PERNOD, or, HOW TO HANDLE THE FRENCH

This is a guest post by Brian Bouldrey. Bouldrey wrote guest blogs for Stacy Simon before blogs were called blogs and instead went out as newsletters and suchwhat. They lived in the Humanities Residential College at Northwestern back in the early 80's and experimented with liqueurs then, too. Brian's latest book is The Peasant and the Mariner.

I was in Michigan this weekend visiting my grandmother and staying with my brother and his family. He has two children and is a former Marine drill sergeant and a prison guard, so he is constantly dishing out orders and instructions.  He was trying to give me directions in our home town about how to get to the pizza place because grandma still likes her pizza.  “You take Park Drive to Francis and take a right on Cooper and pass that one tree—“  I had no idea what he was talking about.  I have not lived in our home town for 35 years.  I have been in FRANCE more than I have been in our home town in the last 35 years.

They love to adhere to procedures in France, too, just like my brother.  You stand in one line to get your groceries, and then take a ticket to a second line to pay for them.  Do not take your shoes off anywhere.  Spinach must be cooked, never eaten raw.  Do not put ice in your wine, what are you, a monster? Dipping your bread in the sauce is gauche.  Gauche means left-handed, which is what I am.  While hiking through France on the road to Santiago de Compostela one year, I started a separate section in my journal called “How to Handle the French”:

• -          Don’t tell them you are Americain.  Tell them you are from the land that brought Charles Bronson to the French.
• -          Make them laugh by imitating the British by asking for “un nuage” (a cloud) of milk in your coffee.
• -          Compliment them on their backyard diorama of Lourdes, which takes up the entire back yard and is not at all weird.
• -          Don’t expect Irish whiskey in the “Irish Bar”.  Or Guinness.  But they will have a television with French tough guys boxing. And French boxers sport the 80’s mullet.
• -          If you are lost or need help, don’t say, “I’m lost” or “I need help”.  Say, “J’ai une probleme”: I have a problem.  The French love to help you solve a problem.  You’re lost?  Get out a map and say “I have a problem.  I need to get from here to here.”  They will practically walk you there.

But let’s face it: the French have a lot of nice things, and it’s worth learning how to handle the French in order to enjoy their nice things. It was while hiking from Vezelay to the Pyrenees that I learned to love Pernod, one of Stacy’s father’s liqueurs.  It’s actually an anise or anisette, one of those things that taste like licorice, so popular in southern Europe (along with Basque pacharan and the notorious green fairy, absinthe).  In bars and cafes in France, I had better luck ordering “anise” and then they would ask whether I preferred “Ricard” or “Pernod” because every time I said, “Pernod” or “Ricard”, they couldn’t understand what the heck I was saying.  So I would say, “I have a problem.  I need an anise.”  Then they’d say “Ricard? Pernod?” and I would point at my nose on that second choice. I’d be served about a jigger of it in a tidy little glass and presented with my own private carafe of water, like this:

It’s very nice with ice, but the French think ice is gauche.  Have you ever had a French waiter stand over your glass with those dang tongs and a bucket of ice, reluctantly dropping tiny cube after tiny cube as you beg “un otre?” over and over again, humiliating yourself?  The waiter makes you beg for each one, rolling his eyes.  This is not how to handle the French. Try it without ice.

The trick is to sit with your journal or a good book and slowly water down the Pernod, first, until it is “un nuage” (a cloud), and then drink it off just as slowly.  Drink a sip, pour in a little water.  Sip.  Pour in a little water, sip.  Like you’re making a homeopathic cure for what ails you (your love of ice cubes, apparently). If you can enjoy the taste of anise, you can make a shot of Pernod last as long as three hours!  On a warm evening in a small French town after a long day’s hiking, on a pilgrim’s budget, this is heavenly.  That’s a lot of people watching, in France.   You also get to look like a native.  People smile from the next table as if to say, “I am also a person who drinks Pernod and is not a financially advantageous customer in bars!” As if to say, “I also love the films of that genius, Charles Bronson!”

You can also put a half a shot of Pernod into a flute of champagne, as one would do with kir or (try this!) pomegranate molasses.  Oh, and since Stacy has a proper recipe in each blog post and because Stacy, like the French and my prison guard brother, loves to give orders and directions:

1 part Pernod

6 parts champagne

Or something like that—do I look like a food scientist?  This does not really have a name, so you can name it yourself.  I like to call anise in champagne, “Where’s Brian’s Pants?”  The bubbles of champagne go “straight to your head”, as they say, and if you’ve fortified it with a stronger alcohol like Pernod or pacharan or absinthe (Hemingway called an absinthe-champagne cocktail a “Death in the Afternoon”, after the bullfighting poem and the fact that you will die from drinking this), it is impossible to get no kick from champagne.  The nice thing is that champagne blows off quicker than hard liquor and even wine, at least in my system.  I may be delusional about this, let’s not do the science.

By the way, I'm guessing Stacy's husband Gerard will dislike Pernod.