French Places - the culture, cuisine, art and traditions of France

 

 

 

Le Steak Tartare

 

It might seem that the great avenue called the Champs-Elysées was built for a practical purpose, to get from central to western Paris. But when it was first traced out, in the 17^th century, everything beyond the Louvre – then the royal palace - was wooded countryside. 

The broad allée’s only raison d’être was to provide a sweeping perspective from the palace, up to the hilltop where the Arc de Triomphe was built over a century later.  It was designed by the gardener Le Nôtre, who later reproduced the same effect on an even grander scale before the palace of Versailles.

When Yves took me there, it was the most elegant thoroughfare of Paris, lined with shops and restaurants and cabarets of a kind which we would not have frequented even if we could have afforded them.  But it boasted a new emporium which, mysteriously to my way of thinking, the French were very proud of, called Le Drugstore.  

This seemed like a strange name to give to what was really an elegant, trendy watering place for the rich, but the rich – especially in Paris – are an unpredictable, perverse bunch of people.  Le Drugstore’s charm, it seemed was that it followed the concept of the American mainstreet drugstore, where you could buy everything you needed in the same shop, a toothbrush, a newspaper, a milkshake and a hamburger.

Yves took me through its brassy, glassy doors one morning, perhaps because he didn’t want me to go back to Spain thinking that France was a musty old museum where nothing new was happening.  The French liked to ridicule the Americans, but, paradoxically, they liked to imitate them too, as I already knew.

It was all very glamorous, much moreso than any American drugstore I had ever seen.  Expensive perfumes and scarves were displayed in glittering stalls lining sinuous corridors, as well as fancy chocolates, cigars and burnished pipes.  There was nothing on sale, in fact, that even vaguely resembled the sort of junk one sees in an American drugstore!

But best of all (or worst, depending on which way you looked at it) was the lunch we were served in a red-leather upholstered booth by a huge window overlooking the Arc de Triomphe.  Instead of greasy hamburgers with synthetic mustard and tasteless lettuce, Yves ordered something which could only be said to resemble a hamburger to the extent in which a swan resembles a sparrow.

It was called steak tartare, and I thought I had never eaten anything so heavenly.  The ground beef was served quite raw, with an egg yolk on top in the half shell, which we mixed into the meat along with helpings of capers, chopped onion and parsley, and mustard – moutarde de Dijon, not the bright yellow American kind.

The fried potatoes, too, put to shame the bland fritters which Americans euphemistically called “french fries”.  They were thick and perfectly browned on the outside, soft and fluffy white on the in.  And there was a bowl of salade verte with a vinaigrette sauce which helped to balance the sweetness of the thick, soft leaves of lettuce, which made the American “iceberg” variety seem like crunchy, crinkly sheets of cellophane.

And forget that soppy nonsense of sipping milkshakes with a straw!  Yves ordered two big ballons of dark red beaujolais wine which did a sensuous pas de deux on the pallet with the gobs of pinkish red, creamy and delicately spiced tartare…

So much for the French version of American food, I thought, making a point never to disdain it in the future, if it was offered to me. Of course, I was not long in discovering that steak tartare was a good French dish traditionally served in Alsatian brasseries.  But that was how its pleasures were first revealed to me, as an improvement on the over-fried, rubbery American “greaseburger”, as we used to call it.

 

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