France is facing national culinary humiliation at the hands of the US
I spent my 13th birthday in France with the family of my French pen-friend, who celebrated the occasion with three birthday cakes from the local pâtisserie’s elegant display of religieuses, mille-feuilles, and financiers.
Fast-forward to last week, when a queue of some 400 people formed in Westfield Forum des Halles, where the first French branch of the North Carolina-based doughnut chain, Krispy Kreme, was about to open. The marketing build-up had been intense, with thousands of free doughnuts distributed in the capital, and fly-posters that contrived to tease both traditional French pâtisserie and the French president, with the slogan “macaron demission” (“macaroon, resign!”).
Emmanuel Grégoire, the deputy major of Paris, huffed that the posters were “illegal … and polluting”, but his complaint served only to highlight the peculiar disconnect in the national psyche when it comes to the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Gallic culture.
While the Académie Française wages its futile war against the creeping taint of anglicisms, and the French chattering classes get into a tizzy over the feather-light comedy of Franco-American mésentente, Emily in Paris, or Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, that most cherished of French cultural treasures, its cuisine, has yielded with indecent enthusiasm to the seduction of le fast-food.
In 1999, the splendidly moustachioed farmer-politician, José Bové, led a group of activists who demolished a partly built McDonald’s in the southern French town of Millau. The protest attracted widespread publicity, and failed entirely to halt the advance of McDonald’s and other fast-food chains. By 2021, France had more branches of McDonald’s than any other European country.
The fried-chicken chain, Popeyes, which opened its first branch at the Gare du Nord this year, has plans for 300 outlets by 2030, while Krispy Kreme also have bold plans to expand. “We’re adding something to France, not taking anything away,” said Alexandre Maizoué, Krispy Kreme’s director general in France.
Indeed they are – and that something appears to be a growing obesity problem that tracks the increasing popularity of fast food. Between 1997 and 2020 obesity among French adults doubled, with rates rising most quickly among younger age groups.
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,” observed Jean Brillat-Savarin, the great writer on French gastronomy.
Brillat-Savarin was fond of the US, where he spent a couple of happy years. But it is hard to imagine that he would have thought a diet of fast food character-forming.
Turkey’s done
During his time in the States, Brillat-Savarin ate a wild turkey, writing that it was “charming to behold, pleasing to smell and delicious to taste”.
Amid much advice in the Telegraph’s letters pages on how best to cook a turkey, one correspondent disagrees. “Why do so many people persist in trying to find ways to make this most miserable of foods vaguely edible,” wondered Vincent Hearne of Chinon, Indre-et-Loire.
He has a point. A whiff of desperation rises from the suggestions of many an excellent cook when faced with making the creature palatable. Jane Grigson resurrects a Victorian dish of boiled turkey with celery, while Alice B Toklas goes for bust, with a stuffing of “four cups of whole truffles”. Alternatively, you could just get a goose.
