He was a bold man,” said Jonathan Swift, “that first ate an oyster.” In all probability he was a poor man and a hungry one as well, necessity, not roast beef, being the mother of invention.
What with their mussels, frogs, and snails, their sea-urchins and their larks, their tripe, beef muzzle, and tête de veau, their boudin and chitterling sausages and sheep feet with hollandaise, the French have always seemed pretty omnivorous by American standards. Perforce they became even more so during the war, and except in the cities and less productive areas where there was acute hardship, the old Gallic genius for improvisation did a good deal to make people's daily life tolerable, if not pleasant.
Hunting, of course, was forbidden during the German occupation, but poaching assumed the proportions of a national industry—there were snares under every bush, and the mortality among hares and rabbits was higher, probably, than it had ever been in the history of France. Frenchmen abandoned their beloved fishing rods and sallied forth cold-bloodedly with seine and dip-net and spear. The little screams in the Limousin and the Dordogne were combed for crayfish; there was a great increase in the consumption of fields salads—mâche and dandelion, wild mustard and water cress—and French children were even more energetic than usual in their search for the members of the mushroom family in which France is so rich—cèpes, morilles, girolles, field mushrooms. truffles. Framers set up little homemade presses and produced their own oil out of walnuts, hazelnuts, sesame, almonds, and sunflower seed—much of it far from bad. Purée of chestnuts became a staple, and many of the chestnuts were wild. The frog population was decimated, and there were chickens and rabbits feeding on the lawns of the proudest châteaux of France.
This is not by any means to say that French cooking did not suffer during the war, or that millions of Frenchmen, adults and children alike, were not hungry most of the time for four long years. They still need and deserve not only all our sympathy, but our help, and at least a decade will have to go by before such words as topinambour (Jerusalem artichoke), rutabaga, and the eternal adjective, orsatz, can be mentioned in France in polite conversation.
The miracle (and there is no other word for it) is that they did, after a fashion, get by. Their doing so was an eloquent proof of their frugality and good sense; it was even more a proof of that extraordinary knowledge and love of food, of cooking and the pleasures of the table, which, in France, permeates all classes and is the true, enduring fraternité of the French state. I very much doubt whether, under comparable circumstances, we Americans could have done as well.
Driving in uniform, in Anno Domini 1945, through the generally undamaged villages and along the still magnificent roads of most of France, it was sometimes difficult for those of us who had known France well to realize how greatly, since 1939, the country had changed. We remembered superb meals in odd, unfrequented places (discovered, thanks to Michelin or the guide of the Club des Sans Club), detours undertaken in honor of a plat régional or a specially recommended vin du pays, the absolute certainty of finding something rather more than edible in any town where noon or seven o'clock happened to overtake us. Such pleasures, alas! are no longer part of travel in France. Nevertheless, in the long run, the situation proved not quite so bad as some of us had feared.
Most of the French civilians who travel along French roads since the liberation do so by gasogène—a car or bus with a vast unwieldy boiler attached fore or aft which burns charcoal or wood instead of gasoline. These are generally capable of a speed of about twenty-five miles an hour on the flat; they have to be pushed up most hills; they break down convincingly and often, and if they are not much worse than the cars that all of us used to drive twenty odd years ago, they are still a long way from what the prewar Frenchman used to regard as appropriate for le tourisme. If you do not own one of these monsters, you practice what is known as “I'auto-stop” (which is modern French for hitchhiking, whatever the Academy may say); you bargain with the truck drivers, end up by paying them pretty liberally, and you travel as freight.
As a result, the pace of travel in France is a lot slower than it was, and the whole atmosphere has changed. There is not tourisme; everyone has undertaken his journey for a reason which to him is of transcendent importance; people are determined, but surprisingly cheerful and good-humored about delays and misadventures. Everything is very informal—strangers talk, share their food, laugh over their discomforts. They dress for warmth, not chic: most of the girls in slacks and sweaters, with handkerchiefs over their heads; the men in worn trench coats, high shoes, wool socks into which they tuck their trousers. Their baggage consists mostly of willow paniers—empty if they are on their way from the city to the country, full of food if they are on the way back.
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.
As a result of all this, there were, by last summer, at least a few fortunate districts in France in which the restaurant keepers could begin to see hope and daylight ahead, districts in which they could begin to serve, to a few clients and on special occasions, meals almost worthy of their great days. Then, gradually, bits of unexpected and welcome good news began to circulate … it appeared that the incomparable cellar of the Hotel de la Côte d'Or, at Saulieu, walled up and camouflaged in the summer of 1940, was undamaged and intact … the stocks of cognac had increased, rather than declined, during the war … the oyster beds of Marennes, under German small-arms fire until April of this year, were in better shape than had been expected … the great Restaurant de la Pyramide, at Vienne, twice closed by the Germans, was serving luncheon four or five days a week … 1942 and 1943, in Burgundy, would prove among the best vintage years of the past two decades … despite heavy German requisitions, there was plenty of champagne in Epernay and Reims. Very slowly, one by one, all over France the lights were coming on.
There must, I suppose, be two hundred hotels and restaurants in France called the “Chapon Fin”—the august and celebrated house on the Place des Grands Hommes at Bordeaux, a scarcely less famous restaurant on the main square of Poitiers, numberless others large and small, pretentious and humble, known and unknown. My own favorite Chapon Fin has been, for at least a dozen years, a little hotel in the village of Thoissey, in that fertile and lovely province of epicures, La Bresse.
From the upstairs windows of the Chapon Fin, in Thoissey, you can see, beyond the meadows and across the Sâone River, the rolling, vine-covered hills of the Beaujolais country, and the famous villages of Fleurie, Morgon, Pouilly, Juliénas—known to wine lovers the world round. In front of the hotel is a wide place, planted with plane trees, under which the citizens of Thoissey used to play boule on Sundays in summer, before the war. The country round about is exceedingly rich, famous for its poultry, its charolais cattle, its vegetables and fruit. There are pike in the Sâone, out of which a knowing chef can make his own quenelles de brochet; there are myriads of frogs in the low meadows along the river, and, to complete the picture, there were, before the war, earthenware carafes of cool, pale Pouilly wine, and wooden pichets of fruity red Beaujolais.
The patron and chef is named Monsieur Blanc. He is still in his early thirties and far and away the best cook of his age that I have ever known, trained in the great Lyonnais tradition, loving his work, tireless and cheerful and blessed with an extraordinary memory for the personal preferences of his guests. Madame Blanc is as pretty as she is efficient; they have three children. Thoissey, thanks to them, was, in 1939, one of the pleasantest places under the sun.
It was not without misgivings, you may be sure, that I decided a few weeks after V-E day to go back. I was driving from Paris to Marseille; it was a warm Sunday toward the end of May, and the French countryside had never looked more beautiful, fresh and green as if there had never been a war. I took the familiar narrow road down the left bank of the Sâone, entered Thoissey, and turned a corner.
There was the square. Out under the plane trees a dozen of the village worthies were playing boule. The hotel stood behind its wide terrace just as I had pictured it a hundred times; even the poster beside the door—Un Repas Sans Vin Est Une Journée Sans Soleil—was faded but still there.
When I opened the door, Madame Blanc got down from behind the caisse and Monsieur Blanc emerged from the kitchen. He was wearing a white coat and white chef's cap, just as when I had last seen him. They took my hands.
“We have been expecting you,” said M. Blanc, “ever since the Americans landed in France. But today, vous tombez bien. Give me an hour.”
Finally we sat down to lunch together. Indeed, as Monsieur Blanc said, I had “fallen well.” If it had not been for the extremely visible changes that six years had made in the Blanc children, I might have believed, for a moment, that I was six years younger and that all that had happened since was merely a dark and unhappy dream. The Chapon Fin had not forgotten my old favorites: pâté de campagne, finely seasoned and not too finely ground; quenelles de brochet à la Nantua which are, as a famous gourmet once said, what happens to a pike when he goes to heaven; a chicken demi-deuil, or “half-mourning,” so called because of the black bands of sliced truffles that show through its transparent skin; green salad, wild strawberries, a glass of old marc. With it we had perhaps the best Pouilly I have ever drunk, a 1942 as clean and fragrant as new-mown grass.
I said good-bye, at last, and turned my car toward the bridge over the Sâone and the main arterial road southward. About a half mile from Thoissey there was a sawhorse set out in the middle of the macadam, and a sign, “Road Closed.” I got out of my car and walked forward. The old bridge, over which I had crossed perhaps a hundred times, was gone, its cables a tangle of wires down in the hurrying river, and its piers blasted by demolition charges.
I looked more closely. Around the damaged piers workmen had already constructed a framework of wood, and stonemasons had begun to lay, slowly, laboriously, the stones of new piers for a new bridge.
And that, I said to myself, as I turned my car round and started south over a secondary road, is France, A.D. 1945.