The early part of my life was spent in the gastronomic wilderness of postwar England, when delicacies of the table were in extremely short supply. I suppose I must have possessed taste buds in my youth, but they were left undisturbed. Food was fuel, and in many cases not very appetizing fuel. I still have vivid memories of boarding school cuisine, which seemed to have been carefully color-coordinated -- gray meat, gray potatoes, gray vegetables, gray flavor. At the time, I thought it was perfectly normal.

I was in for a pleasant shock. Not long after I became the lowliest trainee in an enormous multinational corporation, I was instructed to accompany my first boss, Mr. Jenkins, on a trip to Paris as his junior appendage. This was the way, so I was told, to start learning the ropes of big business. I should count myself lucky to have such an opportunity at the tender age of nineteen.

Jenkins was English and proud of it, English to the point of caricature, a role I think he took some pleasure in cultivating. When going abroad, he announced his nationality and armed himself against the elements with a bowler hat and a strictly furled umbrella. On this occasion, I was his personal bearer, and I had been given the important task of carrying his briefcase.

Before we left for the great unknown on the other side of the English Channel, Jenkins had been kind enough to give me some tips on dealing with the natives. One piece of advice was a model of clarity: I should never attempt to get involved with what he referred to as "their lingo." Speak English forcefully enough, he said, and they will eventually understand you. When in doubt, shout. It was a simple formula that Jenkins claimed had worked in outposts of the British Empire for hundreds of years, and he saw no reason for changing it now.

Like many of his generation, he had very little good to say about the French -- an odd lot who couldn't even understand cricket. But he did admit that they knew their way around a kitchen, and one day he was graciously pleased to accept an invitation from two of his Parisian colleagues to have lunch; or, as Jenkins said, a spot of grub. It was the first memorable meal of my life.

We were taken to a suitably English address, the avenue Georges V, where there was (and still is) a restaurant called Marius et Janette. Even before sitting down, I could tell I was in a serious establishment, unlike anywhere I'd been before. It smelled different: exotic and tantalizing. There was the scent of the sea as we passed the display of oysters on their bed of crushed ice, the rich whiff of butter warming in a pan, and, coming through the air every time the kitchen door swung open, the pervasive -- and to my untraveled nose, infinitely foreign -- hum of garlic.

Jenkins surrendered his hat and umbrella as we sat down, and I looked with bewilderment at the crystal forest of glasses and the armory of knives and forks laid out in front of me. The trick was to start on the outside and work inward, I was told. But the correct choice of cutlery was a minor problem compared to making sense of the elaborate mysteries described on the pages of the menu. What was a bar grillé? What was a loup à l'écaille? And what in heaven's name was aioli? All I had to help me was schoolboy French, and I hadn't been a particularly gifted schoolboy. I dithered over these puzzling choices in a fog of almost complete ignorance, too timid to ask for help.

Jenkins, quite unconsciously, came to my rescue. "Personally," he said, "I never eat anything I can't pronounce." He closed his menu with a decisive snap. "Fish and chips for me. They do a very decent fish and chips in France. Not quite like ours, of course."

With a sense of relief, I said I'd have the same. Our two French colleagues raised four surprised eyebrows. No oysters to start with? No soupe de poissons? The company was paying; there was no need to hold back. But Jenkins was adamant. He couldn't abide the texture of oysters -- "slippery little blighters" was how he described them -- and he didn't care for the way soup had a tendency to cling to his mustache. Fish and chips would suit him very nicely, thank you.

By this time, I was already enjoying a minor revelation, which was the bread. It was light and crusty and slightly chewy, and I spread on to it some of the pale, almost white butter from the slab on a saucer in front of me. A slab. English butter in those days was highly salted and a lurid shade of yellow, and it was doled out in small, grudging pats. At the first mouthful of French bread and French butter, my taste buds, dormant until then, went into spasm.

The fish, a majestic creature that I think was sea bass, was ceremoniously presented, filleted in seconds with a spoon and fork, and arranged with great care on my plate. My previous experience of fish had been limited to either cod or plaice, heavily disguised, in accordance with the English preference, under a thick shroud of batter. In contrast, the sea bass, white and fragrant with what I now know was fennel, looked curiously naked. It was all very strange.

Even the chips, the pommes frites, didn't resemble the sturdy English variety. These chips, a golden pyramid of them served on a separate dish, were pencil-slim, crisp between the teeth, tender to chew, a perfect foil for the delicate flesh of the fish. It was lucky for me that I wasn't required to contribute to the conversation of my elders and betters; I was too busy discovering real food.

Then there was cheese. Or rather, there were a dozen or more cheeses, another source of confusion after years of having only the simple choice of Cheddar or Gorgonzola. I thought I recognized a vaguely familiar shape, safe and Cheddar-like, and pointed to it. The waiter insisted on giving me two other cheeses as well, so that I could compare the textural delights of hard, medium, and creamy. More of that bread. More signals of joy from the taste buds, which were making up for lost time.

Tarte aux pommes. Even I knew what that was; even Jenkins knew. "Excellent," he said. "Apple pie. I wonder if they have any proper cream." Unlike the apple pies of my youth, with a thick crust top and bottom, the tart on my plate was topless, displaying the fruit -- wafers of apple, beautifully arranged in overlapping layers, glistening with glaze on a sliver of buttery pastry.

Too young to be offered an expense-account cigar and a balloon of brandy, I sat in a daze of repletion while my companions puffed away and considered a return to the cares of office. I was slightly tipsy after my two permitted glasses of wine, and I completely forgot that I was responsible for the all-important Jenkins briefcase. When we left the restaurant I left it under the table, which demonstrated to him that I was not executive material, and which marked the beginning of the end of my career in that particular company. But, much more important, lunch had been a personal turning point, the loss of my gastronomic virginity.

It wasn't only because of what I had eaten, although that had been incomparably better than anything I'd eaten before. It was the total experience: the elegance of the table setting, the ritual of opening and tasting the wine, the unobtrusive efficiency of the waiters and their attention to detail, arranging the plates just so, whisking up bread crumbs from the tablecloth. For me, it had been a special occasion. I couldn't imagine people eating like this every day; and yet, in France, they did. It was the start of an enduring fascination with the French and their love affair with food.

It is, of course, the most whiskery old cliché, but clichés usually have their basis in fact, and this one certainly does: Historically, the French have paid extraordinary -- some would say excessive -- attention to what they eat and how they eat it. And they put their money where their mouth is, spending a greater proportion of their income on food and drink than any other nation in the world. This is true not only of the affluent bourgeois gourmet; where food is concerned, interest, enjoyment, and knowledge extend throughout all levels of society, from the president to the peasant.

Nature must take some of the credit for this. If you were to make a list of the ideal conditions for agriculture, livestock and game, seafood and wine, you would find that most of them exist in one part or another of France. Fertile soil, varied climate, the fishing grounds of the Channel, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean -- every natural advantage is here except for a tropical region. (Although, such is the luck of the French, they have Guadeloupe and Martinique to provide them with rum and coconuts.) Living in the middle of such abundance, it's not surprising that the Frenchman makes the most of it.

The other major national gastronomic asset is an army of outstanding chefs, and for this the French have to give some credit to one of the more grisly periods in their history. Before their Revolution, the best cooking was not available to the general public. The most talented chefs sweated over their hot stoves in private for their aristocratic masters, creating multicourse banquets in the kitchens of mansions and palaces. And then, in 1789, the guillotine struck. The aristocracy more or less disappeared, and so did their private kitchens. Faced with the prospect of having nobody to cook for and nowhere to cook, many of the unemployed chefs did the intelligent and democratic thing: They opened restaurants and began to cook for their fellow citizens. The common man could now enjoy the food of kings, prepared by the finest chefs in France. Liberté, égalité, gastronomie.

More than two hundred years later, the common man still does pretty well, despite what pessimists will tell you about times changing for the worse. It's true that traditions are under attack from several directions. For a start, more than 50 percent of all food bought in France is now provided by supermarkets rather than small specialty stores (a statistic that doesn't seem to apply to those faithful Parisians who line up every day outside the Poilâne bakery in the rue du Cherche-Midi; I've bought bread there several times, and the wait has never been less than ten minutes). Then there is television, eating into mealtimes and often competing successfully with a proper dinner. And le fast food is working its insidiously convenient spell, with Big Macs on the Champs-Elysées and pizza stands in every town market. All in all, the future of traditional French cuisine, with its hours of shopping, preparing, and cooking, followed by further hours of eating, doesn't look too promising -- not, at least, if you believe some of the gloomy predictions made by those wise men who claim to see the writing on the kitchen wall.

I am more optimistic, perhaps because I tend to compare France with other countries instead of comparing the France of today with the France of yesterday, with all the rosy distortions of nostalgia. At any rate, I see encouraging signs that some traditions are healthier than ever, and that gastronomy is holding its own against what Régis, my friend the glutton in chief, calls "industrial food." Here are just a few examples.

The star chefs, men like Ducasse and Guérard and Bras and Troisgros, enjoy a level of celebrity and popular prestige reserved in other countries for the gods of sport and television. If any of them were to open a new restaurant, it would be national news. If, God forbid, their standards should ever slip, it would be a national catastrophe, a tremblement de terre, an earthquake, probably marked by sorrowful editorials in Le Monde and Le Figaro. And the clients of these top chefs are not all millionaires, cabinet ministers, or expense-account cowboys. Monsieur Dupont, the average Frenchman, is prepared to invest in his stomach, saving up to eat at the best restaurants, often traveling considerable distances to do so. But, to borrow a phrase from the Michelin guide, ça vaut le voyage. It's worth the trip.

One can say the same about more modest restaurants with lesser-known chefs. Some of them can be found in the back streets of provincial towns, like l'Isle Sonnante in Avignon: small, charming, and delicious. Others are buried so deeply in the countryside that you might think their only clients would be the local postman and his wife, or travelers who had lost their way, something that happened to me one summer's day a couple of years ago.

I had taken a shortcut -- always a bad idea for a geographically challenged person like myself with a severely limited sense of direction -- and found myself lost. Even worse, it was lunchtime. It was hot. The back roads into which I'd strayed were deserted. The signposts bore unfamiliar names. I was irritated with myself for not staying in Aix for lunch.

Fate intervened. I had stopped at a fork in the road. Chance made me turn right instead of left, and two minutes later I arrived in the miniature village of Saint Martin de la Brasque. It was a sight to restore one's faith in shortcuts. There was a tiny square; the houses on it had their windows shuttered against the heat. Tables and chairs were set out in the shade cast by a line of plane trees, and lunch was being served. The air was so still I could hear the splash of the village fountain, one of the best of all summer sounds. I was delighted that I hadn't stayed in Aix.

I don't remember exactly what I ate that first time under the trees at the Restaurant La Fontaine, but I do remember thinking that the food was like the most satisfying kind of home cooking: simple, generous, and tasty. I was given a table next to the fountain, an arm's length from the wine keeping cool in the water. Madame Girand, the young proprietor, told me that her husband was the chef, and that the restaurant stayed open throughout the year.

Since then, I've been back many times. The food has always been good and the restaurant has nearly always been well attended, even in winter. Word has spread. People come from as far away as Aix, or from the other side of the Luberon, an hour or more by car. Ça vaut le voyage.

If Madame Girand and her husband have the stamina to keep at it for the next thirty or forty years, La Fontaine might join those other restaurants, large and small, that have become institutions. You find them all over France, places like Chez l'Ami Louis in Paris or the Auberge in La Môle. They are not always the most fashionable of restaurants, nor are they the most eulogized by the guidebooks. But they have something about them that I -- not to mention a few hundred thousand French customers -- find irresistible. A very distinct character, the comforting feeling that you and your appetite couldn't possibly be in better hands.

There is an air of confidence about these restaurants that comes from three or four decades of practice. They know what they do best, and they do it, ignoring the fads of the day. Their menus will be adjusted, but only slightly, to reflect the seasons. Asparagus will appear in the spring, wild mushrooms in the fall, truffles in the winter. As for the rest -- the scallops, the terrines, the lamb, the confits, the gratins of potatoes, the tarte maison and crèmes brûlées -- why ever think of changing them? They are the classics that have kept generations of people happy.

Naturally, the food and wine in these establishments will be brought to your table by that most excellent and highly skilled of men, the professional waiter. There seems to be a widely held belief nowadays that anyone who has enough physical coordination to balance a tray on the palm of one hand has what it takes to be a waiter. It is something young people often do while they're deciding what to do. Usually amiable and eager to please, but very seldom knowledgeable, they provide little more than a transport service between kitchen and customer. A serious waiter, a career waiter, is in a different league. He can add another layer of enjoyment to your meal.

You should ask him to be your guide, because he knows the food better than you do. He himself has probably eaten everything on the menu dozens of times over the past twenty years. He can tell you exactly how each dish is cooked and what would be the ideal combination of courses, light and heavy, savory and sweet. And he is on close personal terms with the cellar, particularly with some small local wines that you may not have come across before.

Now watch him at work. It seems effortless. There is no furtive wrestling with the wine bottle; the cork never sticks or breaks, but comes out with a smooth turn of the wrist, to be given a brief, considered sniff of approval. Nothing is rushed, and yet all you need -- cornichons to go with the pâté, or a good fierce mustard for the daube -- is there on your table when it should be. The bread basket is refilled; the glasses are topped up. You don't have to ask for anything. Your man is telepathic: He knows what you need before you know it yourself.

I'm sure that waiters like this exist in other countries, but in France there seem to be so many of them -- unhurried, calm, on top of their job. It is considered an honorable occupation. I like that. In fact, I have often thought that these superlative waiters deserve some official recognition, and there could be no better place for them to receive it than in the pages of another flourishing French institution, the Michelin guide.

The guide celebrated its one hundredth birthday in 2000. It was published, as usual, in March -- a red-covered tome, bulging with good addresses -- and, as usual, it flew off bookstore shelves. Other countries, of course, have their restaurant guides (considerably slimmer than the Michelin), and some of them do very well. But the Michelin does better than very well; it is an immediate national best-seller, year after year. In a later chapter, we shall see some of the discreet workings of the red guide in more detail. I only mention it here because it is another example of a thriving gastronomic tradition, and of the continuing search for exceptional food in every corner of the country.

Where else would people get worked up about salt? To the rest of the world, salt is a necessary but anonymous part of the diet, about as fascinating as a glass of tap water. But not in France. Here, salt is something that gourmets argue about. Some of them will tell you that the ultimate saline experience is sel de Guérande, the gray crystallized sea salt gathered along the Brittany coast; others prefer the white fleur de sel found in the Camargue. Not long ago, I bought some of the latter to try. It came in a decorative cork-topped pot, and the label featured the name -- in this case, Christian Carrel from Aigues-Mortes -- of the saunier who gathered the salt. Very good it is, too, particularly when sprinkled on radishes or fresh tomatoes.

More and more small companies, or individuals like Carrel, are making visible efforts through their labels and packaging to separate themselves from the industrial food business. The chicken farmers of Bresse have been doing it for years; every single bird wears on one ankle an aluminum identification ring, marked with the farmer's name and address. Now you can find similar detailed information -- with its implicit promise of higher quality -- on jams and tapenades and cheeses, on sausage and olive oil and honey and pastis. These delicacies are likely to cost more than their mass-produced competitors, but the difference in taste is worth the difference in price.

More proof that the French stomach is far from being neglected is spread out in front of you every week at any of a thousand markets throughout the country. In Provence alone, there are enough of them to offer you the choice of a different market every day, and they seem to be in no danger of suffering from lack of customers. On the contrary, they appear to be getting bigger and more popular. I remember Coustellet market twenty years ago, when there were no more than ten or twelve small vans in the village parking area. You could buy local vegetables and fruit, some goat cheese, half a dozen eggs, and that was about it. Today, the market has grown until it covers nearly an acre, and in high season it's packed every Sunday morning.

It's not only what the French eat that sets them apart from so many other nationalities but how they eat it. They concentrate on their food, sometimes to such an extent that they put aside the joys of arguing with one another. And they are determined to extract the last ounce of pleasure from a meal, a tendency that my old boss Mr. Jenkins liked to describe as "making beasts of themselves."

There is a wonderful photograph taken, I think, in the 1920s, that shows a group of men in suits seated around a table. They are about to eat spit-roasted ortolans -- tiny larklike birds that are now a protected species. But before taking that first crunchy mouthful, they must observe the ritual of appreciating the bouquet. This is the moment that has been captured by the photographer. There they sit, these respectable, well-dressed men, each of them bent low over his plate with his head completely covered by a napkin, so that the fragrant steam can be trapped, inhaled, and properly savored. It looks for all the world like a coven of hooded monks saying grace before having lunch.

No doubt when the ortolans are finished there will be a little sauce or gravy remaining on the plate. Too exquisite to leave, this final treat will have to be dealt with in the correct manner, using a piece of purpose-built cutlery that only a Frenchman could have invented. It resembles a spoon that has been flattened, leaving no more than the hint of a lip along one side. The sole function of this ingenious utensil is to scoop up what is left of the sauce in a genteel fashion (thus avoiding the plebeian habit -- one that I love -- of using bread as a mop).

As it happens, there is a socially acceptable way to do even this if the cutlery doesn't run to a full set of equipment. You take your bread, tear it up into small pieces, and then use your knife and fork to steer the bread through the sauce until you have cleaned your plate. I learned this at a dinner party some years ago, where my host was delighted to instruct me on some of the differences between English and French table etiquette -- and, of course, the superiority of the French way of doing things.

As a boy, I was taught to keep my hands under the table when they were not occupied with knife or fork or glass -- a curious habit, my host said, and one that encourages mischievous behavior. It is well known that hands at English dinner parties have a tendency to wander under the table, squeezing a thigh, caressing a knee, and generally getting up to no good. In the best French households, the rule is the reverse -- idle hands must be kept on the table. Dalliance cannot be allowed to interfere with food. First things first is the rule, and, during dinner at least, fondling is prohibited.

Hastily putting my hands back where they should be, I asked if there was a logical reason why the French, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, almost always set the table with the forks facing downward. Was it, I wondered, to protect tender and well-brought-up fingers from being pricked by the tines of the fork? My host looked at me with an expression I've seen a hundred times before on a hundred French faces -- half-amused, half-puzzled. How could I be so ignorant about something so obvious? Forks are placed like that, of course, in order to display the family crest engraved on the back.

Learning about food -- learning to eat -- is a series of edible adventures and surprises. For instance, just when you think you have mastered the potato, that such a basic ingredient could have nothing new to offer, you discover aligot, a velvety blend of mashed potatoes, garlic, and Cantal cheese. Or you are introduced to the unlikely but triumphant combination of tiny wild strawberries served not with cream but with vinaigrette sauce. Then you encounter roasted figs. The education of the stomach never ends.

And it is normally a most pleasant process. The people who spend their lives making good things to eat and drink are, on the whole, a very congenial bunch, pleased when you show an interest in their work and more than happy to explain how they do it. I have occasionally seen chefs frazzled and bad-tempered at the end of a fourteen-hour working day, and I remember one chef who was so terminally drunk that he fell backward out of his kitchen, cursing loudly. But these were exceptions. On the whole, working with food and wine seems to bring out the better side of human nature. It's difficult to imagine a misanthrope who is prepared to spend his days doing something that gives so much pleasure to others.

Enjoyment is contagious, and this is perhaps best experienced during one particular meal of the week. Here you will see children, parents, grandparents, and occasionally the family dog; young couples giving themselves a treat; elderly ladies and gentlemen poring over the menu as if the pages held the secret of life; local families dressed to kill, and visiting Parisians decked out in full rural chic -- a mixture of generations and social backgrounds, gathered together to observe another tradition that shows no sign of dying out: Sunday lunch.

For me, there is one moment in particular that almost makes the meal by itself: Aperitifs have been served -- pastis or kir or white wine or, on red-letter days, champagne -- and menus are being read with the concentration of a lawyer going through a page of fine print. Suggestions and countersuggestions go back and forth across the tables. The carpaccio of fresh tuna? The soupe au pistou? The asparagus flan? And then what? The cod in a herb crust? The stew of veal and peppers? Or pieds et paquets, the Provençal recipe that elevates humble mutton tripe to new heights?

In fact, it doesn't matter what you choose. It is those few moments of anticipatory limbo that are special. For five or ten minutes, conversations are muted, gossip and family matters are put aside, and everyone in the restaurant is mentally tasting the dishes on offer. You can almost hear the flutter of taste buds.

Lunch progresses at an unhurried pace, as all good lunches should. People eat more slowly on Sundays, and drink a little more wine than usual. They forget to look at their watches. Two hours slip by, often more. Eventually, with appetites satisfied, a drowsy calm comes over the room as the plates are cleared away, the tablecloths are brushed, and coffee is served. A lazy afternoon lies ahead: a book, a doze, a swim. The chef makes a ceremonial tour of the tables, gathering compliments, happy to share with you one or two favorite recipes. Curiously, these dishes never taste quite the same at home, no matter how carefully the recipe is followed, no matter how talented the cook. There is something about Sunday lunch in a French country restaurant that goes beyond food. But unfortunately, ambience doesn't travel.

In the course of preparing this book -- those long hours with knife and fork and glass that I like to call research -- I was surprised by two things. The first was the high level of enthusiasm for any event, however bizarre, that sought to turn eating and drinking into a celebration. The amount of effort put in by the organizers, the stall holders, and the general public (who, in some cases, had traveled halfway across France) was astonishing. I cannot imagine any other race prepared to devote an entire weekend to frogs' legs or snails or the critical assessment of chickens.

And while the French take their passions seriously, my second surprise was to discover that those of them who come to these events don't take themselves seriously at all. They dress up in outlandish costumes. They sing the most unexpected songs -- "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" being just one -- at the top of their voices and often wildly off-key. They make fun of one another, eat and drink like champions, and generally let their hair down -- not at all what one might expect from a nation with a reputation for reserved and slightly chilly good manners.

For many years, there has been a saying in England that I imagine must reflect a widely held view: "Lovely country, France. Pity about the French." Perhaps I've been lucky. All the French I met on my travels were helpful, good-natured, and sometimes embarrassingly generous. There were the strangers who invited me to stay at their homes when there was no room at the local hotel, the farmer who presented me with a bottle of 1935 Calvados made by his grandfather, and dozens of others who went out of their way to make sure I had as good a time as they were having.

I hope I've done them justice in the pages that follow. To all of them, thanks for the memories.

Copyright © 2001 by Escargot Productions Ltd.