In chapter 57 of his sixteenth-century novel, The Fourth Book, Fran?ois Rabelais writes, “The satirist’s sentence, that affirms Master Gaster [Sir Belly] to be the master of all arts, is true.” This seemingly tongue in cheek statement deserves to be considered both literally and figuratively. Food and eating figure prominently in the arts since the pre-historic era. I’m thinking of cave drawings depicting the hunt, for instance; some of the first art produced by humans. Hunger is something more than the body’s signal that we need to ingest calories and food symbolizes desire and identity on many levels. Apples and bananas are the first things that come to my mind. There is also bread and wine, steak-frites and apple pie. And how about lime pickle?
While my professional writing doesn’t have to do with food, I have taught classes on food in French literature and culture, so when I heard about Lydia’s Bookworm in the Pantry series on her blog The Perfect Pantry, I signed up to submit a list of five food related non-cookbooks. It was very difficult to limit my list of books to just five, but the task was easier once I set myself certain rules. First, I didn’t want to repeat any of the previous bookworm selections; I’d rather introduce people to things they might not have read before. Second, I wanted only books originally written in French, because after all, I am a French professor. I might cook food from all over the world, but most of the reading I do has to do with France and her former colonies. According to Lydia’s rules, these all had to be books available in English through a major internet distributor like amazon
. You can order them from amazon.com by clicking on the title in English. I also wanted to make sure these books are available in French, so if you do want to read them in the original language, you can order them amazon.fr by clicking on the title in French.
The most obvious food in French literature reference is Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (the link here is for volume one, you can click from there to get the other 5 tomes). Most of you know about Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu from his experience with a madeleine and a cup of tea that transported him back to his childhood. This book has a lot more references to food and its importance in Belle ?poque France than this one small passage. From asparagus, oysters and boeuf ? la mode to chocolate cakes, petits fours and orangeade, In Search of Lost time offers up a feast of food. Among other things, Proust constructs the character of Fran?oise, the cook, as the consummate artist as in this passage:
Whoever would have refused to taste it, saying: “I have finished, I’m not hungry anymore,” would have immediately debased himself to the level of one of those vulgarians who, even when an artist makes them a present of one of his works, looks at the weight and material when it is only the artist’s intent and signature that have any value. To leave even one drop of it on the plate would have demonstrated the same impoliteness as to get up before the end of a musical piece in the very presence of the composer. (I, 1, 104)
For Proust, the painter, composer and cook are all artists worthy of respect. I am not one of those people who believes that reading Proust is something everyone should do before they die. I have a French friend and colleague who says the only way she’ll ever read Proust is if they shut her up in prison for a couple of years. If, unlike her, you like the long sentences and lingering description, you will find it a satisfying gastronomical read.
No list of French food in literature could be complete without mention of Emile Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris takes place in Les Halles, the area in the center of Paris that was the centrally located wholesale marketplace until it was demolished in 1971. This novel is the third installment in a series about the Rougon-Macquart family. Florent, an ex-convict, returns from a penal colony in Cayenne to live with his younger brother, Quenu, who owns and runs a charcuterie with his wife, Lisa. This novel presents an analysis of the struggle between the conservative, complacent, well-fed haves (the Fat) and the dissident, dissatisfied political idealists (the Thin). Its political theme is inseparable from the setting of the working people of les Halles and the food that is often used as an allegory of class and a symbol of everything from innocent sexuality to corruption. Zola masterfully creates “still-life” scenes of the charcuterie shop: a mountain of sausages and rosy pink pig fat juxtaposed with Florent’s first notice of Lisa’s voluptuous attractiveness, the glorious cherries, plums and strawberries of the fruit stand compared with the beauty of the young woman who sells them and the well-known “symphony of cheeses” scene in which the malodorous putridity of the cheese symbolizes the rotten heart of its gossiping vendor. This book is only currently available in a truncated translation (an e-text version can be found by clicking on the title above), but if you can wait until the fall, this new translation of The Belly of Paris by Brian Nelson for Oxford World paperbacks is available for pre-order right now from (www.amazon.com) amazon.
Food continues to occupy a central place in the imagination of contemporary French writers. Among the books I have read in the last few years, two of them stand out. The first, published in 1997, is Philippe Delerm’s We Could Almost Eat Outside: An Appreciation of Life’s Small Pleasures. It is a collection of very short stories and food is central in almost every one of them. The French title, La premi?re gorg?e de bi?re et autres plaisirs minuscules, references one of the stories which elevates the pleasure of the first sip of beer to an epiphany of almost Proustian stature. It had to be changed for the American reading public. Puritanism at its finest. The more than thirty stories in this book advocate an oh-so-French joie de vivre and you get caught up in it, too. Reading this book will make you want to stop and savor life. Here is an example:
It’s easy to shell peas. A little pressure from the thumb on the crease of the pod and it opens, docile, a gift. Some of them, less ripe, are more reticent - an incision with the nail of the index finger allows one to open the green, and to smell the wetness and dense flesh, just under the falsely parchmented skin. Afterwards, you slide the balls with one finger. The last one is so minuscule. Sometimes, you want to eat it. It’s not good, a little bitter but cool like the kitchen at 11, cold water kitchen, the vegetables peeled - right there, by the sink, some naked carrots shining on a towel are almost dry. (translation mine)
When I first read Clotilde’s Seven Breakfasts, this book came to mind. If you like Chocolate & Zucchini, I’m sure you’d like this book. If you want a small gift for a food-loving friend, this would be the thing.
My other contemporary French language literature recommendation is harder to describe and less connected to food than the other books, though food does figure in it prominently. Belgian author Am?lie Nothomb’s The Life of Hunger is a semi-autobiographical anti-bildungsroman. The main character of Biographie de la faim is a young girl overcome by a powerful hunger and thirst. Her ’surfaim’ or super-hunger is a twist on the Nietzschean concept of the ?bermensch (surhomme in French) and is epitomized when she gorges herself on water, watches herself eat candy in a mirror or finally turns to anorexia.
Finally, for the Francophiles who would like to expand their culinary lexicon in French, I have a recommendation for a dictionary: Bernard Luce’s Dictionnaire Gastronomique Francais/Anglais - Dictionary of Gastronomic Terms French/English. At 500 pages long, you may find it too big to easily slip into your pocket for your next trip to Paris, but it is the most extensive dictionary of its kind. Written by a native speaker of French for restaurant owners in France wanting to translate their menus into English, some of the English is not perfect, but for those who are genuinely interested in learning all of those names for fish in French (and in English) and the ingredients in all of those sauces, this is a valuable companion to the Larousse Gastronomique Recipe Collection. I realize that brings my list up to six books instead of five. I couldn’t help myself.
In the four literary works I recommend, food serves a transcendental symbolic function and demonstrates that Monsieur Belly is at the center of human activity. Fran?ois de la Rochefoucauld wrote in the seventeenth-century about all sorts of human preoccupations like jealously, love and ego. His proclamation, “Eating is a need, knowing how to eat is an art,” sums up the French attitude toward food that may seem snobbish and imperious but accurately portrays the difference to be made between eating to live and living to eat that can be found in all of these books.
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