Does French cuisine merit UN stars?

By Mary Blume

Interantional Herald Tribune

PARIS: French cooking may be awfully good, but it's not awfully
Pinteresting to international critics these days: "I find aris
Prestaurants rather provincial," American Vogue's Jeffrey Steingarten
Phas observed.

It isn't that French chefs can't cut the mustard, but they don't extrude
foams or macerate molecules in the style of Heston Blumenthal of England
or Ferrán Adrià of Spain who vie these days for the title of world's
best chef.

What has happened is that la cuisine française has been reduced to
heirloom status, and the odd thing is that the French themselves have
colluded in the process, led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in
February announced his wish that it be listed for protection under
Unesco's heritage scheme.

The media fuss shows no sign of abating. "Tête de veau and blanquette as
heritages like Mont-Saint-Michel or Machu Picchu?" asked a weekly, Le
Nouvel Observateur, while such leading chefs as Paul Bocuse, Alain
Ducasse, Joël Robuchon and Guy Savoy announced their support.

Part of the furor came from a confusion with Unesco's World Heritage
list, started in 1972, of "properties having outstanding universal
value." The list, now up to 851, includes not only Mont-Saint-Michel
and, for that matter, Venice but also lesser-known sites from Butrint in
Albania to the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe. Not all the French were
thrilled at the thought of having their cuisine co-listed with parts of
the Congo basin or an ancient church in Finland.

In fact, it is not among the familiar heritage sites but within Unesco's
Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage -
which includes oral traditions, performance art, traditional crafts,
social practices and "knowledge and practices concerning nature and the
universe" - that Sarkozy wants French cooking to be enshrined. The
convention dates from 2003, entered into force in 2006 and will get
around to adopting criteria in June, with the first inscriptions to come
in September 2009. Until then, says a Unesco spokesman, the organization
can offer no comments about the merit or likelihood of any inscription.

This gives ample time for the French to argue about safeguarding French
cooking. Is a Unesco listing a way of proclaiming, as Sarkozy did, that
it is the best in the world, or is it a way of mummifying cassoulet, as
Le Figaro asks? It is the world's best, says Jean-Robert Pitte, a
Sorbonne professor who, with the Institut Européen d'Histoire et des
Cultures de l'Alimentation, thought of the scheme, adding graciously on
French TV last Sunday that one can eat better in small bistros in Italy
than in French ones. The compliment was neutralized by his observation
that a pizza can be made in a trice while a blanquette de veau takes the
whole day.

Whether French cuisine is under attack from foreigners with their fast
foods and syringes and dishes like Blumenthal's bacon-and-egg ice cream
or whether it is simply a bit tired, Sarkozy's plan seems to indicate
that gastronomy here has moved into a gelid commemorative stage. French
cooking is good enough to eat and rich enough to analyze as Dr. François
Ladame, the author of "Un psychanalyste chez Guy Savoy," has shown, but
the fact is that the last time the French startled the food world was in
the 1970s with "la nouvelle cuisine," with its oversized plates,
undersized portions and undercooked chicken and fish.

La nouvelle cuisine is happily forgotten, but much of French food is
connected with commemoration's more elastic cousin, memory. The terroir,
the land, is a word dear to everyone here.

"The deep connection the French have is with their region of origin,"
says the Paris writer Chantal Thomas, who grew up in Arcachon, which
left her with an indelible passion for oysters. "People identify
themselves much more by their memories of the first taste of the region
than by their family."

Thomas, an 18th-century specialist at the Centre National de Recherche
Scientifique, has just come out with two books, "Cafés de mémoire" and
"L'ÎIe flottante" (as in the dessert called floating island).

The second book, really a leaflet, has been adapted by Thomas and the
eclectic Argentinian director Alfredo Arias into a play of the same
name, and has been playing in the Thétre National de Chaillot's pocket
Studio (until April 13). It is about two small girls in Arcachon who
decide to separate themselves from the ordinary world and adult life by
eating only white foods. One actress plays both girls, Arias plays a
lampshade (don't ask), and instead of an usher the spectators are seated
by an actor in a chef's costume.

At the play's end, the audience is invited to sit at two long trestle
tables that flank the stage and to eat a bowl of cream of corn soup with
caramelized popcorn from the recipe of the three-star chef Alain
Passard.

Thomas and Arias had a lot of tasting sessions, and the soup is indeed
very nice, "While they are eating it audiences talk with each other
about other meals," Thomas says. In France, she adds, meals are fragile
ephemeral events to be kept in memory.

While Thomas approves of Sarkozy's Unesco initiative, she hopes it is
not commemorating something going or gone. "There is a risk because
French cooking is so rich and dense and diverse," she says. "The Unesco
idea may keep it going. If it's an effort to perpetuate the moment of
pleasure it is a good thing."

The line between memory and memorialization is never easy to draw,
especially in France. In no other country, Thomas agrees, could the
simple little cake called a madeleine have the resonance it acquired
with Proust. As A.J. Liebling, the American journalist and famously
hearty eater, remarked some years ago, the madeleine is now as firmly
established in folklore as Newton's apple. He went on to wonder how
anyone could be inspired by so small a cake:

"In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the
world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite," he wrote. "On a
dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of
steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed softshelled crabs, a few ears
of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of
lobsters and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece."