoping that they can twist their TV appearance into a job. The editing of the show does not really allow us to learn much about any one contestant, save for what they say on their day’s show. Still, it is odd that about every other week there is at least one unemployed contestant and nothing is really said about it at all.

After so many episodes Lili and I couldn’t help but to have picked up some tips on how to throw a successful televised and themed French dinner party. First, keep the atmosphere light, fun and preferably flirty. Second, don’t spend your time only worrying about the food. The ice-breaker/activity and decorations are just as important and are too often overlooked. Third, the most successful ice-breakers include some kind of movement and competition or can be an educational activity about food. Each routinely get high scores. Fourth, for the food, do not pin your hopes on people liking fish, there not being vegetarian or that most like meat cooked rare.

Fifth, smoked salmon or avocado and shrimp make great appetizers while and chocolate ganache poured in molds for dessert is always a crowd pleaser. Sixth, do not keep your guests waiting too long between courses and make sure that the food arrives hot. Seventh, the French are obsessed with food not being too heavy. Keep it light, but keep them fed. With these tips you could win on Un dîner presque parfait. They have had a few Americans on the show, though no American has yet won.  If you follow our tips, you may just be the one to do so!