On kissing: how much, how often, how keenly

This weekend, I write about running the gauntlet of social kissing, plus I share a recipe for tender blanquette de veau.

The first kiss (detail), William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Anyone who’s visited France for more than a weekend knows that a peck is not just a peck, a kiss is not just a kiss. How and how many depends on where you are in the country. There’s even a helpful website (combiendebises.free.fr), a regional map, the result of thousands of French people responding to the question of how many kisses they give in their area. In most of France, two is plenty, though in the South West where I live, three is traditional. This isn’t always the case though, as when I bumped into a friend at a restaurant less than an hour from here and went in for that third kiss, he mumbled slightly awkwardly, “Oh, three, OK ,OK”. I need a more accurate map, ideally one broken down by communes.

If you think three is recklessly exuberant, look out. There are pockets, notably Orne, Yonne, Aube and Haute-Varenne, where four kisses are quite acceptable. I suppose everyone needs a hobby.

In parts of Brittany, one is seen as sufficient, thank you, we have butter and cheese to be getting on with so put your cheek away. In 2014, someone in the city of Brest in Finistère launched a Facebook campaign against the exponential growth of the double kiss, Groupement de Réhabilitation de l’Usage de la Bise Unique (Group for the Rehabilitation of the Use of the Single Kiss, GUBU to its friends). “In recent months and years this barbaric practice has taken a foothold in the city of Brest. It is difficult to know why and who is spreading this insidiously dangerous practice,” they fumed. Certainly, their tongues were firmly in their collective touch-me-once cheeks, but I’m a firm believer that all jokes have some basis in truth.

Maps courtesy of Le Pont, (c) Colin Armand

If only the dilemma stopped at how many. Once you’ve ascertained that, you’re left with the nose-bumping-glasses-skewing dilemma of which side first? I discussed this with my friend Arnaud Barge, director of Arnaud’s Language Kitchen (he teaches English-speaking people French in the least terrifying way possible). Do you start with the left cheek or the right? “Which cheek to extend first? It's right cheek first in three quarters of France - the north, on a line from Biarritz to Nancy, but left cheek first in the south-east quarter.”

And also, what do you call it? Bisou, bécot, se faire un schmoutz, se boujouter? There are many regional variations. For example, schmoutz is used in the areas where, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people spoke German dialects. Se boujouter is used in Normandy and it comes from boujou, a dialect word for bonjour.

But where did all this kissing come from? Along with aqueducts and excellent roads, it was the Romans who introduced the codified kiss to France. The osculum was a kiss between those of equivalent social rank, basium, a kiss between close friends (la bise), saevium, an erotic kiss. Everyone kissed away for centuries, until in the Fourteenth Century the Black Death showed up to ruin everyone’s fun. Cap doffing became the mediaeval equivalent of Covid-induced fist bumping. Kissing slowly crept back in polite and not-so-polite society during the Twentieth Century, reaching its zenith in the 1960s as a part of the phenomène de jeunisme, or the cult of youth. This is when men began kissing each other in social greeting, and it was no longer just the preserve of family members, female friends, and men with women.

However you faire la bise, there is one issue which is universally accepted. There must be no moisture, no dampness, no lips on cheeks. Cheeks brush each other lightly as you make the mwa noise, because though doing that can feel a little pretentious, doing it without the mwa feels just plain bizarre. Honestly, this is a comfort to me, after living for a while in Russia where even recent acquaintances would happily glide in for a Brezhnevian smacker on the lips.

One of the sadnesses – or blessings, depending on your need for personal space – of Covid was the absence of social kissing. After the mask mandate was lifted in March 2022, there was a renewed pleasure – for me, at least – from seeing, on street corners and café terraces, outside bars on Saturday night and mass on Sunday morning – people revelling in the bare-faced cheek-to-cheek of it all and going in for their traditional three kisses.

But the return of la bise was not welcomed by everyone. A headline on slate.fr read: ‘Désolé mais la bise va fair son retour’ (Sorry, but the kiss is coming back). A survey by Aladom published in Marie Claire magazine indicated a large proportion of the population didn’t intend to go back to their pre-mask kissing ways: 78 per cent said they’d stop kissing strangers to introduce themselves, and 50 per cent said they would stop using it to greet family members, friends and colleagues.

Personally, I’m not opposed to kissing, but as we make more French friends and socialise more frequently in their company – and I hope this isn’t enormously churlish - it’s not the codified social intimacy I mind, so much as the massive time suck. It’s impossible to slip into company and – worse – out of it, without causing a massive fuss.

When meeting and leaving a large group of friends, the rounds of kissing can take ages, tempting me to filer à l’anglaise, that is, to sneak away unnoticed. I don’t want to be rude, honestly I don’t. By having to make the social round of kisses before skipping away, I fear disrupting the natural flow of the evening and making others feel obliged to leave too.

At work, this can be particularly frustrating. A segment on the France 24 news channel in 2019 explored the idea that la bise was a big waste of time. Six minutes a day kissing your colleagues hello and goodbye equates to two-and-a-half days a year. I think most would rather have the time in lieu. And this is before you even get to the gendered element of it all. In 2018, Aude Picard-Wolff, mayor of Morette in the Auvergne, emailed her 73 municipal counsellors to say, ‘From now on, I would prefer to shake hands like men do’.

There are signs that the extravagant bise is dying out. Arnaud says, ‘The quatre bises is disappearing fast, and is most common in the over fifties. As a rule, the younger you are, the fewer kisses you give!’ When I ask him why, he says ‘I fear that the American model of the “hello hug” is taking over’. Oh, le hug. In one of our first lessons my French teacher, Diane, made it very clear that French people don’t hug, as though I was about to go into a swift embrace following our great success with the passé composé. They don’t even have a proper word for it. Câlin means cuddle, and while une étreinte can mean an embrace, it also means grip, seize, stranglehold. So – no doubt much to the annoyance of the Académie Française – many, especially the young, use le hug. Which will provide us all with something else to worry about, codify and explore, just as soon as we’ve sorted out la bise.

Blanquette de veau

Veal with onions and mushrooms

Blanquette de veau – please note Gracie, top right, keeping watch over the port.

Some recipes for blanquette de veau contain carrots, which is terribly avant garde. Include them if you want, but I like to remain faithful to the essential blanc-ness of a blanquette and leave them out, following the strict admonitions of Anne Willan in her excellent book, Country Cooking of France: “Traditionally all the ingredients are white: veal, baby onions, button mushrooms, white wine, and crème fraîche. The carrots that sometimes slip in should not be there.” Got it.

When I was writing this recipe, I drew inspirations from blancquettes I have eaten, dreamed about and read about, as we all do, in that delicious daisy chain from one stove to another. My recipe here is influenced most by Anne Willan’s recipe, and that of French chef, Daniel Boulud, though he finishes his with sweetbreads and truffles, which I do not.

One of the things I love about blanquette de veau is that it feels both homey and chic at the same time. It’s a comforting thing to put on a plate after a hard day, but it’s smart enough to serve when you want to feel fancy – truffles or no truffles.

Serves 4-6