French food is enjoying a renaissance – and these three recipes are culinary bliss
When chef Alex Jackson opened his restaurant, Sardine, in London in 2016 I booked a table immediately. I liked the cute name, but my main thought was 'France is back!' Sardine was a love letter to Provençal food and I felt Jackson's passion every time I ate there.
Many food lovers and chefs were seduced by France at a formative time in their lives. For me it was an exchange trip at 15 (my first time abroad) and a year working as an au pair in Bordeaux. Fast-forward 25 years and French food – as represented in restaurants, at least – wasn't getting much attention. The River Cafe in London (opened in 1987) put Italy on the map in huge bold letters. Even though most people couldn't afford to eat there it had a huge influence; young chefs who passed through the kitchen set up their own restaurants.
The food was easier to make than French food. You could cook pasta – inexpensive and simple – instead of reducing litres of veal stock. Eventually it was possible to find sandwiches of roast Mediterranean vegetables in most British train stations. Then Middle Eastern food – light, pretty, full of vegetables – took hold. Both cuisines are healthy (olive oil instead of butter and cream). At the same time France was having a crisis. Dishes were stuck in the past. It seemed immune to outside influences and arrogant about its position in the culinary firmament. It could no longer reign supreme over other complex cuisines, such as Mexican, Chinese and Indian.
Now, gradually, France has crept back. Chefs Henry Harris and Rowley Leigh (decades-long stars in the restaurant world), for example, started cooking French food again. Leigh took over a place (I can still taste the poulet Antiboise) in Notting Hill and Harris (previously in a classy restaurant in Knightsbridge) opened a French restaurant above a pub in East London.
Francophiles rushed to Bouchon Racine, feeling suffused with happiness before they'd had a single bite. Reading the blackboard menu – pork terrine, rabbit with mustard, crème caramel – was enough. It became almost impossible to get a table but there was a lull before others opened. Now it's a fast-flowing stream. I came out of hospital after a serious illness last year and went straight to Camille, a new French restaurant in Borough Market. It felt as if it had been there for ever. Regional French dishes, many of which I'm not familiar with, are its foundation.
I talked to Alex Jackson about why he fell in love so intensely with French cooking. We were both changed by living there, he in Paris, me in Bordeaux. 'Food is important there and yet it isn't,' he says. 'It's a given that food is an important part of life but that doesn't mean making a big fuss or cooking complicated dishes. And they give proper time to eating.'
Weekend lunch at someone's home in France will be several courses including cheese and a green salad (neither of which require cooking). The main might be a good roast chicken and there'd be something as simple as salami and crisp radishes to start. It's hard to explain the sense of wellbeing and ease I felt eating this kind of food on that first trip when I was 15.
Lindsey Tramuta, journalist and author of The Eater Guide to Paris (out on 8 May), thinks the resurgence of French food is partly cyclical – different cuisines go in and out of fashion – but it's also the hold France has over many of us. 'The country remains incredibly seductive,' she says. 'And every generation seems to discover its soft power. This highlights how large France looms in our collective imagination whether we're intimately aware of it or not.'
French food has an easy deliciousness – butter and cream – and is familiar, a good feeling when so much else is shifting. This menu is three courses of bliss.
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