The cooking competition involved two teams of trainee chefs producing gastronomic dishes for a 28-strong jury. There was duck with blackcurrants, and confit apples, all washed down by Esprit de Corps, a wine from the château in Provence, where the vines are tended by former members of the French Foreign Legion.
French television cameras were present, although this was no reality cooking show. The cameras from the M6 channel were there to record the “gala meal” staged by the legion last month as part of a drive to maintain a tradition of culinary “excellence” within the country’s armed forces.
The French army may not be the biggest in the world, or the best equipped, or even the most successful, but it provides the finest food to its troops, according to Paris. “People say you eat better in our army than in others,” said Thierry Marx, the Michelin-starred chef and chairman of France’s Hotel and Restaurant Industry Union.
His words came with the French army struggling to attract personnel — it fell 2,500 short of its target of 16,000 new recruits in 2023 — and keen to reverse the trend by highlighting the military’s gastronomic prowess.
Marx, who served in the French Third Parachute Regiment before becoming a cook, was speaking after returning from a three-day stint with the legion base in Castelnaudary in southern France where he had overseen the preparation of the dishes for the competition for trainee army chefs. “The meal seems to have gone down well,” he said.
The elite corps, which accepts troops from around the world, may be associated in popular imagination with the desperate soldiers who featured in Beau Geste, the 1924 novel by PC Wren, the British writer, but in real life, they enjoy fine food, at least according to Marx. “They eat French cuisine just like in the rest of the army,” he said.
Food has been central to French military planning at least since the days of Napoleon Bonaparte, who once said: “A soldier marches often, fights sometimes but eats every day.”
The French armed forces claim they have taken his words to heart, with a cooking school that trains 500 chefs every year to “develop their culinary creativity”.
“A soldier marches often, fights sometimes but eats every day.”
Philippe Jacob, central director of the army’s commission service, said French military cooks were capable of producing “gastronomic meals” to rival those of the country’s greatest chefs.
French officers insist that it is not only in the mess that soldiers eat well. Their combat rations, too, are “considered to be the best by all the world’s armies”, according to the armed forces ministry.
France has 10,000 or so troops posted abroad, although the number involved in combat missions has fallen since the withdrawal of 5,000 soldiers from west Africa, where their fight against Islamist terrorists was ended by the arrival of regimes hostile to Paris in recent years.
Packed into 3.3 pound boxes by robots at an army center in western France, the daily combat rations consist of 3,200 calories and three meals, including dishes that can be reheated. Each box costs $11.24 to produce.
Among the 14 menus on offer are tuna rillettes and chicken tagine, liver pâté and rabbit sauté, or deer terrine and cassoulet.
Stored in packets designed to keep the dishes fresh in temperatures of up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit, the rations are verified by the French army commission laboratory. It carried out 80,000 checks on 11,000 samples in 2019, the last year for which full figures are available. France says no other country takes such steps to avoid its soldiers falling victim to food poisoning.
“French rations have a very good reputation compared to the foreign rations, to the extent that they are bartered,” said the armed forces ministry on its website. “For example in 2010 in Afghanistan, a French ration could be exchanged for five American rations.”
Adam Sage is the Paris correspondent for The Times of London
