How I feel about much French bistrot food
It's my dirty little secret that I don't like a lot of French food. I am a quasi-vegetarian (no big moral qualms about meat but I just don't love it) who was raised in southern Louisiana. I have always preferred the French cuisine of New Orleans and the Cajun country, with its rice and seafood, pork and chicken, spices and pecans, to that of Paris. The classic Paris dinner party of lamb, veal or fish accompanied by cream sauce and bare potatoes... très peu pour moi!
But what's great about France is that the standard of cooking is so high. It's rare to have a bad meal in a good restaurant, and even a small-town place usually cares about the food. It's just that almost always, I would rather eat the appetizers than the main courses, which are invariably red meat or fish or chicken with all the bones in. As a Chinese writer once put it, I don't see why I should have to butcher my meat at table.
Once in a while, though, I get in an enthusiastic mood and decide to learn some good French recipes. This last weekend at a brocante, I bought a famous old cookbook, French Country Cooking, by Elizabeth David. She's such a good writer, and reading through the introduction to the book at the bookstand I thought, maybe I can do this! My family would be so happy!
But I started looking through the book and kept coming across things like "Remove the pig's foot and the vegetables" or "remove the skin and the fat from the kidneys" or "blanch the sheep's brain." I put the book away again.
