France profonde

I can tell they're expecting the worst, invited for a meal chez l'anglais ("should we bring our own food, just to be safe?"). By the meal's end, however, their faces show surprise, and real pleasure. "But where did you learn...?" I serve nothing fancy, just a few staples of French cooking: goug?, sweetbreads, slow-cooking daubes, and all out of a book-by an Englishwoman! Elizabeth David kept alive in England a tradition of French cooking which the French themselves have now lost. Steak and chips is voted the nation's favourite dish, followed by couscous. Pizza is not far behind and for a f? the most common choice is paella.
By French cooking, I don't mean haute cuisine-still an upmarket tourist attraction in three-star restaurants. Haute cuisine is as far from the cooking which made France's reputation as haute couture is from your favourite clothes. I realised how far when Bernard Loiseau, a star chef, committed suicide. Within hours, the nation still paralysed by shock, his widow was jauntily reassuring us on the television news not to worry; she would take over where Bernard had left off. Not in the kitchen, but much more important-in the boardroom. Her message to shareholders was don't sell, profits won't be affected.
No, French cooking is what you should find every day, tootling through France. But how many times have you stopped at a charming country restaurant, seduced by the sun-dappled terrace and white tablecloths, to be confronted by a menu which owes more to the freezer than the season? Without wine to numb the critical faculties, what would be left of the reputation of French food? Indian and Thai cuisine don't depend on a drink to anaesthetise common sense by the time the bill comes.
"Traditional French cooking is labour-intensive, and with our employment laws, it's out of the question for the average restaurateur," says Catherine Baldy, who runs an excellent local restaurant. "So most have to buy in, ready made." Food comes pre-cooked and vacuum-packed, stamped with the face of a great chef: Loiseau, perhaps, feeding his shareholders from beyond the grave. It is said the unfortunate chef blew out his brains because the prestigious Gault Millau guide had knocked two points off his rating. Mme Baldy's reaction to being honoured with a place in the Gault Millau, with a score of 13/20, was fury. "Now we get customers who plonk the guide on the table and say 'Prove you're up to it!'" She is the fifth generation of Baldys in the same kitchen. She works with her mother, her husband and their daughter, preferring to have fewer tables and no hired staff.
What matters chez Baldy is quality and tradition. It took a year of negotiations with their supplier to get the right livers for their foie gras. Chicken is impossible because the quality varies. There's no ?la carte. But if you order beforehand, you can have what you want. As long as it's traditional.
A few years ago, tourism professionals filed through the Baldy kitchen, giving advice. The key: "Please the children." Dumbing down French cooking to infant level meant chips, ketchup, steak burgers. "It's not the way we want to cook. You are creating the child's taste. It is important that it's done properly. We serve saut?otatoes and, if the children don't like them, we've put toys out in the garden. As for Coke... all children get taught about Jos?ov?Well, this is Bov?ountry."
Conviction in simplicity: you can't beat it. Alain Ducasse, France's top chef-if you go by his nine Michelin stars-employs a choreographer to train his 270 waiters how to move gracefully. After all, the right hand gesture is important if you're presenting a bill that is more than my carpenter M Roque charges for three weeks' work. When I settle Roque's bill, his mother comes round with pots of homemade p?, jarret, foie gras.
Mme Roque m? is a character straight out of Elizabeth David. Even her son, the indomitable carpenter and excellent cook whose boar's head p??ives on in hallowed memory, keeps respectful silence when his mother speaks food. "They say French women of 35 can't cook any more; well it's true, you can't cook without time." Like most of my neighbours, Mme Roque keeps at least four kinds of poultry, as well as pigeons, rabbits and three or four ewes to provide lambs. Everyone in the village has their own vegetable garden by the river. The waste matter from one feeds the next. The men shoot hare, deer, boar and pheasants, as well as blackbirds and thrushes. None of my neighbours keeps a pig any more, but they buy a chestnut-fed carcass from the farmer and make their own p?s and charcuterie from what they find inside.
But why do adults who have been brought up on soups, slow-cooked daube and apple tart feed their young chocolate chip pizza? "Children cost so much nowadays; supermarkets are cheaper," says the Baldys' butcher. "My shop's empty on the last week of the month." Roque agrees: "If they had to eat French, half the population would starve." That's where the whole anti-globalisation argument comes apart. Jos?ov?oesn't have children.