Bringing Up Bebe (23 page)

All the French baby books I read urge parents to stay calm and cheerful at mealtimes, and above all to stay the course, even if their child doesn’t take a single bite. “Don’t force him, but don’t give up on proposing it to him,” the government hangov stdbook explains. “Little by little, he’ll get more familiar with it, he’ll taste it . . . and without a doubt, he’ll end up appreciating it.”

To get more
insight into why French children eat so well, I attend the Commission Menus in Paris. It’s here that those sophisticated menus posted at Bean’s crèche every Monday get their final imprimatur. The commission decides what the crèches of Paris will be serving for lunch for the subsequent two months.

I’m probably the first foreigner to ever attend this meeting. It’s held in a windowless conference room inside a government building on the banks of the Seine. Heading the meeting is Sandra Merle, the chief nutritionist of Parisian crèches
.
Merle’s deputies are also there, along with a half dozen chefs who work in crèches.

The commission is a microcosm of French ideas about kids and food. Lesson number one is that there’s no such thing as “kids’ food.” A dietician reads out the proposed menus, including all four courses for each lunch, as if she’s entering them into the official record. There is no mention of French fries, chicken nuggets, pizza, or even ketchup. The proposed menu for one Friday is a salad of shredded red cabbage and
fromage blanc
. This is followed by a white fish called
colin
in dill sauce and a side of organic potatoes
à l’anglaise.
The cheese course is a Coulommiers cheese (a soft cheese similar to Brie). Dessert is a baked organic apple. Each dish is cut up or pureed according to the age of the kids.

The commission’s second lesson is the importance of variety. Members take a leek soup off the menu when someone points out that the children will have eaten leeks the previous week. Merle scratches a tomato dish she had planned for late December—another repeat—and replaces it with a boiled-beet salad.

Merle stresses visual and textural variety, too. She says that if foods are all the same color one day, she inevitably gets complaints from crèche directors. She reminds the crèche
chefs that if the older kids (meaning two- and three-year-olds) have a pureed vegetable as a side dish, they should have a whole fruit for dessert, since they might find two pureed dishes too babyish.

Some of the chefs boast about their recent successes. “I served mousse of sardines, mixed with a little cream,” says a chef with curly black hair. “The kids loved it. They spread it on bread.”

There is much praise of soup. “They love soup; it doesn’t matter which beans or which vegetables,” another chef says. “The soup with leeks and coconut milk, they really like it,” a third chef adds.

When someone mentions
fagots de haricots verts
, everyone laughs. It’s a traditional Christmas dish that all the crèches were supposed to prepare the previous year. The dish requires blanching green beans, wrapping clusters of the beans in thin slices of smoked pork, piercing the combination with a toothpick, and then grilling it. Apparently this was too much even for the aesthetics-obsessed crèche chefs (though they don’t balk at being told to cut a kiwi into the shape of a flower).

Another driving principle of the Commission Menus is that if at first the kids don’t like something, they should try it repeatedly. Merle reminds the chefs to introduce new foods gradually and to prepare the foods all different ways. She suggests introducing berries first as a puree, since kids will already be familiar with that texture. After that, the chefs can serve the berries cut into pieces.

One chef asks what to do about grapefruit. Merle suggests serving a thin slice sprinkled with sugar, then gradually serving it on its own. The same goes for spinach. “Our kids don’t eat spinach at all. It all goes in the garbage,” one chef grumbles. Merle tells her to mix it with rice to make it more appetizing. She says she’ll send out a “technical sheet” to remind everyone how to do this. “You repropose spinach in different ways throughout the year; eventually they will like it,” she promises. Merle says that once one child starts eating spinach, the others will follow. “It’s the principle of nutritional education,” she says.

Vegetables are a big concern for the group. One cook says her kids won’t eat green beans unless they’re slathered in crème fraîche
or béchamel sauce. “You need to strike a balance; sometimes with sauce, sometimes without,” Merle suggests. Then there’s a long discussion of rhubarb.

After about two hours under the fluorescent lights, I’m fading a bit. I’d like to go home and have dinner. But the commission hasn’t even gotten to the menu for the upcoming Christmas meal.

“The
foie gras
,
no?” one chef suggests as an appetizer. Another counters with duck mousse. At first I assume that they’re both joking, but no one laughs. The group then debates whether to have salmon or tuna for the main course (their first choice is monkfish, but Merle says it’s too expensive).

And what about the cheese course? Merle vetoes goat cheese with herbs, because the kids had goat cheese at their fall picnic. The group finally settles on a menu that includes fish, broccoli mousse, and two kinds of cow’s milk cheese. Dessert is an apple-cinnamon cake, a yogurt cake with carrots, and a traditional Christmas galette with pears and chocolate. (“You can’t veer too much from tradition. Parents will want a galette,” someone says.) For the afternoon
goûter
that day, Merle worries that a mousse made of “industrial chocolate” won’t be sufficiently festive. They settle on a more elaborate
chocolat liégeois
—a chocolate mousse sundae in a glass, topped with whipped cream.

Not once does anyone suggest that a flavor might be too intense or complicated for a child’s palate. None of the foods are outrageously strong—there are a lot of herbs, but no mustards, pickles, or olives. But there are mushrooms, celery, and every other manner of vegetable in abundance. The point isn’t that every kid will like everything. It’s that he’ll give each food a chance.

Not long after
I sit in on the Commission Menus, a friend loans me a book called
The Man Who Ate Everything
by the American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten.

Steingarten writes that when he wthance.
Vogue
, he decided that his personal food preferences made him unfairly biased. “I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow,” he writes. He embarks on a project to see if he can make himself like the foods he despises.

Steingarten’s hated foods include kimchi (the fermented cabbage that’s a national dish of Korea), swordfish, anchovies, dill, clams, lard, and desserts in Indian restaurants—which he says have “the taste and texture of face creams.” He reads up on the science of taste and concludes that the main problem with new foods is simply that they’re new. So just having them around should chip away at the eater’s innate resistance.

Steingarten bravely decides to eat one of his hated foods each day. He also tries to eat very good versions of each food: chopped anchovies in garlic sauce in northern Italy; a perfectly done capellini in white clam sauce at a restaurant on Long Island. He spends an entire afternoon cooking lard from scratch and eats kimchi ten times, at ten different Korean restaurants.

After six months, Steingarten still hates Indian desserts. (“Not every Indian dessert has the texture and taste of face cream. Far from it. Some have the texture and taste of tennis balls.”) But he comes to like, and even crave, nearly all of his other formerly detested foods. By the tenth portion of kimchi, it “has become my national pickle, too,” he writes. He concludes that “no smells or tastes are innately repulsive, and what’s learned can be forgot.”

Steingarten’s experiment sums up the French approach to feeding kids: if you keep trying things, you eventually come around to liking most of them. Steingarten discovered this by reading up on the science of taste. But middle-class French parents seem to know it intuitively and do it automatically. In France, the idea of reintroducing a broad range of vegetables and other foods isn’t just one idea among many. It’s the guiding culinary principle for kids. The ordinary, middle-class French parents I meet are evangelical about the idea that there is a rich world of flavors out there, which their children must be educated to appreciate.

This isn’t just some theoretical ideal that can only play out in the controlled environment of the crèche. It actually happens in the kitchens and dining rooms of ordinary French families. I see it firsthand when I visit the home of Fanny, the publisher who lives in a high-ceilinged apartment in eastern Paris with her husband, Vincent, four-year-old Lucie, and three-month-old Antoine.

Fanny has pretty, rounded features and a thoughtful gaze. She usually arrives home from work by six and serves Lucie dinner at six thirty, while Antoine sits in a bouncy chair drinking his bottle. On weeknights, Fanny and Vincent eat together once the kids are asleep.

Fanny says she rarely makes anything as complex as the braised endive and chard that Lucie used to eat at the crèche
.
Still, she views each night’s dinner as part of Lucie’s culinary education. She doesn’t worry too much about how much Lucie eats. But she insists that Lucie has at least a bite of every dish on her plate.

“She has to tasthe itee everything,” Fanny says, echoing a rule I hear from almost every French mother I speak to about food.

One extension of the tasting principle is that, in France, everyone eats the same dinner. There are no choices or substitutions. “I never ask, ‘What do you want?’ It’s ‘I’m serving this,’” Fanny tells me. “If she doesn’t finish a dish, it’s okay. But we all eat the same thing.”

American parents might see this as lording it over their helpless offspring. Fanny thinks it empowers Lucie. “She feels bigger when we all eat, not the same portions, but the same thing.” Fanny says American visitors are amazed when they see Lucie at a meal. “They say, ‘How come your daughter already knows the difference between Camembert, Gruyère,
and chèvre?’”

Fanny also tries to make the meal fun. Lucie already knows how to make cakes, since she and her mother bake together most weekends. Fanny has Lucie play some role in making dinner, too, by preparing some of the food or setting the table. “We help her, but we make it playful. And it’s every day,” she says.

When it’s time to eat, Fanny doesn’t austerely wave her finger at Lucie and order her to taste things. They talk about the food. Often they discuss the flavor of each cheese. And having participated in preparing the meal, Lucie is invested in how it turns out. There’s complicity. If a certain dish is a flop, “we all have a laugh about it,” Fanny says.

Part of keeping the mood light is keeping the meal brief. Fanny says that once Lucie has tasted everything, she’s allowed to leave the table. The book
Votre Enfant
says a meal with young kids shouldn’t last more than thirty minutes. French kids learn to linger over longer meals as they get older. And as they start going to bed later, they eat more weeknight dinners with their parents.

Planning the dinner menu is a lesson in balance. I’m struck by how French mothers like Fanny seem to have the day’s culinary rhythm mapped out in their heads. They assume that their kids will have their one big protein-heavy meal at lunchtime. For dinner, they mostly serve carbohydrates like pasta, along with vegetables.

Fanny may have just raced home from the office, but, as they do at the crèche
,
she calmly serves dinner in courses. She gives Lucie a cold vegetable starter, such as shredded carrots in a vinaigrette. Then there’s a main course, usually pasta or rice with vegetables. Occasionally she’ll cook a bit of fish or meat, but usually she expects Lucie to have had most of her protein at lunch. “I try to avoid proteins [at night] because I think I’ve been educated like that. They say once per day is enough. I try to focus on vegetables.”

Some parents tell me that, in winter, they often serve soup for dinner, along with a baguette or maybe a bit of pasta. It’s a filling meal that relies heavily on grains and vegetables. A lot of parents puree these soups. And that’s dinner. Kids might drink some juice at breakfast or at the afternoon
goûter.
But at lunch and dinner they drink water, usually at room temperature or slightly chilled.

Weekends are for family meals. Almost all the French families I know have a large lunch
en famille
on both Saturday and Sunday. The kids are usually involved in cooking and setting up these meals. On weekends “we bake, we cook. I have cookbooks for children; they have their own recipes,” says Denise, the medical ethicist and mother of two girls.

After all these preparations, they sit down to eat. The French sociologists Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson, authors of the book
Manger
, say that a French person who eats a sandwich on the fly for lunch doesn’t even count this as “having eaten.” For the French, “eating means sitting at the table with others, taking one’s time and not doing other things at the same time.” Whereas for Americans, “health is seen as the main reason for eating.”
³

At Bean’s fifth birthday party, I announce that it’s time for the cake. Suddenly the kids—who’ve been raucously playing—file into our dining room and sit down calmly at the table. They’re all
sage
at once. Bean sits at the head of the table and hands out plates, spoons, and napkins. Except for lighting the candles and carrying out the cake, I don’t have much of a role. By five years old, sitting calmly at the table for any kind of eating is an automatic reflex for French kids. There’s no question of eating on the couch, in front of the television, or while looking at the computer.