1. Our Ancestors, the Gauls
Brun, Jean-Pierre, and Fanette Laubenheimer, eds. La viticulture en Gaule. Special edition of Gallia 58, no. 1 (2001).
Laubenheimer, Fanette. “Le vin gaulois.” Revue des Études Anciennes 91, nos. 3–4 (1989): 5–22.
1. “Et de vin, divin on devient.” From François Rabelais, Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel: nouvelle edition augmentée (St. Julien en Genevois: Arvensa Editions, 2015), 388.
2. Diodorus of Sicily, a Greek historian of the first century B.C.E., wrote in his epic Library of History (book V, chapter 26.3): “The Gauls are exceedingly addicted to the use of wine and fill themselves with the wine which is brought into their country by merchants, drinking it unmixed, and since they partake of this drink without moderation by reason of their craving for it, when they are drunken they fall into a stupor or a state of madness. Consequently, many of the Italian traders, induced by the love of money which characterizes them, believe that the love of wine of these Gauls is their own godsend. For these transport the wine on the navigable rivers by means of boats and through the level plain on wagons, and receive for it an incredible price; for in exchange for a jar of wine they receive a slave, getting a servant in return for the drink.”
3. It is estimated that wine imports from Italy may have reached 2.6 million gallons a year, shipped to the ports of Marseille and Narbonne and transported into the interior along France’s many navigable rivers. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015), 151.
4. Livy, History of Rome, trans. Canon Roberts (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1912), vol. 5, chapter 33.
5. Rod Phillips offers an excellent overview of this evolution in “Wine and Adulteration,” History Today 50, no. 7 (2000): 31–37.
2. The Virgin of the Kidney
Tallon, Alain, and Catherine Vincent. Histoire du christianisme en France. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014.
1. There is scant historical evidence of this practice, but in Limoges this is the conventional explanation for why baby Jesus is gnawing on a kidney.
3. Barbarians at the Plate
Heather, Peter. Empires and Barbarians. London: Macmillan, 2009.
Lebecq, Stéphane. “Vivent les Mérovingiens!” French Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (1996): 765–77.
Scully, D. Eleanor, and Terence Scully. Early French Cookery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. New York: Routledge, 2014.
1. On the use of food in distinguishing classical civilizations from barbarians, see Massimo Montanari, “Food Systems and Models of Civilization,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 69–78.
2. The Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire, survived for another thousand years.
3. Excerpted in Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 4. From a standard translation by Shirley Howard Weber, 1924.
4. Ode to Gluttony
Le Jan, Régine. Les Mérovingiens. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2015.
Moulinier, Laurence. “Un témoin supplémentaire du rayonnement de sainte Radegonde au Moyen Age? La Vita domnae Juttae (XIIe siécle).” Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest 15, nos. 3–4 (2001): 181–97.
Nisard, Charles. “Des rapports d’intimité entre Fortunat, sainte Radegonde et l’abbesse Agnès.” Comptes Rendus des Séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 33, no. 1 (1889): 30–49.
Venantius Fortunatus. Poems to Friends. Translated by Joseph Pucci. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2010.
1. Venantius Fortunatus, Poems to Friends, 95.
2. Le Jan, Les Mérovingiens.
3. Venantius Fortunatus, Poems to Friends, 101.
4. Ibid., 98.
5. Ibid., 95–96.
5. Left Behind: The Goats of Poitou
Blanc, William, and Christophe Naudin. Charles Martel et la Bataille de Poitiers: de l’histoire au mythe identitaire. Paris: Libertalia, 2015.
Hoyland, Robert. In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
1. Statistic from the French Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fishing, Regional Directorate for Food, Agriculture and Forests, “Poitou-Charentes: premier pôle français de production de fromage de chèvre,” July 2010, agreste.agriculture.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf_R5410A14.pdf.
2. On this paradox of division and union, see Massimo Montanari, “Food Models and Cultural Identity,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 191.
3. FranceAgriMer, La filière lait de chèvre 2008–2013: une difficile adaptation de l’offre à la demande (Montreuil: FranceAgriMer, 2014).
6. The Sweetest King
Einhard and Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of Charlemagne. Translated by David Ganz. London: Penguin, 2008.
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. 2nd ed. Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. See esp. chapter 1, “Collecting Honey.”
1. Terroir is a quintessentially French concept with no exact English equivalent. It is an attempt to capture the ways in which the natural environment influences the characteristics and taste of a particular product, and serves as the basis for the French AOC system of geographical delimitation. Key elements of terroir include climate, average rainfall and sunlight, topography, and soil geology. Skeptics of the concept do exist, especially outside Europe. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015), 737.
2. The University of Leicester’s School of Historical Studies offers a useful translation of the Capitulare de villis: www.le.ac.uk/hi/polyptyques/capitulare/latin2english.html.
3. Statistics from Union Nationale de l’Apiculture Française, www.unaf-apiculture.info.
7. They Came from the Sea
Brownworth, Lars. The Normans: From Raiders to Kings. London: Crux Publishing, 2014.
Lafont, Olivier. “Le rôle du port de Rouen dans le commerce des drogues et des médicaments avec les Amériques.” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 95, no. 359 (2008): 305–10.
1. “Bénédictine: de l’élixir de santé à la liqueur,” Ouest France, September 27, 2013.
8. Feudal Fare
Birlouez, Eric. À la table des seigneurs, des moines et des paysans du Moyen Âge. Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France, 2015.
Montanari, Massimo. “Peasants, Warriors, Priests: Images of Society and Styles of Diet.” In Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 178–85. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
1. A lack of precise data for the feudal era means that exact breakdowns of population by class are not definitive, but the percentages used in this chapter are those conventionally accepted by historians.
2. On this symbolic role of meat, see Montanari, “Peasants, Warriors, Priests,” 180. The association of a carnivorous diet with power would reemerge in the heyday of French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as discussed in Deborah Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet’: Nutrition, Culture and Dietary Practices in France and French Equatorial Africa, c. 1890s to 1920s,” Food and Foodways 17, no. 1 (2009): 1–28.
9. Of Monks and Men
Jotischky, Andrew. A Hermit’s Cookbook: Monks, Food and Fasting in the Middle Ages. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
Racinet, Philippe. Moines et monastères en Occident au Moyen Âge. Paris: Ellipses, 2007.
1. “Chapter 40: On the Measure of Drink,” The Rule of Saint Benedict, http://www.osb.org/rb/text/rbemjo2.html#40.
2. From the annual reports of APPED (Association de Promotion des Poissons des Etangs de la Dombes), available at www.poissonsdedombes.fr/qsn/apped-association-de-promotion-du-poisson-des-etangs-de-dombes-8.php.
3. Catherine Jacquemard and Marie-Agnès Lucas-Avenel, “Des poissons, des mots et des signes: les signes monastiques des noms de poissons au xie siècle,” Annales de Normandie 62, no. 2 (2012): 140.
4. Michael Casey, ed. and trans., Cistercians and Cluniacs: St Bernard’s Apologia to Abbot William (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 1970), 55.
5. Ibid., 56.
10. Fighting for Plums
Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Barber, Malcolm, and Keith Bate, eds. and trans. The Templars: Selected Sources (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Nicholson, Helen. The Knights Templar: A New History. Gloucestershire, England: Sutton Publishing, 2004.
1. FranceAgriMer, Les filières des fruits et legumes, Données 2014. Montreuil: FranceAgriMer, 2016.
2. Nirmal Dass, ed. and trans., The Deeds of the Franks and Other Jerusalem-Bound Pilgrims: The Earliest Chronicle of the First Crusades (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 103.
3. Francesco Franceschi et al., “The Diet of Templar Knights: Their Secret to Longevity?” Digestive and Liver Disease 46, no. 7 (2014): 577–78.
11. The Wine That Got Away
Johnson, Hugh. The Story of Wine. London: Mandarin, 1991.
Pernoud, Régine. Aliénor d’Aquitaine. Paris: Le Grand Livre du Mois, 1994.
Pitte, Jean-Robert. Bordeaux/Burgundy: A Vintage Rivalry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Soyez, Jean-Marc. Quand les Anglais vendangeaient l’Aquitaine: d’Aliénor à Jeanne d’Arc. Bordeaux: Les Dossiers d’Aquitaine, 2013.
1. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante (Paris: Charpentier, 1860), 363. Translation by authors.
2. Yves Renouard, “Les conséquences de la conquête de la Guienne par le roi de France pour le commerce des vins de Gascogne,” Annales du Midi: Revue Archéologique, Historique et Philologique de la France Méridionale 61, no. 1 (1948): 18.
3. This frequently related anecdote is usually attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century English courtier, whose De nugis curialium is a rich source of courtly lore, of varying reliability. Walter Map, De nugis curialium V, ed. and trans. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 450.
4. From the Diary of Samuel Pepys, April 10, 1663, available online at: www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1663/04/10/.
5. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015), 89.
12. The Vegetarian Heresy
Aué, Michele. The Cathars. Translated by Alison Hebborn and Juliette Freyche. Vic-en-Bigorre: Societé MSM, 2006.
Fernand, Niel. Albigeois et Cathares. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010.
O’Shea, Stephen. The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars. New York: Walker and Company, 2000.
1. For a detailed look at the practices and questions typical in the Inquisition, see Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller, eds., Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy (Suffolk, England: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), especially chapter 6 by Mark Pegg (“Questions About Questions: Toulouse 609 and the Great Inquisition of 1245–6”) and chapter 7 by Peter Biller (“Why No Food? Waldensian Followers in Bernard Gui’s Practica inquisitionis and culpe”). The latter shows that Waldensians, another heretical sect, were not asked questions about food because they were known to eat a normal diet.
13. A Papal Red
Lefranc, Renée. À la table du Pape d’Avignon. Avignon: Editions RMG-Palais des Papes, 2005.
Renouard, Yves. La papauté à Avignon. Paris: J.-P. Gisserot, 2004.
1. In fact, the AOC system was partly based on a prototype for wine-production rules introduced by Châteauneuf-du-Pape producers in the 1920s, which established standards for the wine based on geographical delimitation, grape varieties, and pruning methods.
2. In the preface to La Farandoulo, a short book by a fellow poet from Avignon, Anselme Mathieu.
3. Such extravagant table settings required extraordinary precautions: guests were only allowed to depart the palace when the keeper of the dishware verified that all the settings had been retrieved. Lefranc, À la table du Pape d’Avignon, 49.
14. The White Gold of Guérande
de Person, Françoise. Bateliers contrebandiers du sel. Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France, 1999.
Huvet-Martinet, Micheline, “Faux-saunage et faux-sauniers dans la France de l’Ouest et du Centre à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (1764–1789).” Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 85, no. 3 (1978).
Kurlansky, Mark. Salt: A World History. New York: Walker and Company, 2002.
1. French Ministry of Agriculture and Food, “Le sel de Guérande,” June 15, 2016, agriculture.gouv.fr/alimentation/le-sel-de-guerande-label-rouge.
2. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, 2nd ed. (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 414–20.
3. Kurlansky, Salt, 231.
4. Huvet-Martinet, “Faux-saunage et faux-sauniers dans la France de l’Ouest,” 383.
15. Legacy of a Black Prince
Contamine, Philippe. La Guerre de Cent Ans. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.
Mullot, Henry, and Joseph Poux. “Nouvelles recherches sur l’itinéraire du Prince Noir à travers les pays de l’Aude.” Annales du Midi: Revue Archéologique, Historique et Philologique de la France Méridionale 21, no. 83 (1909): 297–311.
Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Random House, 1978.
1. Jeanne Barondeau, ed., Curnonsky et ses recettes d’autrefois (Munich: Édition Curnonska, 2013), in the chapter titled “Un cassoulet mémorable” (Kindle location 351 of 1591).
2. George Payne Rainsford James, A History of the Life of Edward the Black Prince, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1836), 18.
3. Prosper Montagné, Le Festin occitan (Carcassonne: Éditions d’Art Jordy, 1930).
16. The Vinegar of the Four Thieves
Cantor, Norman. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. New York: Perennial, 2002.
Carpentier, Élisabeth. “Autour de la peste noir: famines et épidémies dans l’histoire du XIVe siècle.” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 17, no. 6 (1962): 1062–92.
Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. New York: John Day Company, 1969.
1. Over the years, estimates of the total death toll have ranged from one-third to one-half of the population, an endeavor complicated by a lack of data and the fact that there was significant regional variation.
2. Ziegler, The Black Death, 64. Ziegler acknowledges that the figure seems “improbably high” but notes that mortality rates were much higher in the port cities where the plague first arrived than farther inland.
3. For a translation of contemporary accounts of the massacre at Strasbourg, see Fordham University’s Jewish History Sourcebook, “The Black Death and the Jews 1348–1349 C.E.,” available at sourcebooks.fordham.edu/jewish/1348-jewsblackdeath.asp.
4. For a fascinating look at theriac and other plague remedies, see Christiane Nockels Fabbri, “Treating Medieval Plague: The Wonderful Virtues of Theriac,” Early Science and Medicine 12, no. 3 (2007): 247–83.
5. For a contemporary explanation of the causes of the plague, including the dangers of the “hot and moist” body, see “The Special Challenges of Plague (1): The Report of the Paris Medical Faculty, October 1348,” Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 414–19.
6. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante (Paris: Charpentier, 1860), 344–46.
17. The Cheese of Emperors and Mad Kings
Guenée, Bernard. La folie de Charles VI, roi bien-aimé. Paris: CNRS, 2016.
Marre, Eugène. Le Roquefort. Rodez: Carrère, 1906.
1. Interestingly, this “glass delusion” was somewhat fashionable at the time, afflicting a number of French nobles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Descartes mentioned it in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), saying that to deny his own bodily existence would make him as mad as those who “imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass.”
18. La Dame de Beauté and the Mushroom Mystery
Duquesne, Robert. Agnès Sorel: ‘La Dame de Beaulté.’ Paris: Michel, 1909.
Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Random House, 1978.
Wellman, Kathleen. Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
1. Wellman, Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France, 25.
2. The town of Castillon lends its name to the delightful AOC red wine Castillon Côtes de Bordeaux. In the twentieth century, the town renamed itself Castillon-la-Bataille (the Battle of Castillon).
3. At that time, mercury was often used to treat the kind of parasitic infections that Agnès apparently suffered from.
19. Fruits of the Renaissance
MacDonald, Stewart. “Why Did the Habsburg-Valois Conflict Last So Long?” History Review 33 (1999).
McPhee, John. “Oranges.” New Yorker, May 7, 1966.
Saint Bris, François. “‘Nel palazzo del Clu’: 500 Years of History.” In Leonardo da Vinci & France: Chateau du Clos Lucé, Parc Leonardo da Vinci, Amboise, exhibition catalog, edited by Carlo Pedretti, 19–26. Available at www.vinci-closluce.com/file/francois-saint-bris-nel-palazzo-del-clu-gb.pdf.
Salmon, J. H. M. “Francis the First of France: Le Roi Chevalier.” History Today 8, no. 5 (1958).
1. François Rabelais, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, book 1, chapter 17 (Paris: Chez Dalibon, 1823), 328–29.
2. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, 2nd ed. (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 513.
20. The Mother Sauces
Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. “Writing Out of the Kitchen: Carême and the Invention of French Cuisine.” Gastronomica 3, no. 3 (2003): 40–51.
Flandrin, Jean-Louis. “Seasoning, Cooking, and Dietetics in the Late Middle Ages.” In Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 313–27. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
1. Marie-Hélène Baylac, Dictionnaire gourmand: du canard d’Apicius à la purée de Joël Robuchon (Paris: Omnibus, 2014).
2. Flandrin, “Seasoning, Cooking, and Dietetics in the Late Middle Ages,” 314.
3. Jean-Louis Flandrin, “Le goût et la nécessité: sur l’usage des graisses dans les cuisines d’Europe occidentale (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle),” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 38, no. 2 (1983): 376.
4. Bonnefons’s cookbook Les délices de la campagne (1654) was enormously influential for early modern cooking. Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 60–63.
5. These factors are explained in more depth in Jean-Louis Flandrin, “From Dietetics to Gastronomy: The Liberation of the Gourmet,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 418–32; and Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste, chapter 3.
6. Like many of Talleyrand’s best bons mots, the quip has been attributed to him without citation for decades, so may be apocryphal.
7. Jean Vitaux, Les petits plats de l’histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), 92.
21. Conquest and Chocolate
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.
Huyghe, Edith, and François-Bernard Huyghe. Les coureurs d’épices. Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages, 2002.
Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Patemotte, Stephanie, and Pierre Labrude. “Le chocolat dans quelques ouvrages français de pharmacie et de médecine des XVIIe, XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: ses effets fastes et néfastes avérés ou supposés.” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie 91, no. 338 (2003): 197–210.
1. In fact, France’s most notable achievement in the centuries-long European spice competition was its breach of the powerful Dutch monopoly in the late eighteenth century, when the aptly named colonial administrator Pierre Poivre covertly acquired clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon plants from the Dutch East Indies and established spice crops on the French territories of Mauritius, Réunion, and the Seychelles.
2. Conventional food folklore often states that the Spanish radically transformed Mesoamerican chocolate from bitter to sweet, but in fact local populations already sometimes sweetened their cacao drinks with honey, so the addition of sugar was more of a substitution than a transformation. See Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 684.
3. Honoré de Balzac, Pathologie de la vie sociale (Paris: Éditions Bossard, 1822), 230. Balzac argued here that “the destiny of a people depends on its food and diet,” noting that eau-de-vie destroyed the American Indians, tobacco eventually brought low the Turks and the Dutch, and Russia was “an aristocracy sustained by alcohol.” Translations by authors.
4. For a sense of the broader social meaning of this chocolate debate, see Beth Marie Forrest and April L. Najjaj, “Is Sipping Sin Breaking Fast? The Catholic Chocolate Controversy and the Changing World of Early Modern Spain,” Food and Foodways 15, no. 1–2 (2007): 31–52.
5. Syndicat du Chocolat, “Chiffres clés 2016 des industries de la chocolaterie,” March 15, 2017, www.syndicatduchocolat.fr/conference-de-presse-du-syndicat-du-chocolat.
6. For an in-depth report, see Brian O’Keefe, “Inside Big Chocolate’s Child Labor Problem,” Fortune, March 1, 2016, fortune.com/big-chocolate-child-labor. The NGO Slave Free Chocolate, a coalition of organizations working to end child labor on West African cocoa farms, publishes a list of chocolate firms that do not depend on child labor.
22. The Culinary Contributions of Madame Serpent
Cloulas, Ivan. Catherine de Médicis. Paris: Fayard, 1979.
Wellman, Kathleen. Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
1. Like many food legends, this quote may be too good to be true: it is possible that Luther was asking to be saved from the hay fork, a formidable weapon at that time.
2. Susan Pinkard suggests that this mythology surrounding Catherine may have originated in the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers attempted to discredit an overly extravagant noble cuisine by associating its Italian influences with her notorious historical reputation. Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 189.
23. A Chicken in Every Pot
Gandilhon, René. “Henri IV et le vin.” Bibliothéque de l’École des Chartes 145, no. 2 (1987): 383–406.
Tierchant, Hélène. Henri IV: roi de Navarre et de France. Bordeaux: Editions Sud Ouest, 2010.
1. Bernard Lonjon, Colette, la passion du vin (Paris: Éditions du Moment, 2013), 15.
2. Béthune, Maximilien de, duc de Sully, Economies royales, ed. Joseph Chailley (Paris: Guillaumin & Cie., 1820), 26.
3. For a sublime firsthand account of the Salon International de l’Agriculture, see Lauren Collins, “Come to the Fair,” New Yorker, April 4, 2016.
4. Letter from Henry IV to Monsieur de Batz, in Recueil des lettres missives de Henri IV (Paris: Berger de Xivrey, Imprimerie Royale, 1843), 122.
24. The Chestnut Insurgency
Bruneton-Governatori, Ariane. “Alimentation et idéologie: le cas de la châtaigne.” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 39, no. 6 (1984): 1161–89.
Crackanthorpe, David. The Camisard Uprising: War and Religion in the Cévennes. Oxford, England: Signal Books, 2016.
Jouhaud, Christian. “‘Camisards! We Were Camisards!’: Remembrance and the Ruining of Remembrance Through the Production of Historical Absences.” History & Memory 21, no. 1 (2009): 5–24.
Monahan, W. Gregory. “Between Two Thieves: The Protestant Nobility and the War of the Camisards.” French Historical Studies 30, no. 4 (2007): 537–58.
1. From “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, 1520: Proposals for Reform, Part II,” section 19. In C. M. Jacobs, trans., Works of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman Company, 1915).
2. Centre National Interprofessionnel de l’Economie Laitière (CNIEL), L’économie laitière en chiffres (Paris: 2017), 184.
3. It is not clear whether the name Camisard was derived from their practice of night attacks (camisades) or the fact that they fought in plain shirts (camisoles). The rebel fighters themselves, most of them devout young men, preferred to be known as les enfants de Dieu (the children of God). Crackanthorpe, The Camisard Uprising, 99–103.
4. Bruneton-Governatori, “Alimentation et idéologie,” 1161.
5. Jean-Baptiste Lavialle, Le châtaignier: Étude scientifique du châtaignier (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1906), 34.
6. Bruneton-Governatori, “Alimentation et idéologie”; French Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Statistique Agricole, December 2013, agreste.agriculture.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/memo13_integral.pdf.
7. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (New York: Scribner, 1910), 144. This is not only one of Stevenson’s earliest works, first published in 1879, but one of the first books to describe hiking through the countryside as an activity of leisure, not necessity.
25. The Bitter Roots of Sugar
Blackburn, Robin. “Anti-Slavery and the French Revolution.” History Today 41, no. 11 (1991): 19–25.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
Stein, Robert Louis. The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Viles, Perry. “The Slaving Interest in the Atlantic Ports, 1763–1792.” French Historical Studies 7, no. 4 (1972): 529–43.
1. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates); Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century, 20.
2. Scholars continue to assemble detailed statistics about the slave trade, with new documents continuing to come to light today. See Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century, 23; David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 119–38.
3. Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century, 107.
4. Voltaire, Candide, ou L’optimisme (Paris: G. Boudet, 1893), 94. Translation by authors.
5. Today, the Institut Benjamin Delessert continues his legacy by awarding prizes for research in nutrition.
6. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, 2nd ed. (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 503.
26. The Liquor of the Gods
Delamain, Robert. Histoire du cognac. Paris: Delamain & Boutelleau, 1935.
Jarrard, Kyle. Cognac: The Seductive Saga of the World’s Most Coveted Spirit. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
Prioton, Henri, and Prosper Gervais. La culture de la vigne dans les Charentes et la production du cognac. Paris: Librairie J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1929.
1. Hugo’s quote may be apocryphal, as the original source is difficult to verify, but it was attributed to him as early as 1896, in the newspaper L’Avenir d’Arcachon.
2. Whisky consumption statistics from Euromonitor (2015).
3. Brian Primack et al., “Alcohol Brand Appearances in US Popular Music,” Addiction 107, no. 3 (2012): 557–66. Ironically, Busta Rhymes’s manager later confessed to the New York Times that “Busta actually drinks Hennessy.” Lynette Holloway, “Hip-Hop Sales Pop: Pass the Courvoisier and Count the Cash,” New York Times, September 2, 2002.
27. The Crescent Controversy
Chevallier, Jim. August Zang and the French Croissant: How Viennoiserie Came to France. Chez Jim Books: 2009.
Isom-Verhaaren, Christine. Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011.
1. Gilbert Pytel, “Comment reconnaître une viennoiserie industrielle d’une artisanale?” L’Express, October 6, 2016.
2. Laurent Binet, “‘Touche pas à mon pain au chocolat!’ The Theme of Food in Current French Political Discourses,” Modern & Contemporary France 24, no. 3 (2016): 247–48.
28. War and Peas
Cobban, Alfred, “The Art of Kingship: Louis XIV, A Reconsideration,” History Today 4, no. 3 (1954): 149–158.
De Courtois, Stephanie. Le potager du Roi. Versailles: Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paysage, 2003.
1. Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 130.
2. Correspondance complète de Madame duchesse d’Orléans née Princesse Palatine, mère du régent, vol. 2 (Paris: Charpentier, 1857), 37. Translation by authors.
3. Original quote from his Premiers Lundis, vol. 2 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1883); cited from the 2016 electronic version produced by the Université Paris-Sorbonne (obvil.paris-sorbonne.fr/corpus/critique/sainte-beuve_nouveaux-lundis-02/body-20).
4. Madame de Maintenon, Lettres de Madame de Maintenon à Monsieur le Cardinal de Noailles, vol. 4 (Amsterdam: Pierre Erialed, 1757), 60. Translation by authors.
29. The Devil’s Wine
Mervaud, Christiane. “Du nectar pour Voltaire.” Dix-huitième Siècle 29 (1997): 137–45.
Epstein, Becky Sue. Champagne: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.
1. Jean-Louis Flandrin, “From Dietetics to Gastronomy: The Liberation of the Gourmet,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 418–32.
2. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015), 156, claims that up until the nineteenth century, up to half of the champagne bottles produced each year would burst.
3. Voltaire, Le mondain (Paris: 1736), 5. Translation by authors.
4. Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 156. Two-thirds of champagne sales are in France.
30. An Enlightened Approach to Food
Pinkard, Susan. A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Roche, Daniel. France in the Enlightenment. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). See esp. chapter 19.
Spary, E. C. Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Vasseur, Jean-Marc. Jean-Jacques Rousseau dans son assiette: les plaisirs de la table au temps des Lumières. Paris: La Lettre Active, 2012.
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 346.
2. Ibid., 153.
3. Ibid., 346.
4. Quoted in Michèle Crogiez, “L’éloge du vin chez Rousseau: Entre franchise et salubrité,” Dix-huitième Siècle 29 (1997): 186–87. Translation by authors.
5. Ibid., 187.
6. For an in-depth examination of Rousseau’s stance on food and broader trends at the time, see Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste, chapter 6.
7. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 4 (Paris: 1751), 538. Translation by authors.
8. Chad Denton, Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility: The Enlightened and Depraved (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 114.
31. Revolution in the Cafés
Lenotre, G. La vie à Paris pendant la Révolution. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1949.
Lepage, Auguste. Les cafés politiques et littéraires de Paris. Paris: E. Dentu, 1874.
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Le nouveau Paris par le cit. Mercier. Vol. 6. Paris: Fuchs, C. Pougens & C.F. Cramer, 1797.
Weinberg, Bennett Alan, and Bonnie K. Bealer. The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug. London: Routledge, 2004.
1. A very interesting pamphlet written for British servicemen participating in the Allied invasion of France in 1944 explained the revolution thus: “The French Revolution was not, of course, a Communist revolution or even mainly a revolution of the poor against the rich. It was a revolution of the prosperous middle-classes who have led France ever since against an aristocracy which had already ceased to lead.” Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944, reprinted by the Bodleian Library, Oxford University (Cambridge, England: University Press, 2005), 17.
2. From his Qu’est-ce-que le Tiers-État, available online through the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (gallica.bnf.fr).
3. As in most revolutions, the spontaneous popular uprising was channeled and managed by elites and professional revolutionaries striving to overturn the status quo. Some evidence of this can be found in the fact that the two barriéres not burned during the revolt belonged to the Duke of Orléans, a supporter of the revolutionary forces. George Rudé, “The Fall of the Bastille,” History Today 4, no. 7 (1954): 452.
4. Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, vol. 9 (Paris: Belin-Mandar, 1833), 427–28. Quotes translated by authors.
5. Mercier, Le nouveau Paris, 72.
32. Pain d’Égalité
Campion-Vincent, Veronique, and Christine Shojaei Kawan. “Marie-Antoinette et son célèbre dire.” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 327 (2002): 29–56.
Kaplan, Steven Laurence. The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
1. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History in Three Volumes, vol. 3, The Guillotine (London: James Fraser, 1837), 420.
2. Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1974), 44–46.
3. Quoted and translated in Adrian Velicu, Civic Catechisms and Reason in the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 2016), 117.
4. Decree published in Gazette Nationale, ou Le Moniteur Universel, November 26, 1793, 57. Translation by authors.
5. The 2015 figure is a reported by the National Association of French Millers, cited in Eric de La Chesnais “On consomme toujours moins de pain en France,” Le Figaro, June 17, 2016.
6. The idea that wine, cheese, and bread constitute a “holy trinity of the table” is often attributed to the Renaissance humanist writer François Rabelais, perhaps because it sounds like the kind of thing he would have said. But this specific phrase does not appear in his writings, and the actual originator of the phrase appears to be Michel Tournier, a celebrated twentieth-century novelist and philosopher.
33. The Potato Propagandist
Andrews, George Gordon. “Making the Revolutionary Calendar.” American Historical Review 36, no. 3 (1931): 515–32.
Kennedy, Emmet. A Cultural History of the French Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
Salaman, Redcliffe. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Spary, E. C. Feeding France: New Sciences of Food, 1760–1815. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2014. See esp. chapter 5, “The Potato Republic.”
1. Translation by Steven Kaplan; quoted in his The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on “Bread, Politics and Political Economy” Forty Years Later (New York: Anthem Press, 2015), 358.
2. Spary, Feeding France, 177–80.
3. Madame Mérigot, La Cuisinière républicaine (Paris: 1794), 16–17.
4. France Agroalimentaire, “French Potatoes: As Many Qualities as Varieties,” April 6, 2017, www.franceagroalimentaire.com/en/thematiques/all-products/articles/french-potatoes-quality.
34. The Pyramid Provocation
Howard, Michael. War in European History. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1976.
LeMay, G. H. L. “Napoleonic Warfare.” History Today 1, no. 8 (1951): 24–32.
1. Talleyrand was neither the first, nor the last, to deploy France’s gastronomic soft power for political advantage. In July 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron hosted U.S. president Donald Trump at an elegant dinner atop the Eiffel Tower, prepared by the legendary chef Alain Ducasse—a superb Talleyrandian maneuver.
2. From a letter to Madame de Rémusat, translated and quoted in David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, vol. 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 248.
3. This profound shift in the character of European warfare is nicely captured in a short and engaging book by one of the founders of the modern academic discipline of war studies, Sir Michael Howard, titled War in European History.
35. The Man Who Abolished the Seasons
Appert, Nicolas. The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years. London: Black, Parry and Kingsbury, 1812.
Capatti, Alberto. “The Taste for Canned and Preserved Food.” In Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 492–99. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Pedrocco, Giorgio. “The Food Industry and New Preservation Techniques.” In Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 481–91. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Picot, Olivier. L’avenir est dans la boîte. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2002.
1. From the Courrier de l’Europe, February 10, 1809; translated and quoted in Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, 2nd ed. (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 665.
36. The Fifth Crêpe
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814. London: Penguin, 2016.
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
1. The historical debate over the causes of the fire is well summarized in the introduction to Alexander Mikaberidze’s The Burning of Moscow: Napoleon’s Trial by Fire 1812 (Barnsley, England: Pen and Sword: 2014).
37. The King of Cheeses
Jarrett, Mark. The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy After Napoleon. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.
Vick, Brian E. The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics After Napoleon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
1. Waterloo was not only the end of Napoleon but the end of nearly eight centuries of frequent warfare between Britain and France: after 1815, the two countries never fought one another again (excluding British operations against Vichy France during World War II).
2. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante (Paris: Charpentier, 1860), 134. Translation by authors.
38. A Revolutionary Banquet
Ihl, Olivier. “De bouche à oreille: sur les pratiques de commensalité dans la tradition républicaine du cérémonial de table,” Revue française de science politique 48, nos. 3–4 (1998).
Louis, Jêrome. “Les banquets républicains sous la monarchie de juillet,” in Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère, ed., Tous à table! Repas et convivialité, Les banquets républicains sous la monarchie de juillet (Rennes: 138th Congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, 2013).
de Tocqueville, Alexis. The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1896).
1. This is well summarized in Massimo Montanari, “Food Systems and Models of Civilization,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 69–70.
2. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Paris pendant la révolution, ou Le nouveau Paris (Paris: Poulet-Malassis, 1862), 244. Translation by authors.
3. Grimod de La Reynière and C. P. Coste d’Arnobat, Almanach des gourmands, ou Calendrier nutritif . . . par un vieux amateur (Paris: Chez Maradan, 1804), 61–62. Translation by authors.
4. In an interesting historical twist, Abd al-Qadir became one of the only insurgent leaders in history to be honored by the government he resisted for so many years. After his defeat, he resided in Damascus, where he saved more than a thousand Christians during a civil war in 1860. For this, the French government awarded him the Legion of Honour.
5. Louis, “Les banquets républicains sous la monarchie de Juillet,” 152.
6. Ihl, “De bouche à oreille,” 390.
7. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, 19.
8. Ibid., 21.
9. Quoted in Alfred-Auguste Cuvillier-Fleury, Portraits politiques et révolutionnaires (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1852), 70. Translation by authors.
39. The End of the Oyster Express
Rambourg, Patrick. “Entre le cuit et le cru: la cuisine de l’huître, en France, de la fin du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle.” In Les nourritures de la mer, de la criée à l’assiette, 211–20. Caen: Centre de Recherche d’Histoire Quantitative, 2007.
Robert, Sandrine. “De la Manche à Paris: les routes de la marée dans le Val-d’Oise de l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle.” In De l’assiette à la Mer, exhibition catalog, 87–93. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013.
Smith, Drew. Oyster: A Gastronomic History. New York: Abrams, 2015.
1. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, 2nd ed. (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 353–55.
2. It is not clear when the first chasse-marrée emerged—possibly as early as the fourteenth century—but by the seventeenth century, a highly organized and efficient delivery system was in place.
3. Robert, “De la Manche à Paris,” 87.
4. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015), 411.
40. Revelation in a Bottle
Besson, André. Louis Pasteur: un aventurier de la science. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2013.
Debré, Patrice. Louis Pasteur. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. See esp. chapter 9.
Hellman, Hal. Great Feuds in Medicine: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever. New York: Wiley, 2001.
1. It should be said that not all French drinkers enjoy Jura wines; it is very much a “love it or hate it” wine region.
2. Louis Pasteur, Oeuvres de Pasteur, vol. 7, ed. Louis-Pasteur Vallery-Radot (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1939), 130.
3. Debré, Louis Pasteur, 227–28.
41. The Curse of the Green Fairy
Adams, Jad. Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
Baker, Phil. The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
Blocker, Jack S., Ian R. Tyrell, and David M. Fahey, eds. Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2003.
Cargill, Kima. “The Myth of the Green Fairy: Distilling the Scientific Truth About Absinthe.” Food, Culture & Society 11, no. 1 (2008): 87–99.
Delahaye, Marie-Claude, “Grandeur et décadence de la fée verte.” Histoire, Économie et Société 7, no. 4 (1988): 475–89.
Prestwich, P. E. “French Workers and the Temperance Movement.” International Review of Social History 25, no. 1 (1980): 35–52.
1. Delahaye, “Grandeur et décadence de la fée verte,” 479.
2. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 555.
3. Didier Nourrisson, Le buveur du XIXe siècle (Paris: L’Aventure Humaine, 1990), 321.
4. Quoted in Delahaye, “Grandeur et décadence de la fée verte,” 483. Translation by authors.
42. Siege Gastronomy
Decraene, Jean-François, and Bertrand Tillier. La nourriture pendant le siège de Paris, 1870–1871. Saint-Denis: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Saint-Denis, 2004.
Merriman, John. Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
Pascal, Edmond. Journal d’un petit Parisien pendant le siège (1870–1871). Paris: A. Picard et Kaan, 1893.
Richardson, Joanna. “The Siege of Paris.” History Today 19, no. 9 (1969): 593–99.
1. Alice Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky, France and Its Empire Since 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 38–40.
2. Jean Vitaux, Les Petits Plats de l’Histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), 34–35.
3. Decraene and Tillier, La nourriture pendant le siège de Paris, 11. Translation by authors.
4. Pascal. Journal d’un petit Parisien, 264. Translation by authors.
5. Ibid., 283.
6. This evolution is well described in Suzanne Citron, Le mythe national: L’histoire de France revisitée (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2017).
7. Merriman, Massacre, 252.
43. The Peanut Patrimony
Brooks, George E. “Peanuts and Colonialism: Consequences of the Commercialization of Peanuts in West Africa.” Journal of African History 16, no 1 (1975): 29 54
Péhaut, Yves. “The Invasion of Foreign Foods.” In Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 457–70. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Wikte, Thomas, and Dale Lightfoot. “Landscapes of the Slave Trade in Senegal and the Gambia.” Focus on Geography 57, no. 1 (2014): 14–24.
1. Statista Market Forecast, “Peanut Butter,” 2017, www.statista.com/outlook/40090400/102/peanut-butter/europe#market-global.
2. Brooks, “Peanuts and Colonialism,” 39.
44. Gastronomads on the Sun Road
Csergo, Julia. “The Emergence of Regional Cuisines.” In Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 500–515. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Donnaint, Clémentine, and Élodie Ravaux. Nationale 7: 50 recettes sur la route mythique de Paris à Menton. Paris: Hachette Livre, 2013.
Lottman, Herbert R. The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003.
Trubek, Amy B. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
1. Menton today hosts only a few lemon suppliers; most of the citrus fruits used in Menton’s surreal Fête du Citron, celebrating the end of winter each February with gigantic sculptures made of lemons and oranges, are imported from Morocco and Spain.
2. The canuts actually staged one of the first workers revolts, unsuccessfully, in 1831 (their motto: Vivre libre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant! or Live Free Working or Die Fighting!)
3. J.-A. Lesourd, “Routes et trafic automobile en France,” L’Information Géographique 11, no. 1 (1947): 23–27.
4. Curnonsky, Souvenirs littéraires et gastronomiques (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958), 53–54. Translation by authors.
5. Jeanne Barondeau, ed., Cur non . . . bibendum? ou Du PNEU Michelin au guide gastronomique (Munich: Édition Curnonska, 2014), Kindle location 808 of 3675.
45. A Friend in Difficult Hours
Boisard, Pierre. Camembert: A National Myth. Translated by Richard Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Pourcher, Yves. Les jours de guerre: la vie des Francais au jour lejour 1914–1918. Paris: Hachette, 2008.
1. There is also a dessert called a café liégeois, which includes coffee-flavor ice cream.
2. It is not entirely clear where this nickname came from. Some say it reminded soldiers who had previously served in the colonies of the monkey meat they sometimes had to resort to eating, but a more likely source for the nickname is the fact that the can openers used at the front were made by a company called Le Singe (The Monkey).
3. Boisard, Camembert, 107.
4. Ibid., 113.
5. This remark, purportedly uttered by the prime minister during a speech to former servicemen near Verdun in 1919, has become a veritable French proverb, despite a lack of documentary evidence for it.
46. A Mutiny and a Laughing Cow
La vache qui rit: sa vie, ses recettes. Neuilly-sur-Seine: Éditions Michel Lafon, 2006.
Villemot, Guillaume, and Vincent Vidal. La chevauchée de la Vache qui rit. Paris: Editions Hoëbeke, 1991.
1. The first full investigation into the mutinies, made possible after the opening of French military archives, appeared in Guy Pedroncini’s Les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).
2. According to the association Les Amis de Benjamin Rabier, Bel initially used Rabier’s illustration without the latter’s permission and only asked him to create a new logo when rival cheesemakers began using the same image.
3. La vache qui rit, 43. Translation by authors.
47. “Bread, Peace, and Liberty”: The Socialist Baguette
Bertaux-Wiame, Isabelle. “L’apprentissage en boulangerie dans les années 20 et 30: une enquête d’histoire orale,” Rapport Final, vol. 2, Convention CORDES no. 53/74 (1976).
Vigreux, Jean. Histoire du Front Populaire: l’échappée belle. Paris: Tallandier, 2016.
1. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Penguin, 2003), 62, 67.
2. Stephanie Strom, “A Baker’s Crusade: Rescuing the Famed French Boulangerie,” New York Times, July 11, 2017.
48. Couscous: The Assimilation (or Not) of Empire
Béji-Bécheur, Amina, Nacima Ourahhmoune, and Nil Özçağlar-Toulouse. “The Polysemic Meanings of Couscous Consumption in France.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 13, no. 3 (2014): 196–203.
Binet, Laurent. “‘Touche pas à mon pain au chocolat!’ The Theme of Food in Current French Political Discourses.” Modern & Contemporary France 24, no. 3 (2016): 239–52.
Buettner, Elizabeth. Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Grange, Henri, and Florence Barriol. “Le marché de la graine de couscous en Europe.” In Couscous, boulgour et polenta: transformer et consommer les céréales dans le monde, ed. Hélène Franconie, Monique Chastanet, and François Sigaut, 83–92. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2010.
Janes, Lauren. Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
1. The Maghreb (“west” in Arabic) conventionally refers to the countries of northwestern Africa: Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. For the purposes of this chapter, the most relevant countries are Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, which France occupied in the nineteenth and early twentiethth centuries.
2. TNS SOFRES, “Les plats préférés des Français,” August 2011, www.tns-sofres.com/sites/default/files/2011.10.21-plats.pdf.
3. The arid interior of the country was administered by the French armed forces.
4. This era is expertly described by Lauren Janes in Colonial Food in Interwar Paris. She argues that the French rejection of colonial food products was a manifestation of a broader reluctance to incorporate the colonies into the French nation.
5. The Third Republic ended with the Nazi occupation of France, and the Fourth Republic was launched in 1946.
6. Béji-Bécheur et al., 197.
7. Buettner, Europe After Empire, 236.
8. Ibid., 242.
9. Sylvie Durmelat, “Tasting Displacement: Couscous and Culinary Citizenship in Maghrebi-French Diasporic Cinema,” Food and Foodways 23, nos. 1–2 (2015): 108.
49. The Forgotten Vegetables
Drake, David. “Du rutabaga et encore du rutabaga: Daily Life in Vichy France.” Modern & Contemporary France 15, no. 3 (2007): 351–56.
Mouré, Kenneth, and Paula Schwartz. “On vit mal: Food Shortages and Popular Culture in Occupied France, 1940–1944.” Food, Culture & Society 10, no. 2 (2007): 261–95.
Schwartz, Paula. “The Politics of Food and Gender in Occupied Paris.” Modern & Contemporary France 7, no. 1 (1999): 35–45.
1. Elizabeth Kier, “Culture and Military Doctrine: France Between the Wars,” International Security 19, no. 4 (1995): 65–93.
2. Statistics from Yad Vashem—The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
3. Regions with a tradition of agricultural self-sufficiency, such as the Loire, Normandy, and Brittany, suffered much less than some of the southern regions and the major urban centers.
4. Bernard Frizell, “Gastronomy: Good Eating Has Survived Both War and Politics as France’s Finest Art,” Life, December 9, 1946, 60.
5. Information and Education Division of the US Occupation Forces, Paris, 112 Gripes About the French (Oxford, England: Bodleian Library, 2013), 73.
6. The diverse experiences of urban and rural residents are noted in a number of wartime memoirs, such as those by Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas.
7. Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944, reprinted by the Bodleian Library, Oxford University (Cambridge, England: University Press, 2005), 5.
8. Jean-Louis Flandrin, “The Early Modern Period,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 358.
50. Canon Kir Joins the Resistance
Gildea, Robert. Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015.
Lormier, Dominique. Histoires extraordinaires de la résistance française. Paris: Cherche Midi, 2013.
Muron, Louis. Le chanoine Kir. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 2004.
1. Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944, reprinted by the Bodleian Library, Oxford University (Cambridge, England: University Press, 2005), 32.
2. Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, ed. Sergei Khrushchev, vol. 3, Statesman, 1953–1964 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 200–1.
51. France and the United States: From Liberation to Exasperation
Gordon, Bertram M. “The Decline of a Cultural Icon: France in American Perspective.” French Historical Studies 22, no. 4 (1999): 625–51.
Kuisel, Richard F. “Coca-Cola and the Cold War: The French Face Americanization, 1948–1953.” French Historical Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 96–116.
1. 112 Gripes About the French, first published in 1945 by the Information and Education Division of the US Occupation Forces, Paris; reprinted in 2013 by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
2. Farley was also a longtime political adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. J. C. Louis and Harvey Z. Yazijian, The Cola Wars (New York: Everest House, 1980), 76.
3. Quoted in Kuisel, “Coca-Cola and the Cold War,” 110.
4. “Cheese-eating surrender monkey” entered the American lexicon of insulting terms for French people in 1995, thanks to an episode of The Simpsons (“’Round Springfield”).
5. This is a subjective category to be sure, but it usually includes things like frozen dinners, processed chicken nuggets, cookies, sugary cereals, and fast food generally.
6. Hayagreeva Rao, Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 86.
7. Waverley Root, “The Restoration of French Cooking,” New York Times, December 17, 1972.
52. Conclusion
1. Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es is the fourth of Brillat-Savarin’s famous twenty aphorisms, listed at the beginning of The Physiology of Taste.