Get Stuffed - Le pique-nique

The wicker hamper is packed, a sunny yellow damask tablecloth neatly folded at the bottom. On top: two wineglasses, plates and forks, a bottle of good chardonnay Gismondi recommended in last week’s column, a baguette, maybe some buttery brie, baskets of local strawberries and a container of smoked wild salmon. Someone will invariably forget the corkscrew, but otherwise this looks like the start to another perfect picnic on the banks of Lost Lake.

But this isn’t your usual picnic. Or it is, and far more. For our hamper is also bearing all the icons and cultural baggage associated with our understanding of the picnic – or le pique-nique, as the French originally called it.

To begin with, there’s come to be an allure, a piquancy of sorts, about anything pique-ishly named, a fact not overlooked by the co-generators of this humble newsmagazine – and no, I’m not bucking for a raise. However, the etymology of "pique-nique" starts hazily in France in the late 1600s with no definitive explanation of why and where the term arose, and certainly no indication that it has anything to do with things piquant. Most likely it was simply a playful rhyming duplication of the French verb "pique", meaning "to pick".

And what else do we do on a picnic, but pick ants from the tablecloth, burrs from our socks, seeds from the watermelon, and bits of this and that from the proffered offerings scattered among the tangle of legs and elbows (the picnic table being a relatively recent but welcome invention for anyone over 40).

In one of those peculiar reversals of status, le pique-nique started humbly as a meal taken outdoors by peasants in France. It spread to Germany (a description of a "piquenic" near Hanover was recorded in 1748) and to Sweden. But once the idea moved across the channel to England (we have one "Miss Knight" writing in her autobiography of 1777 of going to a little country house outside Toulon in 1777 for a pique nique; no doubt she told everyone about it when she returned to England) the upper class rubbed its collective hands together and said, oh goodie, let us abandon our fine oak tables and comfortably upholstered chairs and drag some hinds of deer outdoors and sit on the ground.

The early 1800s in England saw the rise of fashionable Pic Nic Societies which hosted Pic Nic suppers (all important terms being suitably capitalized) in which each member drew a lot obliging her, or him, to provide the dish indicated. "The rich," recorded one sour observer, who likely never received an invite, "have their sports, their balls and their parties of pleasure and their pic nics."

This is likely when the idea took root of picnic as something desirable and genteel, with all the attendant ideas of leisure and class hooked in. As in, you’re no bumbly coarse-skinned peasant with limited life span working your buns off from dawn to dusk in a dirty field. No, you have oodles of time to pack all those fiddly containers and freezer packs so no one gets food poisoning from the mayo, and, in your case, a plastic checkered tablecloth, and get the whole damn family into the van to get over there before all the spots are taken.

No, wait – those are those other picnics.

We’ve got a wicker basket with chardonnay and a good tablecloth. And even when we forget the corkscrew, we’re still heading out in our mind’s eye to one of those idyllic light-dappled meadows, where the empty wine glasses just might take a tumble across that damask while we feed each other fresh berries.

So when did we add the wine glasses and the piquant idea of romance to picnic?

It’s pretty inextricably tied to our notion that all things romantic are French, which brings us to a cultural fork in the road: We must consider one French painting and one French illusion for a minute.

Even if you’ve never visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, you’ve likely seen a reproduction of Édouard Manet’s Déjeuenr sur l’Herbe. It’s a fabulous big image of a sun-dappled forest. Front and centre: le pique-nique featuring two young gentlemen in dark suits befitting gentlemen of the 1860s flanking one very naked young woman. She gazes frankly at us, rather unconcerned about her lack of clothing, including her bare legs intertwining the gentlemen’s clothed ones.

Ooh la la, c’est un scandale! Had Manet gone mad? Everyone in 1860s Paris knew you had to paint a nude in a classical setting. The provocative subject and the unusual spontaneous painting technique all added up to an image with a lot of clout and staying power, including that basket of fruit and empty wineglasses tumbling across the messed up tablecloth.

As for the mythic romance tied to France and all things French, I hate to tell you that the myth is really a construction. But it is. Post-World War II, the birth rate in France was so low, the French government hired a series of photographers to set up a series of publicity shots portraying handsome young French models and actors in romantic clenches. The idea: get young couples in the mood to reverse the declining population trend.

Some poor misguided sot shared the images with a big New York newsmagazine, which presented them as photojournalism, not p.r. And we bought it, lock stock and barrel: Ooh, zose Frenchmen, zey are so romantique.

But those beautiful archetypal black and white 1940s photos we’ve all seen on postcards, in posters, in washrooms and student apartments – the couple kissing on the banks of the Seine, the couple kissing in front of the Arc de Triomphe, – they’re all fakes, posseurs, ersatz. So much for the city of love.

But not really. We just can’t shake the image, can we, even when we know better.

So grab your wicker basket and your wineglasses and baguette and whatever else you need for your perfect, romantic, leisurely interlude on a perfect summer afternoon. I say, vive le France and vive le pique-nique, ants, broken cork and all.

Picnics never really go out of fashion, they simply mutate. The idea of picnic is currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, especially amongst young urbanites – sort of a return to seemingly simpler, more leisurely, romantic times (see above). Witness: one of the best selling gift items at Leslie Stowe Fine Foods in Vancouver are the wicker picnic hampers.

Riding this trend, Arsenal Pulp Press has just published The Urban Pi c nic , by John Burns and Elisabeth Caton, which serves up a slice of cultural anthropology on the picnic plus recipes from a gang of celeb cooks, including west coasties, Umberto and Rob Feeney.

I’m not sure how you feel about assembling Nigella Lawson’s Mint Julep Peaches, but personally, I can’t go to a picnic without a pound of potato salad – and a good baguette. Must be the French-Canadian influence.

Now, I’ve got a couple of fail-safe approaches to what I’ve been told are fabulous potato salads, and I’m sure you do too. But when I came across this recipe from the Cordelli family in Norwalk, Connecticut, I had to share it. Not everyday do you get to use enough mayo to give an elephant a heart attack, and the pesto sounds like a piquant update to a picnic icon. Plus boiling the eggs with the potatoes will save time and help assure your position in the leisure class.

Connecticut potato salad

4 lb red potatoes

8 oz pesto

6 eggs

Grated Romano cheese

Mayonnaise

Cut up the potatoes, leaving the skin on. Put them and the eggs into salted boiling water for about 15 minutes, until the potatoes are cooked. Immediately immerse them all in cold water until they’re cool. Peel and chop the eggs and add them and the pesto to the potatoes. Sprinkle liberally with cheese and add enough mayonnaise "to give an elephant a heart attack" (you decide how much that might be). Refrigerate overnight.