Patum Peperium

My Life In France: Memoirs Of Julia Child

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Le Petit Grignotage

Christine

At 5:45 A.M. November 3, 1948, Julia Child--thirty-six years old and newly married--awoke to see lights twinkling in the early dawn from the shores of Le Havre, France. Disembarking from the SS America, she stepped onto that Gallic soil for the first time, and would be forever changed. Up until then, she had worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, where she had met her artistic husband Paul when both were posted in Ceylon, India in 1944. He fell in love with the gangly, 6'2", outgoing Californian, and they married in 1946. After two years in Washington, D.C., Paul was assigned to the United States Information Service office in Paris, and they two, being the adventure-loving sort, thought a few years in the City of Lights sounded just fine.

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Julia Child had no cooking skills to speak of. She could not tell you what a shallot was, or which type of wine to drink with beef. She could barely scramble an egg. Neither did she have any special fascination with food. She was raised on hearty American fare like potroast, beef stew, or leg of lamb, all cooked with sufficient, but not special, skill. That morning in Normandy would change all of this. Driving through the cold northern countryside, exhausted, famished, the two stopped in Rouen at a little restaurant: La Couronne, est. 1345--her first French meal--and it would prove a revelation.

It was warm inside, and the dining room was a comfortably old-fashioned brown-and-white space, neither humble nor luxurious. At the far end was an enormous fireplace with a rotary spit, on which something was cooking that sent out heavenly aromas. We were greeted by the maître d'hôtel, a slim middle-aged man with dark hair who carried himself with an air of gentle seriousness. Paul spoke to him, and the maître d' smiled and said something back in a familiar way, as if they were old friends. Then he led us to a nice table not far from the fireplace. The other customers were all French, and I noticed that they were treateed with exactly the same courtesy as we were. Nobody rolled their eyes at us or stuck their nose in the air. Actually, the staff seemed happy to see us. 

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As we sat down, I heard two businessman in gray suits at the next table asking questions of their waiter, an older, dignified man who gesticulated with a menu and answered them at length. "What are they talking about?" I whispered to Paul. "The waiter is telling them about the chicken they ordered," he whispered back. "How it was raised, how it will be cooked, what side dishes they can have with it, and which wines would go with it best." "Wine?" I said. "At lunch?" I had never drunk much wine other than some $1.19 California Burgundy, and certainly not in the middle of the day. In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. "The trick is moderation," he said. Suddenly the dining room filled with wonderfully intermixing aromas that I sort of recognized but couldn't name. The first smell was something oniony--"shallots," Paul identified it, "being sautéed in fresh butter."...Then came a warm and winy fragrance from the kitchen, which was probably a delicious sauce being reduced on the stove. This was followed by a whiff of something astringent: the salad being tossed in a big ceramic bowl with lemon, wine vinegar, olive oil, and a few shakes of salt and pepper. My stomach gurgled with hunger. I couldn't help noticing that the waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended.... We began our lunch with a half-dozen oysters on the half-shell. I was used to bland oysters from Washington and Massuchusetts, which I had never cared much for. But this platter of portugaises had a sensational briny flavor and a smooth texture that was entirely new and surprising. The oysters were served with rounds of pain de seigle, a pale rye bread, with a spread of unsalted butter. Paul explained that, as with wine, the French have "crus" of butter, special regions that produce individually flavored butters. Beurre de Charentes is a full-bodied butter, usually recommended for pastry dough or general cooking; beurre d'Isigny is a fine, light table butter. It was that delicious Isigny that we spread on our rounds of rye.

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Rouen is famous for its duck dishes, but after consulting the waiter Paul had decided to order sole meunière. It arrived whole: a large, flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top. The waiter carefully placed the platter in front of us, stepped back, and said: "Bon appétit!" I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly. The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the browned butter. I chewed slowly and swallowed. It was a morsel of perfection.... I experienced fish, and a dining experience, of a higher order than I'd ever had before.

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Along with our meal, we happily downed a whole bottle of Pouilly-Fumé, a wonderfully crisp white wine from the Loire Valley. Another revelation! Then came salade verte laced with a lightly acidic vinaigrette. And I tasted my first real baguette--a crisp brown crust giving way to a slightly chewy, rather loosely textured pale-yellow interior, with a faint reminder of wheat and yeast in the odor and taste. Yum! We followed our meal with a leisurely dessert of fromage blanc, and ended with a strong, dark café filtre. The waiter placed before us a cup topped with a metal canister, which contained coffee grounds and boiling water. With some urging by us impatient drinkers, the water eventually filtered down into the cup below. It was fun, and it provided a distinct dark brew. ... Paul and I floated out the door into the brilliant sunshine and cool air. Our first lunch together in France had been absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life.

The rest of her memoirs explain her awkward but joyful initiation into Parisian life, her acquaintance with the local fishmongers, butchers, cheesesellers, and vegetable stalls, where she acquired her food education "on the streets." She recounts her days studying at Le Cordon Bleu under her friend and mentor Chef Max Bugnard, how she started an informal cooking school, L'École des Trois Gourmandes, with the friends who would end up collaborating with her on her famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

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Although French cookbooks abound these days, Julia Child's work was truly unique for its time, groundbreaking, introducing authentic French recipes--some for the first time ever, including beurre blanc à la Mère Michel--in accessible English. She was the first to figure out a workable recipe for baking authentic French baguettes in a home oven, complete with quarry tiles and a stone heated red-hot to be dropped into a pan of cold water at the bottom of the oven to produce the puffs of steam so necessary to form that light, crisp outer crust. Mastering was a labor of love, years in the making, every recipe (in the hundreds) personally tried and tasted twice, thrice, sometimes a dozen times until perfected. Her newfound fame led to the cooking show, which made her a household name--and the rest is history. When one recalls the fact that, up until the middle of her life, she hadn't the least inkling she could cook nor had she ever tasted a single French dish, her later accomplishments are rather remarkable. Her memoirs are a sheer delight, and well worth the read to anyone with a love of France, fine wine, or food.

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In her honor, I set forth a quintessential French recipe that is--quite literally--simple as pie:

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Quiche au Fromage

For 4 to 6 Servings

1 cup grated Swiss cheese [more if you like it especially cheesy]

8-inch partially cooked pastry shell placed on buttered baking sheet [I make the dough from scratch, although those in a hurry can use pre-made filo dough]

1 1/4 cups whole milk [you can use 2% milk, but you must bake it about 10 minutes longer to ensure the quiche sets; on no account use skim milk, unless you want a slushy (not to mention bland) mess when you attempt to slice the quiche]

3 large eggs

1/2 tsp salt Pinch of pepper and nutmeg

2 TB butter

(Preheat oven to 375 degrees.)

Spread 3/4 of the cheese in the bottom of the shell. Beat milk, eggs, and seasonings in a bowl to blend. Just before baking, pour in the liquid to fill the shell to within 1/8 inch of the top. [Do not overfill, as the mixture rises when baking.] Sprinkle on the remaining cheese and the butter, cut into dots. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Can be served hot out of the oven, or cold. Personally, I prefer it hot, with a glass of crisp white wine and a simple salade verte.

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Bon appétit!

...

...

Happy News!

At dawn 

on December 27th, 2008,

the feast of 

St. John the Apostle,

our Christine gave birth.

Mother and daughter 

are both doing well.

Deo gratias!

Meat is Murder

 Le Petit Grignotage 

Christine

But the results can be delicious, can’t they? Morrissey may have been serious when he penned that moralistic dirge, but the rest of us carnivores won’t succumb to such reproaches. As far as I’m concerned, as long as the animals are raised and killed humanely (I’m no card-carrying PETA member, but my conscience—and taste buds--far prefer grass-fed, free-roaming livestock over confined, factory-farmed, chemical-engorged beasts), I will feast with delight. Even those Peruvians munching on cat flesh at their annual cat-eating festival get no incriminations from me (pigs are at least as intelligent as felines, and we consume 80 million tons of pork per year), as long as the critters are given a relatively painless end…

During my weekly meanderings at the Oxford Covered Market back when I was a young and vigorous college student, I remember the butcher shops would, come Fall, trot out the carcasses—-deer, pig, lamb, hare—-hamstrung to the rafters, gutted (but not skinned), lined up neatly outside their display windows for passersby to see (and smell). November weather was cold enough to keep the corpses frigid, and they would hang there for weeks. At the time, knowing very little about meat, I wondered why these butchers would leave fresh kill to ripen and rot out in the open air. Why not cut them up immediately, store them in airtight bags, and sell them the next day? My sentiments showed I was city-raised, a product of supermarket culture, where everything comes neatly packaged, sealed, and ready to cook. The butchers would have laughed me to scorn. These days, of course, I know better: hanging is an essential part of developing the flavor and texture of meat, and if done properly, results in moist, tender, flavorful cuts. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall explains in his most excellent tome The River Cottage Meat Book:

What happens to the meat during hanging is that natural enzymes begin to act on the fibers of the muscle meat, making them softer and more elastic, so that the meat becomes more relaxed and tender. Effectively this is the onset of the beginning of decay--but it's nothing to be alarmed about. Under carefully controlled conditions, actual putrefaction, of the kind that will taint the flavor of the meat, need not occur for weeks, or even months. The meat will also begin to lose moisture as it hangs. Paradoxically, this is a good thing when it comes to cooking. Wet, fresh, underhung meat carries too much water, which expands as the temperature rises during cooking, stretching the fibers of the meat and leaching out between them--especially when the meat contracts again after cooking and during carving. This means that wet meat actually ends up drier after cooking and vice versa.

This is why supermarket meat can be a great disappointment; not only is meat not dry-aged properly (because moisture loss means weight loss, and weight loss means profit loss), the worst is done to it: cuts are vacuum-packed and left to bathe in their own juices, giving the illusion of moistness, but ending up drier and more tasteless when cooked. If one can find a good butcher, one has found a treasure. He will understand such things, know where his meat comes from, and advise you as to cuts. (I was delighted when I discovered the local butcher shop down the street--only to find out it bulk-ordered its meat from a national meat distribution company.) If you're lucky enough to have found one of your own, ask for a well-aged leg of lamb (for the following recipe, of course; all of this rambling does serve a culinary point). If you're lucky, he'll pull out the carcass from the locker and carve the leg straight off the body, made to order, just as the British butcher did when I was preparing to cook for a party of ten one Easter. Lamb is so fatty and flavorful (particularly if it's grass-fed) that it practically cooks itself, and takes minimal preparation. Just be sure to leave the fell (outer, paperlike covering) on, as it helps to keep in moisture while roasting.

 

  Roast Leg of Lamb

One leg of lamb 

Olive oil 

5-6 large garlic cloves, sliced 

Several sprigs of rosemary and thyme 

Salt & pepper 

Wash and thoroughly dry lamb. Rub all over with olive oil. Cut slits in meat and insert sliced garlic. Season with rosemary, thyme, salt, and pepper. Place the meat on a rack in a roasting pan, fat side up (this allows the meat to self-baste). Do not cover. Roast at 325 degrees twenty minutes for every pound if you like your meat rare. Remove from oven and set for fifteen minutes (meat will continue to cook). Carve and serve. 

Bon appetit!

Enjoy more from Christine at her blog, Laudem Gloriae.

V is for Vapid

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

Last week, Notre Dame University once again allowed The Vagina Monologues (written by Louise Brooks-look alike Eve Ensler) to play on its grounds' during Holy Week, of all times. One can only grasp the bitter irony of this timing when one considers that, during the holiest week of the liturgical year, the campus gave air time to a play promoting lesbianism, sado-masochism, and masturbation, all via a monologue coming from a disembodied vagina. The bishop of the diocese issued a strongly worded letter to Fr. Jenkins, priest of Holy Cross and president of the University, criticizing the decision:

As bishop of this historic diocese, entrusted with the spiritual welfare of all those who live within its borders, including the students at our beloved Notre Dame, I believe that, once again, I must publicly and respectfully disagree with Father Jenkins' decision.

God bless him. You can read the rest here.

Going on its tenth year, Monologues hasn't only suffered criticism from conservative circles; pro-sex feminists like Betty Dodson have complained that the play is a blast of hatred at men and heterosexuality--which it, of course, is. And Monologues supporters, happy to push their misanthropic vapidity onto unsuspecting college students, have been less than tolerant. In 2000, when Robert Swope wrote a piece in the Georgetown paper condemning the hypocrisy of one lesbian rape scene and the Monologues' so-called campaign of violence against women, the female weeping and gnashing of teeth was such that he wound up fired from his position. That's grrrl power for you!

Ah yes, Valentine's Day--that day on which tradition celebrates the gift of love between man and woman, the giddiness of romance, the swoon of ardor, the potency of amour; a day to exchange gifts: roses, chocolates, a cold bottle of bubbly shared over a warm, candlelit meal, and by a roaring fire, perhaps; and, for those Catholics among us, a day on which to pay homage to Valentinus, a Roman priest martyred for his faith, patron saint of affianced couples, lovers, and happy marriages.

Not so for these hags of war. Valentine's Day must be forever known as Vagina Day, or V-Day, a day on which the battle cry is raised against acts of horror committed against the fairer sex, the "grisly memento mori of violence", as Camille Paglia put it, of rape, incest, battery, sex trafficking--acts that rob the woman of her dignity by reducing her to an object, an item to be used, a piece of flesh, a mere vagina.

And the Monologues does its bit to promote peace by...reducing women to mere vaginas. But it is all done with humor and grace, aging hipster Ensler insists! Judge for yourself; monologues include:

--The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could, in which a thirteen-year-old girl is given alcohol and seduced by an older women, and in the end declares it to have been "a good rape".

--I Was Twelve, My Mother Slapped Me, a choir describing menstrual periods;

--My Vagina Was My Village, a compilation of testimonies of Bosnian women victimized in rape camps;

--My Angry Vagina, in which a performer rails against douches, tampons, and gynecological instruments;

--The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy, in which a dominatrix eulogizes her "love" of women, the monologue ending in a triple orgasm;

--Because He Liked to Look At It, in which¦ nevermind.

If this is Ensler at her gracious best, then I hate to think what she's like when crass.

While the above scenes were being performed under the Golden Dome of Notre Dame--a university dedicated to and named after the Woman of most sublime dignity, whose very existence embodies purity, innocence, and modesty--only several hundred yards away the Easter Octave Masses were taking place in the basilica, the sacred Gospel read, the ancient prayers chanted, the words of consecration spoken over the host that would become our risen Lord.

Some students, seeing the incongruity, staged a protest on the first night of the performance. After the opening skit, thirty students scattered throughout the audience stood up and walked out, leaving in their empty seats a flyer containing the following:

Upon leaving the play, we are headed as a group to the Grotto, where we will pray for the students, faculty and administration of the University of Notre Dame, and particularly that our institutional participation in such a demeaning cultural fad will come to an end. As loyal sons and daughters of Our Lady, we are confident that she will hear our prayer.

Notre Dame du Lac, priez pour nous.

You can read more from Christine at her own blog, Laudem Gloriae.

The Throne of Glory by Way of the Guillotine

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

We know the story well. On the day following the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, 1794, sixteen Carmelites from Compiègne, singing the Veni Creator, mounted the scaffold one by one and were beheaded. To justify their condemnation, the tribunal had produced as proof of their treason a picture of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus along with one of the deposed king, taken from the convent wall.

La Pucelle

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

Joan of Arc miniature, ~1450-1500, author unknown

Dijon has the unfortunate fate of being home to the man responsible for turning St. Joan of Arc over to the English to burn at the stake.

It is said that in 1519, a Carthusian monk showed an acquaintance the fractured skull of John the Fearless, the murdered duke of Burgundy, and remarked, “This is the hole through which the English entered France.”

He was referring to the third phase of the Hundred Years War of a century earlier, during which Henry V captured and occupied Paris and all of northern France (begun, of course, by the Battle of Agincourt, the king’s speech romanticized and immortalized by Shakespeare:

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.).

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

My Dear Basil,

Hearty thanks for your memoir of some weeks back; it explains so much about you.

As for me, I must admonish you warmly for failing to pay attention, as many of your questions would have been answered by reading my confession published in these very pages. Therein, you would have discovered that I am of French-Vietnamese descent, of the royal line of Lê, the longest dynasty to rule the old country during what is known as its Golden Age, from 1428 to 1788. You would have known that my grandmother married a French colonel stationed in l’Indochine and bore two daughters, one of whom was my mother, who went on to wed a successful civil engineer—my dear father. As he was also chairman of a bank and my mother inherited a jewelry business, we were living it large, as they say; we had a cook to make our meals, a maid to sweep our floors, and three nannies to wipe each of our privileged bottoms.

But Mr. Ho Chi Minh, never one to pass up a pillaging in the name of equality, brought his own brand of freedom to town by seizing our possessions to keep for himself distribute to the poor. After my father fractured about thirty bones in a motorcycle accident, he switched careers to medicine, a lifelong dream. Two years into it, alas, he made the hard decision to leave his homeland for farther shores. With the new government, Saigon was not the same place. We bought one-way tickets to France and never looked back. Some years later, the Land of Opportunity beckoned, and the rest is history. Through industry (and not a small amount of grace), my parents have bought their own little corner of paradise in Florida and have put three children through college (two doctors, and one greasy lawyer, who's forsaken the prestige and profit of law firm life to raise her children).

Chez Nous

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

In the heart of Dijon stands a church dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel. Within this church, just to the left of the High Altar, is a little chapel separated by an iron grille. Candles burn at every hour of the night here. A golden box in the wall, sheltered behind plate glass, holds the relics of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, the Dijonnaise Carmelite saint Hans Urs Von Balthasar has called one of the most important theologians of our time, and who Pope John Paul II has called “a brilliant witness to the joy of being 'rooted and grounded in love.’” (I’ve written about her more extensively here.)

L’Eglise St. Michel itself is magnificent. It started out in the 9th century as a funeral chapel dedicated to the archangel, and was situated in a cemetery. By the 11th century, the building had grown sufficiently to be turned into a parish church. It fell into ruin in later times, however, and on the day just after the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, 1497, the townsfolk met to decide whether or not the church should be rebuilt. Fortunately for the Cote D’Or, all agreed to start reconstruction, and the result is a rather spectacular confluence of Gothic interior and Renaissance façade. Today on entering the church, one is greeted by the sound of Gregorian chant floating down from the ribbed vaults, and can find no less than sixteen chapels (one of them dedicated to St. Joan of Arc).

Goodbye To All That

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

Austin Bramwell's article was published 8 months ago, and aptly sums up the state of modern conservatism. (We were co-bloggers on the Harvard Federalist Society Blog, Ex parte, and became acquainted at the Fed Society Annual Student Symposium at Notre Dame.) He writes here, for instance:

Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker. ...Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks.... Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

I have a confession to make: several years ago, I was more conservative than I was Catholic--which makes sense, because I wasn't Catholic at all. I was Protestant. I had always been a supporter of capital punishment; I was an ardent defender of America's right to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq, and involved myself in a number of contentious debates defending the point; I never questioned the correctness of our decimating Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Any conservatives who called these issues into question were, in my mind, closet liberals.

After my return to the faith, I started seriously considering the Church's teachings on issues like just war, capital punishment, poverty, and the like. And I found, to my discomfort, that the Republican platform often jarred with the Church's own doctrines. Capital punishment? We know St. Thomas Aquinas's justification, and Pope John Paul II's questioning of its continued legitimacy because we now have other methods of protecting society from the worst of the worst. The war against Iraq? Both Popes John Paul II and Benedict have stated in no uncertain terms that there is no moral justification for a preemptive strike against another country. Now, one might respond with irritation, what do popes know about military strategy? Next to nothing, of course. But popes have authority to proclaim the conditions on which a war can be waged morally--and any Catholic serious about his faith should not take their words lightly. I would go so far as to say that any Catholic dismissive of their words on such weighty issues are putting ideology before faith.

Hiroshima? Nagasaki? The Church has been even clearer on this point. Pope Paul VI called America's act "butchery of untold magnitude." Pope John Paul II referred to it as "a self-destruction of mankind", ranking Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Auschwitz as a place devastated by man's sin. And the Catechism teaches:

"Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." (2314)

The point? The point is that, after some years of reflection and thought, I am now more Catholic than I am conservative, liberal, or libertarian. In fact, these labels don't work for me anymore, because I hold positions that either side of the aisle can sympathize with. Does this make me an outsider to some in the conservative camp? Undoubtedly. But ideology is less important to me than fidelity to Christ's teachings as handed down through the Church. I don't judge other conservatives who may disagree with the Church--but the question is, as Bramwell notes, do they judge me?

You can read more from Christine at her own blog, Laudem Gloriae.

The Death of Bd. Elizabeth of the Trinity

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

Elizabeth Catez was born in 1880 in a French military camp. Twenty-six years later, she lay dead in a Carmelite convent in Dijon, her body so ravaged by Addison’s disease it seemed a skeleton. Most remarkable about this girl was not so much that she had invited such suffering into her life by asking that Christ “fulfill a second humanity” in her; or that she accepted her internal devouring with equanimity (“God is a consuming fire, it is to His action that I submit.”); or that in the midst of her torments she asked, not that her pains would cease, but that God would increase her capacity for suffering. What was most remarkable about Elizabeth of the Trinity is that she was a most ordinary girl from a most ordinary background. Although an intelligent and popular child, she was burdened with a strong will and a fierce temperament. She would go into fits when she did not get her way. In one case, a favorite doll had been borrowed (unbeknownst to her) for use in the parish play. When she spotted it, she stood up in the middle of the theatre and shouted, “You wicked priest! Give me back my Jeanette!” Other such instances prompted the curate to tell her mother, “With such a temperament, she will be either a demon or an angel.”

She enjoyed clothes and the latest fashions, dressing up to go dancing, and excelled at classical piano. At one point she was even engaged to be married. She gave it all up at twenty-one, however, to become the spouse of Christ in the Carmel of Dijon. Three days after entry, a sister wrote a letter to Sr. Geneviève of Lisieux (sibling of St. Thérèse): “a postulant of three days but one who has desired Carmel since the age of seven, Sr. Elizabeth of the Trinity, who will turn out to be a Saint, for she already has remarkable dispositions for that.”

Tales Of A Yankee Frog

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

The French have been in Asia since the 1600s, when Jesuit missionaries forayed onto the ancient continent and established themselves among the natives. Although the Portuguese were the first to evangelize Vietnam, the French Jesuits left a more permanent mark. (French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes developed the Romanized version of the Vietnamese alphabet in use today.) In 1887, France officially occupied a tongue of land jutting just below China, encompassing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, called L’Indochine. France remained, off and on, until she was driven out by the communist Viet Minh in 1954.

It was the French who westernized Vietnam, and her influence can be felt everywhere: in the architecture, food, music, and, language. The Saigon Notre Dame Basilica , for instance, was built by French architect J. Bourard in Roman-Gothic style, based on the similarly named cathedral in Paris. All the stones, tiles, and stained glass were imported from France. Vietnamese cooking has incorporated the baguette, patés chauds, cheese, butter, sweetened condensed milk (for its hot or iced coffee), and any number of other French elements. The Vietnamese people’s fondness for ballroom dancing can be attributed directly to exposure to French music, and a dialect called Vietnamese French is spoken in the country to this day, which, as the name suggests, consists of a combination of both tongues.

Coq au Vin

Le Petit Grignotage
Christine

The cockerel, that vain, imperious bird, stands for vigilance in the Christian tradition, and the French recently adopted it as their national symbol (by recent, I mean circa 1830). It replaced, most sadly, the fleur-de-lis, or lily, which stood for Mary, the patron saint of France. One could say the replacement had something to do with the fact that the cockerel’s Latin name, gallus, is the same as the Latin for Gaul; or that its proud strut is an apt depiction of the French national attitude; or (perhaps most accurately) that the secular powers, having overthrown l’ancien régime only a few decades earlier, felt the need to find a national emblem less steeped in Roman Catholic “myth”.