The Long Lunch Still Matters Here

In a great many households here the evening meal is the light one. Something is put on the table, people eat it, and the day ends. The meal with weight is the one in the middle, and this is not a quaint survival. It is the sensible arrangement for a place where the hours between midday and four in high summer are unusable for anything else. The heat has to go somewhere in the day's design, and it goes into lunch.

So the length is the point rather than a side-effect of it. A meal occupying three or four hours is a container built to hold the hottest part of the day, and everything that has to be said between the people at the table gets said inside it. A business here will give an entire afternoon to a table because the afternoon was not otherwise available and the table is where the work is being done.

That work is not always announced. Families settle things at lunch: money, property, who is going to look after whom. The length is what lets a difficult subject be raised at the second course and returned to at the fourth, with ordinary conversation in between so nobody has to be confronted. Agreements are reached the same way, frequently without a document appearing at any point. The visitor's mistake is assuming that because nobody produced a folder, nothing happened.

The shape of the meal is what makes the duration possible, and it is worth understanding as a mechanism rather than as a menu. Something to start, a first course, a second course with its vegetable arriving separately, then cheese or fruit, then something sweet, then coffee, then, often, something after the coffee. Six or seven arrivals, each of them modest. Portions are calibrated to the number of plates, which is why the total quantity of food across a long lunch is frequently less than a visitor eats in one large main course elsewhere.

The gaps between the arrivals are the functional part. A three-hour lunch is not three hours of eating; it is five or six short bursts of eating with the good part in between, and the good part is why everybody is there. Plates arriving slowly is not slow service; it is the kitchen keeping time for the table, and a kitchen that has understood who is sitting in front of it lengthens or shortens the intervals without being asked.

Which is why compressing the meal does not make it efficient, it dismantles it. Order one plate and you get one plate and thirty-five minutes, and you leave thinking the food was fine and the whole business overrated. The structure was the product. The drinking is misread the same way: a bottle shared over four hours, with water and food arriving throughout, is not the same activity as the same bottle in an hour.

Visitors picture the social life of this lake as a sequence of restaurant tables because that is the only part they can see. In practice a large share of the serious entertaining happens in houses and on boats, and it is not principally about privacy. It is that the houses are the point: somebody who owns a terrace above the water with the whole basin in front of it did not buy it in order to eat somewhere else. The boat is the other venue, and it works because it moves, though that has its own logistics, and is a subject in itself.

So what an owner needs at lunchtime is usually not a reservation. It is a table that seats fourteen, shade over it by half past twelve, somebody who can shop properly, and a kitchen that can send food out to a terrace.

Children are at the table. They are not fed earlier and removed so the adults can talk; they sit through the whole thing, they are handed things off other people's plates, they get down and run about between courses and come back, and nobody treats the resulting noise as a problem to be managed. A child who has sat through several hundred long lunches has absorbed a good deal about how adults negotiate with each other, which is arguably the more durable education.

The other axis is the year, and it moves more sharply than visitors expect. What is on the table in April has little in common with what is on it in October: the spring is green and brief, high summer is cold and raw and about as little cooked as possible, the autumn turns heavy and brown with mushrooms, game, chestnuts, polenta, things dried or put away, and the winter is braises and long cooking, which is what you want in an unheated stone dining room. Lake fish belong in this too, and are better in some months than others.

So a cook here does not have a repertoire so much as a calendar, and the same is true of the kitchens worth eating in. A table that can produce anything at any time of year has told you something about how it buys.

They book dinner. Every night, in advance, in the good places, and then treat lunch as an interruption to sightseeing to be dealt with standing up. It is precisely the wrong way round, and it produces the commonest complaint about eating on this lake: that it was pleasant and somehow did not amount to anything.

Two reasons. The meal is built for the middle of the day and is diminished when it is squeezed into an evening with a bedtime at the end of it. And, more bluntly, after dark you cannot see the lake. You have travelled to a landscape, arranged to eat beside it, and chosen the hours in which it is invisible. The terrace that is the entire reason for the table is, at nine in the evening in October, a black rectangle with a candle on it.

The correction costs nothing. Give one day of a trip over to lunch entirely. Sit down at one, arrange nothing afterwards, let the afternoon go where it goes, and eat in the evening the way people who live here mostly do, lightly and without ceremony. On the day you get it right you will achieve nothing else at all, because that was the arrangement all along.