Simple and Delicious: Lessons from Paris
When I was fourteen and on the verge of entering 9th grade, my family moved to Provence in southern France. This. Was. The. Worst. Thing. That. Had. Ever. Happened. To. Me.
We landed in Paris with many suitcases, each weighing the maximum amount allowed—all our belongings for a year’s worth of living. For the first week in France, we were to stay with family friends who had children about the same age of my younger brother and me. I had no idea how this would work and was very worried. I couldn’t fully converse in French, and our hosts' English skills varied depending on the generation. The parents had rusty 25-year-old English they barely used anymore, and the children all had about as much English as we did French. So the two families limped along in a funny Frenglish that somehow worked. During this week of initiation into French life, I quickly decided living in France would not, in fact, be the worst thing that had ever happened to me, in no small part due to the charm of Hélène (and being served wine with every meal while at their home).
Hélène, our host family's matriarch, was sharply dressed, thin, elegant, and the hilarious mirror of my father’s "nutty professor" vibes. She and my father met in the late 1960s when she was a guest professor for a year at an American university where he taught. They became fast friends and stayed in touch after she returned to France. As an art historian, Hélène was now giving tours at the Louvre, but over the years, she had also been a homemaker and was an excellent cook.
One evening, as I helped prepare dinner, she showed me how to make homemade mayonnaise in her most professory way. You can do that? I thought to myself, without revealing my astonishment that mayonnaise contained raw eggs. Next, she taught me how to make a vinaigrette for our salade verte, the perfectly simple French standard of green salad made with beautiful, ruffly and crisp butter lettuce and a light vinaigrette. Back at home in Canada, where I was growing up, this was the era of bacon bits, bagged croutons, and Ranch dressing and Hélène's straightforward salad seemed a bit plain. Nonetheless, I paid close attention as she whisked up a small bowl of vinaigrette, enchanted by her accent, delicate hands, and impossibly stereotypical French intensity.
I don't remember her recipe, but I do remember the words that came next, which made her somewhat famous at our house forever after. After pouring the vinaigrette over the lettuce she said in Frenglish, “Now you must fatigué la salade.” I looked at her quizzically. I knew the French word fatigué meant "tired." In my head I quickly translated the rest of what she had said, "Now you must make the salad tired." What does this mean? Noticing the strange look on my face, Hélène showed me with two large spoons how she tossed the vinaigrette with the lettuce before serving it, making the salad "tired" by mixing it a lot. Got it: fatigué la salade means toss the salad. Such flair, such drama to describe the most simple of tasks. I am going to like this place.
When I visited Hélène's daughter 20 years later in Paris and mentioned this story, she laughed heartily and told me fatigué la salade is not a typical French saying. She thought it must have been her mother's way of communicating in her half-French, half-English that I needed to toss the vinaigrette and the lettuce leaves well before serving it. We chuckled. The saying had endearingly stuck for three decades at my house!
Even though I was only a teen when I lived abroad, it had a profound impact on me. Much of that had to do with eating well, which often means making simple foods at home with quality ingredients. The first time I took my husband to France, he marveled at how the food tasted like it was supposed to. He kept saying things like, "I mean, this grape tastes like a grape—it's just so grapey. It's like the flavor of grape jelly!” The fact is, the French were eating a "whole food" diet before that was a term or concept in the US. Cooking meals from scratch in the average American kitchen has been disappearing for decades. When Michael Pollan's book Cooked was released in 2014, research showed that Americans spend less time preparing food than any other culture on earth with the average American household spending 27 minutes a day preparing food, compared to 60 minutes a day in 1965.
There are many reasons that home-cooked food is declining, and Pollan shared his views on the subject in Cooked and a follow-up Netlfix documentary series of the same name in 2016. Hint: the degradation in the quality of food we eat has more to do with generating profits for big agriculture and brand name conglomerates producing salty, sweet, convenient foods than a conscious choice Americans are making to eat poorly. Shifts in cultural and gender roles also play a part, but as is often the case in our capitalist-based economy, money and greed are at the heart of the issue. Lastly, Americans are under the thumb of convenience. Processed foods, first introduced when the demands of feeding US troops during World War II collided with new technological advances, resulted in powered, packable, preservable foods that never left the American dietary landscape. Viewing commercials from the 1950s sent shivers down my spine as I watched Cooked—aluminum foil wrapped TV dinners advertised to women offering “Freedom from the kitchen!” and “Drudgery no more!” I have read extensively about this time of transition in American culture, and the technological advances seemed just as sexy then as they do now, and convenience just as seductive. I often find myself asking, Do the gains of convenience truly outweigh the losses we incur? Advertisers and corporations try to lull us into believing that convenience always offers a net gain—I and many others beg to differ.
None of this surprises me as a longtime follower of the Slow Food movement, which started in Italy in the 1980s. A few worried citizens began protesting against the introduction of fast food chains seeing their presence as a threat to their country's precious food traditions. Slow Food supporters value the communion, tradition, connection, and joy humans find when gathered around food—and that connection is not usually found in the waxed paper and styrofoam cups of brightly lit fast food joints. The loss of slow food preparation is often one of the first ways in which cultures lose connection with traditions and rituals that make them unique.
I would love to see households across America (and the world—we are not the only country where home-cooked meals are a thing of the past) engage in cooking and eating together at home more often. Planning, shopping, and cooking weekly meals can feel overwhelming. I get it! And I get it because I live it. I work and just so happen to be the primary cook in my household. Yet in a world of convenience foods and the tempting freezer section of Trader Joe's, I am a champion of home cooking and here offer my plug for homemade vinaigrette, one small way to slow down and bring fresh, wholesome food into your diet.
Have you ever noticed how so many of us have graveyards of dressing bottles in our fridge door? They seemingly never go bad, because most have preservatives and long lists of unpronounceable ingredients. Homemade vinaigrette includes no preservatives, offers the health benefits of fresh olive oil, and most importantly, tastes better. It’s also more earth friendly, since there are no bottles to throw away. Requiring only a handful of ingredients and a few minutes (literally!) to whip up, homemade vinaigrette is a Slow Weekender staple at our house. If you have a Mason jar with a lid or a pretty glass dispenser you can leave the vinaigrette on the counter or in the fridge where it will keep nicely. If you don't feel you have a lot of time to make homemade food but would like to, this is one small, simple way to get started. Below are two favorite recipes from our family kitchen.
Enjoy and don’t forget to fatigué la salade!
Classic French Vinaigrette
2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon grainy mustard
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
Salt and pepper to taste
Recipe from My French Kitchen: A Book of 120 Treasured Recipes by Joanne Harris and Fran Ward, 2003. (Yes, that Joanne Harris, who is also the author of the beloved novel Chocolat!)
Everyday Balsamic Vinaigrette
1/4 cup balsamic vinaigrette
3/4 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1 garlic clove, minced
A little pinch of salt and pepper
Recipe from Emeril Lagasse.
Enjoy the slow- Heather