Free Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes Page B

place that leaves no special memory. This one did. I was sitting there in genial anticipation of my final French meal of the trip when something awful happened: they brought me an amuse-gueule.
    Nowadays this wouldn't even provoke a pause in the conversation. Then it made my spirits sink. You think this is what you ought to do? You think people will have a lower opinion of you if you fail to offer a dinky je ne sais quoi in a flaky-pastry whatsit? My doomy response may have been excessive but was not, in retrospect, inaccurate. The French, for all their reputation as anarchic individualists and committed regionalists, have also been ruthless centralizers and dogged followers of fashion. One minute it's the amuse-gueule, next it'll be plates the size of birdbaths, followed by an outbreak of courgette circles topped with hillocks of fake caviare, and before you know where you are the chef at the humble Restaurant de la Gare will be shaking your hand, bugging you for praise, and trying to sell you raspberry vinegar and his book of gastro-wisdom on the way out.
    Naturally, I blamed—and continued to blame— nouvelle cuisine, its oppressive orthodoxy, and the craven implementation of its supposed principles by chefs whose talents lie elsewhere. (I also blame the languid, preening prose of its long-time propagandists at Gault-Millau. Try this for the opening line of a restaurant write-up: “Artists often feel, at a certain moment in their lives, the need once more to hear the world begin to shake.”) Elizabeth David, of course, saw further. There is nothing wrong, or odd—or, for that matter, nouvelle —about nouvelle cuisine. The first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary may date only from 1975, but the phrase and the concept both go back to the mid-eighteenth century. As E.D. pointed out, “Nouvelle cuisine then, as now, meant lighter food, less of it, costing more.” Then as now, new meant healthier and more delicate; then as now, the wiser of the nouvellistes admitted that their innovations only worked because they were based on the sound foundation of traditional methods. Like the nouvelle vague, twentieth-century nouvelle cuisine was a noisy, useful, publicity-driven revolt: one against le cinéma de papa, the other against la cuisine de maman. Both resulted in a temporary forgetting of just exactly what Maman and Papa did; also, and of how ineluctable genetic inheritance is. Just as Truffaut revered Jean Renoir, Bocuse acknowledged that most of his recipes were adaptations of Alfred Guérot, “one of the great chefs, the most comprehensive chefs of the first half of this century.”
    This doesn't mean that damage hasn't been done. Anyone who's eaten through the last few decades in France knows that at the day-to-day level the quality of restaurant cooking has fallen, that pretentious and theoretical food goes largely unpunished, and that generally you will eat better in Italy. Elizabeth David knew better, though, than to blame it all on nouvelle cuisine. For her, the decline had already set in by the mid-Sixties. In 1980 she recorded “the melancholy fact that during these [last] fifteen years I have eaten far worse meals, and more expensively—a bad meal is always expensive—than I would have believed possible in any civilized country.” It was partly culinary fashion, but more importantly a loss of technique in the kitchen and changing social habits. Nowadays there are fewer native French in the dining-rooms, and many more uncomplaining foreigners. Employment law has also affected things: the “35-hours” rule may protect sweated labour in a fast-food outlet, but has harmed the small family restaurant.
    Four years after E.D.'s death, a group of friends and followers put together a best-of volume, barded with tributes and homages. The oddest comment in the whole book came from Sir Terence Conran, who during that 1989 TV programme had proclaimed, “She writes really beautifully.” After her death, he