Not only since the liberation, but during the German occupation as well, these gasogène trucks have done more than their share to keep at least a trickle of supplies and foodstuffs moving along the roads of France. Gradually, their routes became more or less standardized—they followed the great national highways, with frequent, complicated detours made necessary by cut bridges; they would go fifty miles out of their way to avoid too steep a grade, or a section of bad road too hard on their worn, patched, invariably overloaded tires. Their drivers, being Frenchmen and hungry, resourceful and comparatively well paid, soon discovered where they could best casser leur croûte, or have a snack. And today, if you want to eat well in provincial France, the first thing to do is to locate one of these caravanserais of the gasogènes.
Invariably, they are in small towns. They are not hotels, not restaurants, but village bistrots, often without any exterior sign, low-ceilinged, humble, but wonderfully warm and comforting after a long day in an open car on the road. The food is not what you used to get at Prunier's or the Ritz but it is something no less excellent in its way—the admirable and simple fare, perfectly cooked and seasoned, which French peasant women have given to their families these many hundreds of years.
I remember with especial pleasure a little place of this sort in the town of Vivonne, near Poitiers. We were coming from the Atlantic front, where a few German divisions were holding grimly to La Rochelle, Royan, and the mouth of the Gironde estuary; we had been five hours in a jeep; it had grown dark, and it was bitterly cold. Rounding a corner in Vivonne, we spotted, parked off to one side in a little square, ten or a dozen big gasogène trucks. That was the signal, and we stopped. Except for two dimly lighted windows, the shutters were up and the square was dark. We took a chance, knocked; a door was opened, and beyond the door a heavy tapestry curtain was pulled back. “Entrez, nom d'un chien,” said the patron, “il fait froid.”
There was a big, pot-bellied stove in one corner of the room, and the thin stovepipe zigzagged back and forth under the low ceiling on its way to the chimney. The room was almost full of truck drivers and their passengers crowded around long low tables; it was noisy and warm and the air was laden with that incomparable perfume—the smell of a good French kitchen at work.
Because we were cold, the patron gave us a grog—brandy and boiling water and a spoonful of local brown honey. And because we were still cold he gave us soup, one of those magnificent peasant garbures, so thick and heavy with vegetables that it was almost a meal in itself. And then, wonder of wonders, a superb civet made out of wild rabbit (a lapin de garenne, no doubt, that had got under the wrong bush); for a vegetable we had that princely fungus, cèpes, cooked à la Bordelaise with just the proper amount of garlic; then roast veal, snowy-white, fine-grained, moist, such as I had not seen since 1939 in France; a salad of endive with fragrant walnut oil, wine vinegar, and homemade mustard, a slice of honorable country cheese, good bread, a bottle of fair wine. After that, even the jeep seemed to run better as we pointed its nose up the long dark road to Paris.
More, perhaps, than the farmer of any other country, more, certainly, than anyone who eats as well as he does, the French peasant lives off his own bassecour—farmyard—and garden and farm. Essentially, a propriété in France is pretty much of a self-supporting unit, even in the wheat-growing province of La Beauce or a wine-growing province such as Burgundy. And, to a surprising extent, what is true of a French farm is true, on a larger scale and with many obvious exceptions, of French départements. Surpluses of one agricultural product, or two, or three, are shipped to Paris or to some smaller city near by. The surplus may be of wine, as in the Gard or Herault, of spring vegetables, as in the Vaucluse, or of mussels and oysters, fresh butter and cognac, as in the Charente Maritime. The rest, and it is a very large “rest,” never sees a grocery store—it stays at home.
Furthermore, with the French transportation system paralyzed, as it was at the beginning, or even partially restored, as it is today, a good many of these local surpluses, especially of perishables, simply cannot be moved. At a time when mussels, for example, were worth almost their weight in gold in Paris, they could be had for the asking in the fishing villages along the Atlantic Coast. And with the wine ration still fixed at a bottle per person per week in most of France, fifty cents a gallon, in Beziers or Narbonne, will buy you as much vin ordinaire as you can carry away.
Pinterest
