A Woman From the Country in Mitterrand\'s Kitchen

PARIS-As truffle season in France inches closer and the smell of damp leaves in the forest evokes the seasonal change in food, a film called “Les Saveurs du Palais” is arriving in Paris. The film's English title, “Haute Cuisine,” misses a beat: “Palais” means palace as well as palate in French. The story is based on a two-year period when François Mitterrand, then president of France, hired a personal cook, ruffling the feathers of the official in-house Elysée chef.

In 1988, Mr. Mitterrand had just been re-elected for another seven years and began his new term by proclaiming in front of an adviser: “I want a woman from the country in my kitchen!”

The search led to a recommendation by the Michelin-starred chef Joël Robuchon: Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, a cook from the Périgord region, who had founded Foie Gras Weekend, a pioneering class teaching the region's cuisine, as well as creating the École d'Art et Tradition Culinaire du Périgord, the area's first cooking school, and opening a restaurant in her home.

She was whisked to the Elysée where she was told that a high-level man in government needed a cook. When she found out who it was, she said she simply accepted then and there. The story of the next two years cooking for a president who had a passion for gastronomy is recreated in the film, with Catherine Frot as Ms. Mazet-Delpeuch and Jean d'Ormesson, a novelist and member of the Académie Française, playing the former president, in his first film role at age 87.

“I could talk to you about cuisine for hours,” says Mr. d'Ormesson as Mitterand. “I wonder if it wouldn't be better than taking care of politics.”

Food and politics have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries; treaties have been sealed and alliances forged over now-historical meals. And the culinary likes and dislikes of heads of state continue to fascinate, as did the gargantuan meals the former Chancellor He lmut Kohl of Germany had with former President Bill Clinton, or his intimate dinners with Mitterrand.

When Ms. Mazet-Delpeuch arrived at the Elysée, Joël Normand had already been the head chef for three presidents before Mitterrand, including Charles de Gaulle. In his book published in 2000, “La Vème Republique aux Fourneaux” (The 5th Republic Behind the Stove), Mr. Normand describes the Mitterrand era as a miserable one for him, recounting how the president hired a personal cook and never bothered to get to know his own chef. But Mitterrand was tired of the pomp and circumstance of the “official” kitchen, and told Ms. Mazet-Delpeuch that he wanted “the best France could offer”; food like what his grandmother cooked.

In a touching scene in the film, late one night Mitterrand wanders downstairs into the kitchen, where his cook serves him toasted bread carefully layered with slices of truffles she had received that morning from the Périgord, accompa nied by a glass of 1969 Château Rayas.

“When you cook you have a lot of power,” said Ms. Mazet-Delpeuch recently in a radio interview. “You have the power to make people happy or grumpy. … It was a great pleasure to find perfect products, cook them simply, staying close to the original flavors; to make the president and the people close to him happy.”