In theory, Mireille Guiliano is scary. The former chief executive of Veuve
Clicquot in the US, the author of French Women Don’t Get Fat
and its new follow-up, French Women for All Seasons, is a woman who
recommends saving half a banana for later (see box), can demonstrate a dozen
ways of tying a scarf, and takes the stairs to her 15th-floor New York
apartment to stay fit. In person, of course, she’s petite, soignée and
perfectly coiffeured. (Small, well groomed and with immaculately cut hair
just doesn’t sound the same.) Her scarf is carefully draped over a neat
Belgian jacket and her heels weren’t designed for scaling endless flights of
stairs.
We meet at Roast, one of the new generation of restaurants reviving hearty
British food. If Guiliano is appalled by the masculine ambience and the
prospect of giant portions she’s too well-mannered to show it. And once
she’s chosen what happen to be the least fatty-sounding dishes from the
menu, she can get on with deflecting resistance to her regimen with grace,
diplomacy and a flow of charmingly accented words. “I don’t believe when fat
people say they are happy,” she says, recounting the time she first went to
the States and put on 20kg (44lb). When she came home her dad told her she
looked like a sack of potatoes and she swore never again to let herself go.
Guiliano’s first book took America by storm. But it wasn’t only Americans who
were in awe of French style. Plenty of sceptical Brits bought the idea that,
if we learn to eat like them, we too can acquire that French figure and
composure. Nor was it just a cult among English speakers who’ve been envying
the image perfected by Coco Chanel and cultivated by her compatriots ever
since. Translated into 35 languages, French Women Don’t Get Fat
has sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Part of its appeal was the author’s insistence that, because it countenances
chocolate and bread, it wasn’t a diet book. “It’s about learning how to eat
a little bit of everything,” she says, the way that French women, with their
healthier attitude to food, always have.
Just to remind you, here’s how they do it: lots of water; don’t drink anything
stronger than a glass of wine, and then only with food; eat proper meals,
with plenty of fruit and plain yogurt; don’t snack; reduce portion sizes;
eat slowly and savour food that you love; have small amounts of dark
chocolate; don’t give up bread altogether; walk everywhere and don’t take
the lift. Oh, and French women rarely have seconds.
There are recipes, including one for the leek broth that kick starts the whole
cultural reprogramming. The diuretic qualities of leeks and their role in an
occasional detox has always been known to French women, according to
Guiliano. She shared this secret with the rest of the world, and the one
about keeping regular with a couple of prunes for breakfast, to the chagrin
of some of her French women friends.
The new book French Women for All Seasons isn’t a diet book either.
Despite identifying some foods as “offenders”; despite recommending as an
autumn lunch 250ml soup, one slice of wholemeal bread, 30g cheese and half a
papaya; and despite the ingenious “50 per cent solution”, whereby you eat or
drink only half of everything, the new book is about “how to change your
relationship with living”, Guiliano maintains. What wine to drink, how to
entertain like the French, and her memories of growing up in Alsace are
interspersed with recipes and guidelines, which are grouped into seasons, in
this lifestyle manual.
For the 33 years that she has lived in New York, the expat has been reforming
her American husband’s habits and giving advice to friends and staff. Her
books, she says, pass on what she learnt from her mother and her upbringing.
“Not in a condescending, arrogant French way,” she insists. “We’re not any
better; we are just different.”
And I suppose if other women will keep asking for your advice — about how to
tie a scarf, cook a skate wing or keep svelte while admitting that you love
chocolate — it’s only fair to share what you know. That’s why she wrote the
second book. “In the same way that you don’t need to eat like a pig,” she
says, “you don’t need a closet full of clothes. It’s about less is more.”
Though we will keep encouraging them, do French women really have enough
reasons to feel superior to the British and Americans? The widowed Madame
Clicquot, whose Champagne Guiliano promoted in the US, was no lightweight
according to 19th-century portraits of her, and, rather meanly, I point that
out to Guiliano.
That was then, when size indicated status, she replies. But you have only to
cross the Channel to Normandy to see that plenty of French people are
overweight, I try again. “A lot of overweight women in France aren’t
French.” My last try: Doesn’t anecdotal evidence suggest that young French
women substitute cigarettes for food? Unfortunately, the most of the
statistics are on her side. A recent European Commission report on health
and food indicates that the French have the second-lowest body mass index in
Europe. At least it galls the Gauls to be beaten by the Italians. “You know,
I’ve seen quite a lot of overweight women in Italy,” Guiliano can’t resist
saying. The numbers of women smokers is actually higher but they have a
lower incidence of lung cancer than British women. However, according to the
World Health Organisation, the French have higher cholesterol levels than
the UK, Italy, Greece or Spain. Aha! The two other women lunching together
at Roast are doing an admirable job of putting away lamb shanks and big
glasses of red. Guiliano observes the size of the plates. “In France people
do not overeat, restaurants don’t heap the plates with food,” she says. She
has ordered oysters “not because they are low in calories but because I love
them” and fish. I’m asked to believe that another time she might have had
lamb shank, or pigeon breast or pheasant, but not when she’s dining out
twice a day to promote the book. But she’s game enough to choose a glass of
English pinot noir because she always prefers to drink local.
She even takes a piece of bread, puts a smidgen of butter on it and has a
nibble or two. In the time it takes me to put away most of my main course,
she has been pausing between mouthfuls, keeping a fork of food suspended
halfway between the plate and her lips.
I’m seeing the 50 per cent solution in action. I’ve read that Guiliano and her
husband “rigorously apply” the formula to their evenings at home, ekeing out
half a bottle of wine between them. “If you implement the 50 per cent
solution routinely, your sense of a satisfying portion is bound to shrink.”
She drinks half her wine. I finish my glass. We share a salad. By eating twice
as much as my guest, I’ve invented the 150 per cent solution to keep waste
to a minimum. She doesn’t even eat all her halibut, let alone the mashed
potato underneath it. Meanwhile, I’m buttering bread, chewing, gulping my
wine, mopping up gravy, but at half my usual pace. Because what we might
call Anglo-Saxon gusto, she would consider mindless eating. “People eat so
fast," Guiliano observes. As for the way we drink . . . Even here, at
Roast, where the food gets her approval. “It’s pure poison,” she gasps,
looking at a Diamond Martini, the house special cocktail, which is a mix of
white chocolate liqueur, vodka and cointreau, “It’s frightening."”
Even if you begrudge being told how to eat, drink and live like a French
woman, you have to admit that preferring a glass of champagne to a sickly
Martini may be one example of how they get it right.
Don’t go totally bananas
I’ve noticed two things about bananas over the years. First, they are
on average twice as large as they were in my youth. Secondly, you peel it,
you’ll eat it — often in very big bites, making it disappear like a piglet
down a python.
So, applying the 50 per cent solution, I cut the banana in half before peeling
it, then wrap the exposed end of one half in plastic. I set that aside for
another time, perhaps for breakfast the next day or a later dessert.
With a bit of practice, half a 20th-twentieth century banana makes a most
satisfying dessert, especially when you treat it as you would a piece of
cake or pie. I don’t eat it with my fingers, I peel it and set it out on a
plate and eat it with a knife and fork.
I savour each bite and I put down my fork between bites. Eating slowly
enlarges the experience, alerting my brain to the banana in process.
(Hint: a sliver of banana tastes just as much like a banana as a big chunk.
Eat the smallest bites that let you register taste. Then have another.)
A lot of people I know would make that half banana vanish in 20 seconds, but
how much satisfaction are they getting? I bet I derive more satisfaction by
consuming my half mindfully over the course of a few minutes. Try It.
© 2006 Mireille Guiliano. This is extracted from French Women
for All Seasons (Chatto & Windus, £12.99), available from Books
First at £11.69. Call 0870 1608080 or visit
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
