I'll Drink to That (16 page)

The Lyonnais naturally agree, and most of the French along with them, even if judgments of this sort tend to make Parisians cross. But once the inexhaustible quarrels about the relative merits of the greatest temples of
haute gastronomie
have been put aside, even the most chauvinistic of Parisians will concede that nothing in the capital can rival Lyon’s proudest institution, the one that virtually defines the city: the low-down, low-price
bouchon,
the Lyonnais version of the bistro. Working-class gathering and drinking places par excellence, these little family affairs evolved over the centuries from rough-hewn bars to a special category of humble, one-room “restaurant.” I use the slightly demeaning quotation marks because most of these places were so simple that there was rarely space for more than two or three tables, and the cooking equipment usually consisted of nothing better than a sink and a little coal stove, which in more modern days became gas or electric. It was in these improvised cubbyhole kitchens that proprietors’ wives turned out ragouts, stews, soups and runny omelets of sorrel, cheese and tripe, while their husbands sliced bread and sausages at the bar and poured
pots
of Beaujolais. Served up to order, often consumed standing at the bar, inexpensive and delicious, these meals were little masterpieces of simple, honest gastronomy—fast food à la Française—and precursors to the culture of
les mères Lyonnaises,
the celebrated “Lyon mothers.”

That was another category, a notch or two up from the
bouchon
and every bit as admirable. A succession of these rather more imposing restaurants, run by intractably perfectionist, frequently ill-tempered but endearing female chefs, became gloriously famous both in France and abroad, and they are remembered in Lyon today with a kind of sepia, Proustian nostalgia for a more comforting time before globalization spoiled all the fun by making life efficient.

The
mères Lyonnaises
were truly grandes dames, and memories of La Mère Guy, La Mère Fillioux or eccentrics like La Mélie or Léa are enough to bring a tear to a Lyonnais eye. Léa, whom I had the honor and advantage of meeting toward the end of her career, and whose kitchen floor I happily trod, engulfed in a savory microclimate of slow-cooking aromas, was one of the memorable local characters of downtown Lyon, a wild eccentric who doubtless struck some casual strollers as half-mad. Bright and early every morning, she left her restaurant, La Voûte, on a dark little side street behind Place Bellecour, and made her way, shouting and gesticulating at drivers who presumed to get in her way, through the traffic to the farmers’ market on the Quai St. Antoine along the eastern bank of the Saône. Further accentuating the spectacle was the outlandish wheeled contraption that she pushed, not unlike a Sabrett’s hot dog cart or a Good Humor ice cream bin, to which she had attached an oversized rubber-bulbed bicycle horn which ever and anon she honked as she thrust her way forward. There was plenty of room insideher pushcart for her day’s provisions, and a bright sign on the front warned:
FAIBLE FEMME, FORTE EN GUEULE
(Frail Woman, Loud Mouth). Léa picked through the day’s fresh offerings with fiendish determination, and she got exactly what she wanted. Whether it was tripe, foie gras or just a perfect lettuce, the results showed spectacularly in her little one-room restaurant. Léa was mad like a fox.

La Mère Fillioux, who ran her little restaurant in the Brotteaux section of town from 1890 until her death in 1925, was as renowned for her cooking as for her steely determination to do nothing but her own recipes, turning aside all culinary fads and fashions with the scorn they deserved. “I have spent my life making four or five dishes,” she famously declared, “so I know how to do them. And I won’t do anything else.”

What were these marvels? The list was so short that to most long-menu restaurateurs it would have appeared laughable: a rich, smooth truffle soup; pike quenelles in crayfish butter, browned in the oven; artichoke hearts with foie gras; chicken
demi-deuil
(“half in mourning” in reference to the black truffle slices under the skin, slow-cooked for an hour in bouillon); and, on special order, lobster
à l’américaine.
But her specialties were turned out with such generosity and devotion to perfection that in her time they made her famous to gourmets the world over. (It is an interesting game to speculate whether Michelin, the great arbiter of restaurant quality, would have had the courage to award three stars to a place with such a limited card, but we’ll never know the answer—the famous system of one, two and three stars did not enter the red book until 1933.) Her signature dish was the chicken, of course, and someone once figured out that she must have sliced up half a million of them during her thirty-five-year career, always using the same little knife. Worn to a fraction of its original size by successive sharpenings, the faithful instrument is now on display in the Escoffier Museum of Culinary Arts in Villeneuve-Loubet, near Nice.

There’s a nice little anecdote about that knife. One evening in the early twenties, it seems, a world-famous surgeon—some say American, but the stories vary on this detail—perhaps fired to excess of confidence by the flow of Beaujolais that had passed his gullet, asked for the unusual privilege of being allowed to carve his own chicken after it had been lifted dripping from the pot and freed of its cheesecloth wrapping. La Mère Fillioux reluctantly handed over her precious tool, and the surgeon squared his shoulders and set to work. No more than a few seconds had passed before a cry of anguish passed her lips: “Stop, unhappy man, you are murdering it!”

The highest achiever of this wonderful sisterhood was Eugénie, La Mère Brazier, who was among the twenty-one to be awarded three stars when Michelin’s first rating system appeared in 1933. She was a peasant girl who had begun life tending pigs, but she rose to become Lyon’s most renowned chef until Paul Bocuse came along with his own brand of perfectionism and promotional genius. But Bocuse would not be what he is today if he had not served as a foot soldier under Eugénie Brazier’s command—she was one of the several chefs under whom
le grand Paul
apprenticed in the early days of his ascendancy toward the imperial status he now enjoys. La Mère Brazier taught her apprentices the old-fashioned way, setting them a work schedule that broke the will of many of those who made the climb up to her place on a hill (col de la Luère) above Lyon. Rising at 5 A.M. and rarely to bed before 11 P.M., young Bocuse chopped wood, hoed the vegetable garden, milked Eugénie’s cow, did her laundry and starched and ironed her tablecloths before he even got a chance to do any cooking. With that experience under his belt, followed by stints with the great Fernand Point at La Pyramide in Vienne, and Lucas-Carton in Paris, he was ready for any challenge the world of cuisine could possibly put in his path. It is no accident, then, that Bocuse holds the world’s record for the longest incumbency (forty-two years and counting) in Michelin’s top three-star rating.

In the early seventies, Bocuse introduced me to another archetypal Lyonnais institution: the
mâchon.
I suppose I should have known it would involve an encounter with Beaujolais, and rather more matutinally than I normally would have preferred. The
mâchon
(from
mâcher
, to chew) is an extra meal that the Lyonnais invented, a solid little bit of feeding too serious to be qualified as a mere snack and yet not quite a meal: an emergency measure to fill that perilously empty gap between the
café-croissant
and lunch. I had been honored to join Paul on a revictualing trip to Les Halles, Lyon’s central market in the Part Dieu section of town, riding on the floor in the back of his famous blue Renault delivery van, the one with the Gallic rooster and the “PB 1926” logo painted on the side to indicate the owner’s identity and birth date. (As if there could be anyone in Lyon who didn’t already know all about both—the man is far more famous than whoever happens to be the current mayor.)

I was riding on the floor because my wife was up front in the passenger seat next to Paul, enjoying the view of the city and appraising his skill at the traditional French sport of slaloming through traffic. After less than an hour’s shopping, Paul had filled the van with such a profusion of vegetables, fruits, meat, seafood and dairy products of all description that I felt like a participant in some surrealistic reconstitution of an Arcimbol- do painting—foodman!—complete with potato nose, beef filet cheeks, bunches of grapes for hair and cherry eyes, careening through town in a turbo-charged vehicle with a stuntman chef at the wheel. There was a bump when Paul pulled over and parked the van halfway across the tiny sidewalk of the rue du Garet near the Rhône embankment and led us into a little room behind a streetside façade of dark wood.

Chez Georges, the place was called, and before I quite knew what was happening I found myself faced with a plate of sliced
rosette
sausage, a
cervelas
salad, a bowl of
rillettes d’oie
(goose pâté thick with luscious fat) and a
pot
of Beaujolais-Villages. It was about nine in the morning, more like my usual orange juice and toast time, but who was I to dispute ethnic culture and custom? I plunged in dutifully, and it wasn’t really all that much of a sacrifice, because the food was delicious and the Beaujolais superb—but I couldn’t help noticing that Paul only symbolically raised his glass to his lips before placing it back down on the bar. He watched me closely, though, and so did Georges. Over the following years I was to become a good deal more familiar, both in Lyon and in the Beaujolais country, with this routine of being tested with an avalanche of food, mirth and drink that stopped only when you cried uncle. (The point being to see how far you will go before you
do
cry uncle. The game can be hazardous.)

There was a spring in my step, or was it an incipient totter, when I marched back to Bocuse’s food wagon that morning, but I was grateful for his unscheduled stop there, because it was my introduction to the culture of the
bouchon,
my first serious glimpse of a shard of urban folk history that was already centuries old. It was in 1913, in just such a
bouchon
as Chez Georges, that the
Société des Amis de Guignol
was founded, which in a moment of luminous inspiration nineteen years later organized a quirky little competition that proved to be of serious importance for the future of the wines of the Beaujolais—the
Concours du Meilleur Pot.

The Society of the Friends of Guignol was an informal grouping of writers, journalists and men-about-Lyon who were devoted to honoring and preserving the
canut
traditions that had made Lyon different from all other great French cities: the puppet shows, art, folklore, literature and craftsmanship—and, of course, the food and drink. On this last subject their devotion was total, and their 1913 inaugural dinner, wetted down with a small river of Beaujolais, was the city-dweller’s equivalent of the wedding feasts dear to Papa Bréchard’s memory: beginning with poor man’s food, it moved on to the more elaborate creations worthy of special occasions. Naturally
paquets de couenne
and
gratons
had to come first, and this time they were accompanied by the rather less commonplace
os de China
, or grilled pig’s tail. Appetites sharpened, the table companions moved on to destroy a stuffed breast of veal, scalloped potatoes
à la Lyonnaise
(with onions), turkey with chestnuts, a salad of mule’s muzzle, herring and dandelions, and finally the cheese platter, inevitably starring
cervelle de canut.
Dessert could only be sugared
bugnes
, feather-light, deep-fried wisps of sugared pastry that make the American donut seem like an anvil in comparison.

The journalist Henri Béraud, who died in 1958, was a faithful friend of both Guignol and the wines of the gamay grape, and he left behind a poignant little vignette evoking that curious mixture of merriment and melancholy—lachrymose joy—that is the mark of the true philosophical drunk. “We were Lyonnais
gones,
drinking Beaujolais according to the venerable custom in a little café, where the emptied
pots
lined up on the table formed a handsome grillwork, through whose greenish bars we drinkers exchanged handshakes, vows of friendship and words of deep wisdom.”

Barhopping was not the only activity of the Friends of Guignol, but this time-honored, largely masculine act of purposeful circumambulation unquestionably formed a serious part (personally, I suspect it was the backbone) of the society’s raison d’être. By the mere act of paying solemn visit to
bouchon
after
bouchon
to sample
pot
after
pot
, these gents would have noticed, compared and commented upon the differences in style and quality of the Beaujolais they had drunk in each. It was this wide range of differences, the fruit of each proprietor’s scouting trips into Beaujolais country to buy his yearly supply of barrels, that gave birth to the first
Concours du Meilleur Pot
, in 1932.

The point of the competition was to discover the best over-the-counter Beaujolais in town, and if at the outset it gave the self-appointed jurors a magnificent excuse to indulge in some exceptionally assiduous barhopping, it grew, sui generis, without need for any promotion or money injection whatsoever, into an event of far greater importance than any of them had expected, because it was a natural winner for the press. Gimmicky feature stories like these leap directly into print, because journalists love them: they are fast, easy to write and probably entail free drinks. Enthusiastically covered by all the local papers, the competition soon assumed formal rules and procedures, and Lyonnais bars and
bouchons
fell all over themselves to offer free samples, electrified at the prospect of the stampede of new customers that a winning entry would ensure. With that, the easygoing barhop that lay behind the idea in the first place succumbed to the chore of a formal
dégustation,
a comparative tasting session of dozens of sample bottles, complete with grading sheets and spitting buckets.