**** As a short-sighted person myself, I felt obliged to go and ask Monsieur Plumey about this discrimination against spectacle-wearers, and he said the man probably had ‘special tastes’.
***** The song’s title is actually a cruel putdown: ‘I love you—neither do I.’
During the Prussian siege in 1870–71, Parisians were forced to forage for food and eat ‘siege game’. Rat salami became something of a favourite.
8
FOOD
Le dîner tue la moitié de Paris et le souper tue l’autre.
(Dinner kills one half of Paris, and supper the other.)
CHARLES DE SECONDAT, BARON
DE MONTESQUIEU,
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SATIRIST
PARISIANS HAVE a hands-on, in-your-face, almost sexual rapport with food. It has to be seen, touched and felt as well as tasted. They need to be absolutely certain that it’s fresh—alive, even. Hence the shellfish stands in the street outside restaurants—the oysters, crabs and lobsters to be eaten in the brasseries are often displayed outdoors on the pavement, and the poor man (it’s almost always a man) responsible for opening up oyster shells and pulling off crabs’ claws has to work in the open air even in winter, just so that passers-by can ogle his wares.
The same thing goes for the food markets, where all but the poshest stalls let you squeeze and sniff your oranges, avocados, fennel and bananas before you buy them. Even in supermarkets, only the softest fruit like strawberries will be under plastic—everything else is on display to be fondled by potential customers.
My favourite description of Parisian food is in Émile Zola’s novel Le Ventre de Paris—‘The Belly of Paris’. The story is set in and around the food markets at Les Halles at the end of the nineteenth century, and begins with the hero, Florent, an escaped political prisoner, arriving in the city just before daybreak. He has hitched a ride with a woman coming in to sell her vegetables, and awakes, starved and exhausted, to the first rays of dawn: ‘The sun set the vegetables on fire,’ Zola writes. ‘He [Florent] no longer recognized the pale watercolour hues of twilight. Now the swollen hearts of the lettuces were burning, the carrots began to bleed red, the turnips became incandescent.’
No one, not even the poutiest celebrity chef, ever wrote about turnips like that. Here is a writer who wants to have sex with a vegetable. And in Paris, that’s probably legal.
Brain food, or food on the brain
It’s a miracle that Parisians stay relatively slim, because food is never far from their thoughts. By a linguistic accident, even their word for ‘slim’ looks edible to English-speakers—it’s mince.* Not that Parisians are snackers and grazers—their thoughts are usually focused on regular mealtimes.
These mealtimes are often spent talking about food. At a French dinner party, it is not considered polite to discuss what you are eating—apart from complimenting the chef, obviously. It is, though, very much the done thing to recall other great meals you have eaten. This may seem bizarre, like describing a torrid night spent with someone other than the person you are currently making love with, but in fact it is seen as a way of paying homage to what you’re eating. The food is so good that your taste buds have overloaded your brain with images of sumptuous meals from your past, and you have to express yourself.
Logically, lack of food is therefore a double deprivation—nothing to eat and nothing to inspire you. This probably explains why the 1870–71 siege of Paris by the Prussians has stayed in the city’s folk memory for so long. It wasn’t just the shelling, the fighting and a subsequent revolutionary uprising—there was nothing to eat. And unlike in 1940, there was no way of getting relatives to bring in the odd hunk of bacon or bunch of carrots from the country. The city was cut off. Things were made even worse because at the beginning of the siege, in September 1870, the optimistic Parisians carried on eating more or less as normal—no one dared to introduce any rationing. Food was not too difficult to obtain because there were still farms and smallholdings in the closest suburbs, and Parisians had been warned of the likelihood of a siege, so many of them had got in plentiful stocks of food.
Gradually, though, as winter set in, supplies dwindled and stomachs started to rumble. Restaurants began to serve wolf burgers and rhino drumsticks as the zoo animals were slaughtered. The poor had to sacrifice their cats and dogs, and even vermin became a delicacy. In the Musée Carnavalet, Paris’s history museum, there is a gruesome painting of a street butcher during the siege. All he has on offer is rat—at the time, ratatouille was no joke.
There is also a glass flask on display containing a real piece of bread baked during the siege. It is made of flour mixed with wood shavings, the latter perhaps being appropriate. After all, a baguette is a stick.
But Paris being Paris, even during a siege it managed to fight off depression by turning privation into a gastronomic experience. Rats, mice, pigeons and anything caught in traps became known as ‘siege game’, and they weren’t just boiled up and eaten—they were prepared. Rat salami became something of a favourite.
And although a famous Christmas 1870 menu served at the Café Voisin in the posh rue Saint-Honoré, based almost entirely on zoo animals, was only available to the rich, there is something admirable about it, like the musicians on the Titanic going down playing their instruments. The six-course meal included such delicacies as elephant consommé, roasted bear ribs, antelope pâté, kangaroo stew, camel ‘roasted English style’ (that is, without sauce) and, just to add the common touch, cat accompanied by a side dish of rats. No doubt conversation during the meal was about simpler foods from less turbulent times—a roast chicken, a fresh apple, real bread.
This ability to eat their way through a crisis is
