French Twist (15 page)

The entire evening was filled with these moments of bewilderment. Lucie’s children were so well behaved, but it was their decorum at the table that really shocked and pleased me. As I did almost every night, guests or not, I had prepared two meals—one for the adults and another made with simpler ingredients and a prayer that it would be tolerable to young palates. On this particular night, the kids’ meal was mac-n-cheese, sliced mango, and green beans. A sure hit, I thought. The French children, as it turned out, were much more interested in the adult dinner of eggplant tagine with lemon and olives, served over couscous. In between bites, the six-year-old even asked questions about how to prepare it: “Do you grill the
aubergine
first?” Her knowledge and interest in food was incredible. According to my master plan, the children required only forks with their meal. Upon being seated, however, Lucie’s
kids both politely requested knives as well. I quietly replaced their crappy plastic forks—decorated, naturally, with hearts and dinosaurs—with the more mature cutlery the adults were using. Clearly these kids didn’t need to be babied when it came to food. Watching the two French children eating so well at my table (don’t even get me started on their table manners!) felt bittersweet. I was, quite sincerely, envious of what Lucie had achieved with their culinary attitudes. The painful thought that I’d been selling my own children short turned into a surge of inspiration. It could be done! I vowed to teach my babies how to love food!

Before love, it seems, comes respect.

And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. The French have been cultivating their strong reverence for food for centuries. The French respect and fierce defense of their daily bread (and brie and reduction sauces) is evident in all corners of the culture. For instance, on a recent episode of
Les Escapades de Petitrenaud
—a popular French cooking show—the host, upon skillfully completing a ham dish, proclaimed, “Children, when you eat this
jambon de Paris
, Louis the Fourteenth has his hand on your shoulder.” How I wish someone, anyone, royalty or otherwise, was guiding me through meals—not to mention operating as a lofty historic chaperone for my kids.

Let’s have a look at the approach to lunch in public schools in France, which any French parent can do, as the weekly bill of fare is posted each Monday. Every day at
l’école
, the children are offered five courses: hors d’oeuvre,
salad, main course, cheese plate, and dessert. And there are no repeats for more than a month.
Time
magazine Paris correspondent Vivienne Walt points out that French schools take it even further, by offering dinner suggestions to complement these varied—and very delicious-sounding—lunch menus. Walt, whose own child attends school in France, breaks it down thusly: “The French don’t need their First Lady to plant a vegetable garden at the Élysée Palace to encourage good eating habits. They already know the rules: Sit down and take your time, because food is serious business.”

I admit that I’m perhaps unnaturally passionate about French school lunches, but I do think they get to the heart (of palm) of the matter. Not long ago, the French government went as far as outlawing school
and college
cafeterias from serving ketchup (except, ironically, with French fries), in an effort to encourage healthy eating. The underlying message here is that in France, they really care about their food, a value taught at a very early age. In addition to menu items like “mâche with smoked duck and fava beans,” or greens with “smoked salmon and asparagus, followed by guinea fowl with roasted potatoes and carrots and steamed broccoli,” students at a school in France’s Loire Valley are given “a choice of ripe, red-throughout strawberries or clafoutis. A pungent washed-rind cheese … along with French bread and water” for dessert.
^*

Am I the only one suddenly feeling a little peckish?

I laughed (in that troubled sort of way when something hits distressingly close to home) when a friend in France recounted to me the first day of kindergarten in Paris for her American colleague’s six-year-old. On her way out of the school building after drop-off, the child’s mother was handed a brochure that listed the lunch items being served for the week. She started reading it on the metro, and by the time she reached her stop she was in a panic, imagining the reaction of her son, who knew only quesadillas, chicken fingers, and, of course, peanut butter and jelly as lunch foods. She figured he’d be okay with the bread and strawberries that were on the list, but what would he do when they tried to serve him parsnip puree and ratatouille? He would be traumatized! Like any “good” mom, she rushed home, fixed a sandwich with her emergency stash of peanut butter, and raced back to his school with it, presuming she had saved the day for the little boy—only to get an earful from the school administrators, who were disgusted by her pampering and certain that he would eat what was served when he grew hungry enough. Eventually détente was reached: The American boy would eat his sandwich with a fork and knife.

The French insist upon decent eating conditions in schools. Often, when I question Oona about the untouched items in her lunch box at the end of the day, she complains that she ran out of time. In French schools, the students luxuriate over meals and are allotted about twice as long for lunch as they are here in the States. The French also
spend about three times more tax dollars on school lunches. Money well spent, if you ask me. Moreover, I used to feel relief at the thought that if I ever absentmindedly forgot to put utensils in my kids’ lunch boxes, there were sporks aplenty offered in the school cafeteria. That relief feels more like a grudge since I learned that food is often served on heated plates in French schools, with real (metal) silverware and (glass) glasses.

Clearly, food in France is to be revered, and lunchtime seems as if it is a component of the educational studies. And why not study and develop the palate? Learning about food, the structure of meals, manners, and customs is as important as practically every other subject in school. We eat every day—children should certainly learn to do it right! If my kids had been raised with that kind of attitude, I doubt they’d want to moon me at the table. (Yes, they have done this. Not proud, mind you. Not proud.)

This might be painful, but it’s important, so here goes. Witness a chart comparing a week of lunches at an American school in Pittsford, New York, with the menus in a school outside Paris:

The French menu is practically worth a Michelin star. Or two.

Now that I have a better idea why, it makes sense that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) deemed “the gastronomic meal of the French” a “World Heritage Treasure” in 2010. That puts the French meal in the same category as national wonders such as Stonehenge, the Kremlin in Moscow, and the Great Wall of China. We are talking about people who are really proud of their food.

If food and dining are like a class in school, French parents can be thought of as homework tutors. I have learned that dinner is perhaps the most important part of a French family’s routine, with considerable time spent together deciding what to cook, preparing the food, setting the table, and then, of course, eating. Lucie tells me that on a daily basis her children, like most French kids, handle raw eggs and separate whites from yolks, use sharp knives, and throw chopped onions into hot oil. They wear little aprons. They sit on the countertop, next to boiling water. They put food in the oven. They learn how to dip green beans in cold water after cooking so the beans will not turn gray (I didn’t even know that last trick). And they sit down at the dinner table, every day, to have a three-course meal.

The kitchen confidence and genuine absorption in culinary processes that Lucie’s kids displayed at my house was no fluke. French kids don’t need special utensils, ravioli shaped like hearts and stars, or endless pleading to eat well—it’s just what they’ve been raised to do. Lucie assures
me that her kids eat the same way she did as a child: “The only addition to the routine that my mother back in France would not approve of is tofu. But, then again, why would a petite, chain-smoking woman who believes allergies are a myth, who will tell you that a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman who is missing an eye, and for whom vegetarians are no less than heretics, admit such ugly, tasteless little squares to the sacrosanct family meal?”

Point taken. Lucie, however, uses tofu to her advantage, incorporating it as a key ingredient in the “color meals” that her children love to contemplate (and eat!). Along with tofu, a “white” meal might include endives, rice, and brie—with an apple for dessert and milk to drink. And for the parents’ beverage, a nice chilled fumé blanc will do the trick. Turns out that kids love menu planning. For the “pink” meal, fresh grapefruit juice is the first thing to come up. “Salmon!” screams the four-year-old, who would otherwise not eat much fish. Pink pasta (a mixture of tomato sauce and goat cheese provides the perfect hue) and beet salad are added to the list, and finally they agree on Lucie’s daughter’s suggestion of frozen strawberries for dessert. Clearly, this approach to mealtime is more than just a means of giving the body energy. For these “pink” dinners, Lucie further elicits delight from her kids with “the ice cubes in which they find a rosebud.” Okay, that might be a bit much for me, but I could certainly stand to jazz things up and take a lesson from Lucie, who has managed to cultivate a loving relationship between her children and their food.

Until we Frenched things up, dinner at my house bore close to zero resemblance to the meals prepared and served in my friend’s home—something I aimed to fix. I’m not sure how I ended up with such an altered system, because, when I was growing up, my parents insisted that my twelve siblings and I report to the kitchen at 5:00
P.M.
sharp for dinner assignments, eat
every
night as a family, wait to be excused, and stick around to clean up after the meal.

But times have changed.

Heretofore, when my children ate dinner, no one needed to set the table, because if they were not feeding in the living room (in front of the TV—we had made a bargain that they could watch a show
if
they ate their vegetables), they were at the kitchen table. All meals were served on their favorite plates—the plastic kind, with four sections and cute cartoon characters. I would fill each little alcove with a different comestible and, voilà, dinner was served. If ketchup was in order, it usually went in its own quarter of the plate. Unlike the Reagan Administration, however, I tried not to classify it as a vegetable. Occasionally, Oona would grab a couple of forks, but that was hardly setting the table.

My main concern was making sure the girls ate something healthy, and, thanks to the divided plates, they got fruit (generally frozen mangoes), protein (either some plain chicken, cheese, or lunch meat), vegetables (spinach or green beans mostly, although asparagus is a recent, unlikely hit), and then the wild card (crackers, dried cranberries,
half a piece of toast with hummus—you get the idea). This was a typical night in our house.

Sometimes they’d eat tofu, doused with enough soy sauce, but more often they’d complain that it was “too creamy.” The funny thing was that most of my friends with kids were covetous of our dinnertime success. “They eat so well!” I heard that all the time. “I can’t believe they will eat spinach. Miles thinks that anything green has been dipped in poison.”

As for table manners, we had a long way to go. Here’s a peek at a previous dinner at our house. By some strange twist of after-school lunacy, I ended up with a spontaneous crowd: three mothers and six daughters. Armed with a family-sized bag of prepackaged tortellini and a heap of frozen green beans, I proudly, if perhaps too quickly, threw together a meal for everyone. After a lot of cajoling and corralling, we finally had every kid in the proximity of the table. However, I cannot say with any confidence that they were ever simultaneously seated. At one point I looked around—here’s the tally:

• Two girls were sitting at the table, quietly shoveling food into their mouths;
  
• Oona was under the table, instructing me to hand her green beans without looking in her eyes;
  
• My neighbor was seated with her four-year-old on her lap, pleading and trying desperately to slip bites into her daughter’s mouth;
  
• One child was in a stroller, munching away;
  
• Daphne was sitting on the windowsill with her plate on her lap.
  

I tried to console myself with the idea that it was the excitement of eating together that caused the children to riot at dinnertime, but deep down I knew the truth. By and large, in an effort to protect our children’s sense of self and to honor their emotions, my generation of American parents has abdicated the throne. The anarchy in my dining room on tortellini-dinner-party night, or practically any night, was the result of a new style of parenting, one in which the children are so used to having a say on everything that they cannot take direction on anything. Please now join me for a moment of silence to honor the French insistence on boundaries: They have made all the difference in my life.