By Anne Swardson

Walking down a small street in my neighborhood the other day, I heard a sound that took me back decades: the noise of silverware clinking on a plate. Through the open windows, I could hear lunch. Three lunches, from three separate apartments.

The coronavirus lockdown has brought back, at least in some parts of the country, the old French tradition of family lunch at home. Recipe sites and women’s magazines (yes, women’s magazines) are filled with easy recipes for “le confinement,” as the lockdown is called. This professional chef suggests homemade chicken nuggets, among other things:

Parents take their children, whose schools have been closed for more than a month, grocery shopping — one of the outings authorized under the lockdown that can be done en famille.

It’s a turnaround from a turnaround. In 1975, around the time I first heard the silverware-on-plate noises in Paris, only 18 percent of all meals in France were eaten outside the home. But by 1998, when I wrote an article for The Washington Post about takeout in France, about half were. The demands of work and the rise of the female labor force had sent people away from the home lunch table.

Now many families are rediscovering midday meals together. Lilyana and her husband, David, both in finance, rarely ate lunch with their two teenage children except when on vacation. Since the lockdown was imposed March 17, all four sit down every lunchtime. They eat omelets, fish, pasta and other hot dishes, with plenty of fruit, vegetables and cheese. No sandwiches, ever. And they talk: about the coronavirus or the kids’ online schoolwork or other news.

It takes a lot of schedule-juggling to combine work and cooking, but it’s worth it, Lilyana said. Mia, 16, and Lev, 14, help choose the menu sometimes, and on some days no one wants to get up and leave the table. The children enjoy themselves so much “the problem will be to get them back to school” when it reopens, she said.

Cooking at home has changed culinary habits for some French people, said Elsa Orivel, a dietician and nutritionist. She works for an app called Foodvisor, which provides nutrition advice and coaching. Because users send in photos of what they are eating, she can see patterns changing – for the better.

“People are paying more attention to good ingredients, and because of import restrictions every ingredient is 100% French,” she said. “Because they aren’t spending on vacations or entertainment, they can up their food budget and go for higher quality.” The site is deluged with questions about lockdown eating, she said, including on how to stop snacking all day and what foods can help avoid stress.

The French have always taken lunch seriously. A survey in 2016 found that 43% of them spent more than 45 minutes each day eating lunch, far more than 10% for the British and 3% for Americans. At my former place of employment, everyone brought takeout lunch, French and Americans alike. The French employees enjoyed their meals sitting together around a table in the canteen, while the Americans gobbled it at their desks.

When the son of my friend, journalist Vivienne Walt, was in public nursery school in Paris, every one of his class lunches there included an hors d’oeuvre, salad, main course, cheese plate and dessert. As she wrote for Time in 2010, the school also sent home dinner suggestions that would match well with what the children had consumed at midday.

School in France is set to resume on May 11, on a rolling schedule. Parents who have come to enjoy lunching with their children can at least rest assured that the kids will get a good and complete meal – while they themselves are standing in line at the sandwich shop.