Here is a guest post that arrived in our inbox from a chapette called Pauly – she has no website or blog to link to but here are her wonderful words about the difficulties getting butter served with bread in France:
Buerre
Bread and butter. Absolutely not if you’re in southern France. The bread is fantastic, but topping it off with equally delicious butter is not condoned. It’s shocking. The reaction from a waiter when you ask for butter can range from an exasperated sigh to a lengthy lecture. Most often, a Gaelic shrug. The reason? It’s just not the way we do things. It appears to be comparable to dousing filet of sole with ketchup. (I’m usually happy when the tip is included in the price of a meal. It saves me from math in a foreign currency. However, there is not a great incentive for the garçon to hide his disdain.)
I was having lunch at a charming open-air restaurant overlooking a yacht basin near St. Tropez. You selected the fish you wanted, they weighed it and prepared it for the nearby grill by putting stalks of rosemary in the cavity. The process was mouthwatering to watch, the result delicious to eat. As I waited, a waiter delivered an order to a couple at the table next to mine: oysters, bread and BUTTER. I was amazed and asked how they were able to get butter without creating a fuss. She laughed and said that thinly sliced rye bread and butter were always served with oysters.
At last, a solution. I would order oysters and ask that the bread be a baguette rather than rye and, by the way, skip the oysters!
It reminded me of that memorable scene in Five Easy Pieces when Jack Nicholson tries to order toast and is told by the waitress he can’t have toast with his order because they don’t allow substitutions. He tries to show her how to give him his toast and not break any rules by ordering a chicken salad sandwich and holding everything but the toast. Of course, it didn’t work and he lost his temper. I never did find the nerve to try the oyster gambit.
A week later – my next to last day in France. I had left Les Arc and was spending a few days in Nice dropping off the car before flying home. Lunch. There it was in front of me – a basket of heavenly French bread, probably my last for a long time. I took a deep breath, hoped for the best, and asked for beurre. The waiter grumbled. He returned and practically threw a small ramekin of butter on the table and mumbled something else which I didn’t understand – just as well. He was about to take my order when a man sitting with his wife at the neighboring table spoke up. He said in heavily accented English, “Don’t let him get away with that! You are a customer. If you want butter, he should serve it to you, politely!” The waiter did look a bit sheepish. He continued, “We are from Normandy. We have the best butter in France. You would not have to ask.” He had lived through the War and had a fondness for Americans.
I didn’t want to continue with the Buerre War so I opted for pizza for lunch the next day. They are crazy about pizza in Nice — pissaladière — a crisp crust with sauted onions, tomatoes, oil, olives, anchovies, with just a sprinkling of cheese. A distant cousin of our Neopolitan pizza. And, of course, eaten European style — with knife and fork.
