JE NE SAIS QUOI

La Brasserie du Nord and Chicken and Chips

My great Indian doctor friend, Behjat, sadly no longer with us, was a man of great compassion and understanding and he used to make the best gin and tonics in the world. He used the same four ingredients that everybody uses - gin, tonic, lemon and ice - but his gins and tonic were incomparably better than those of anyone else and certainly were better than mine, even when I adopted his method of mixing, which was to add the lemon juice to the gin before you added the tonic. I think this was because he also added a secret fifth ingredient and that was ‘je ne sais quoi.’

'Je ne sais quoi' is French for ‘I don’t know what’ and it is the phrase best used to describe what turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.  It is applicable to anything that is made through the agency of human hand or human brain. By turns ‘je ne sais quoi’ may comprise love, imagination, flair, enthusiasm, art - or any such adjective.  'Je ne sais quoi' is particularly applicable in the kitchen.  A meal cooked with ‘je ne sais quoi’ is magical; a meal cooked without it may look identical, but will taste flat.

I was thinking of this yesterday coming back from a family party.  We had gathered in a large pub and restaurant near Bath to celebrate three noteworthy events: my elder daughter’s 40th birthday, the engagement of her sister-in-law,  and her father-in-law’s 80th birthday,  all of which occasions took place in sufficient proximity to one another to induce us to push the boat out. We were fourteen altogether, ranging in age from eight months to nine hundred and sixty months, (work it out!) and a very happy party was had by one and all.

Such parties bind the nation together.  It is difficult to imagine anyone in that group being thrown out or disowned by the other members.  In fact rather the reverse for I suggested that if we all sold our respective houses - we had six between us - we could afford to buy something so large that we would never ever get on each other’s nerves.  We would meet perhaps once a month like ships passing in the night in great corridors and by pooling our resources we might be able to employ people to do the ironing.

I have always fancied living in such a house though no-one else unfortunately shares my enthusiasm.  I think you could call it 'je ne sais quoi' applied to living.  It is, after all, what the musicians do in ‘Quartet’ that marvellous directorial debut film by Dustin Hoffman that I saw earlier in the week and which is worth a couple of hours of anyone’s time. It is not only Mr Hoffman's acting that boasts 'je ne sais quoi,' which, now that I come to think of it seems applicable to acting and theatre at least as much as it does to cooking. 

The only slightly disappointing thing about our day out was the food for which we paid an average British price of around £25 a head for something that sadly lacked this 'je ne sais quoi.'  (In France we should have paid a great deal less, despite their VAT and high social charges and the food might well - though not alas certainly - have been better.)  Still, it isn’t easy to say what this food actually lacked. It would have passed any culinary inspection but you had the feeling that the chef wouldn’t really have chosen to eat it himself. It looked pretty, but was devoid of sparkle, the ordinary rather than extraordinary.  The 'je ne sais quoi' wasn't there.

Note, this doesn’t mean exotic. A piece of dry toast can taste extraordinary, so can simple mashed potato and so can chicken and chips, which is what I chose for my main course on the grounds that I ought to be on fairly safe ground.  But chicken and chips is a dish that cries out for 'je ne sais quoi.'  I can remember from thirty-five years ago a chicken and chips in the basket served in the bar of the old Hand Hotel in Llangollen (Wales) and another chicken and chips eaten in ‘La Brasserie du Nord’ in Paris twenty years ago.  In this large busy restaurant they must have been serving one hundred portions of chicken an hour and yet the birds were succulent and truly magical.  More recently, down at the Mill, I can remember sitting on the sunny terrace of a little restaurant in Conques eating chicken and chips, so beautiful cooked and tasty and so carefully presented, that washed down with a splendid bottle of Gaillac rosé I thought that maybe I had already died and gone to Paradise.

My expectations were excessively raised perhaps by such memories.   The appearance of yesterday's chicken couldn’t be faulted; neither could the taste in any absolute sense it was just that somehow a vital ingredient was missing: the ingredient of 'je ne sais quoi.'

I flip through the paper at breakfast this morning. A headline says ‘Eight Easy Dishes. Restaurant Food at Home,’   but nowhere in the notes and instructions does the article mention ‘je ne sais quoi.’
In fact now that I come to think about it this ingredient is missing from a very great part of British life.  This wasn't always the case, but today we seem to have lost the ability to inject a little magic into what we do, preferring to settle for the ordinary, the conventional, the simply dull.  On this depressing thought I had better end.  Still the sun is shining, the cold weather has departed and spring will be here in a month or two.