Pot-au-feu

Illustration by Severo Pozzati (1957) 

used to advertise Maggi pot-au-feu beef cubes

 

Venez à moi, vous dont l’estomac crie misère, et je vous restaurerai!

 

 

Although English people are likely to answer frog legs (cuisses de grenouille), snails (escargot), or coq-au-vin if asked to name the French national dish, it is actually pot-au-feu (or boiled beef and carrots, as Harry Champion would have it) [1]. 

 

This hearty stew, made with simple ingredients, seasoned with herbs and thickened with marrowbone, is thought to encapsulate all that is best about Gallic cuisine and, indeed, French culture; i.e., it taps into the same mythology which Roland Barthes discussed with reference to a good steak and a full-bodied red wine [2].

 

Pot-au-feu, in other words, is for the French what a Sunday roast is to the English, or a Big Mac is to an American; character building and identity reaffirming. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the dish has often featured in French literature, with bourgeois novelists keen to promote pot-au-feu as a symbol of the traditional values they feared were being eroded by modernism and political radicalism. 

 

As one commentator reminds us, Flaubert mocks this in Le Château des cœurs (1863): 

 

"A fantasy, set in the 'Kingdom of the Pot-au-feu', its sixth tableau depicts a huge cauldron of the dish being worshipped by a host of adoring bourgeois. The source of all their happiness, it stands for all that the middle classes hold dear: social and political conservatism, base materialism and narrow self-interest. Its influence is also terrifying. When the play's hero, Paul, refuses to taste the stew, he is taken prisoner and thrown into jail. In a final, horrifying twist, the cauldron rises up into the sky, growing ever larger, until it eventually blots out the sun and plunges the city into darkness." [3]

 

In his novel L’Assommoir (1877), Emile Zola also gives a shout out to pot-au-feu as one of life's simplest pleasures; as does Guy de Maupassant in La Parue (1884). 

 

But for Michel Houellebecq [4], one of the best descriptions in French literature of this robust but delicate dish is given by Joris-Karl Huysmans in Là-Bas (1891), where Durtal, a man disgusted by the modern world, lovingly inhales the aroma of "a peppery pot-au-feu, perfumed with a symphony of vegetables, of which the keynote was celery" [5].

 

I suppose this just goes to show that even Satanists enjoy a good stew served with a simple salad and washed down with cider, followed by cheese and wine.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'Boiled Beef and Carrots' is a popular music hall song composed by Charles Collins and Fred Murray (1909). The song was made famous by Harry Champion, who sang it as part of his act and later recorded it. The song extols the virtues of a typical Cockney dish over adopting a vegetarian diet and living on the kind of food they give to parrots: click here.  

 

[2] See 'Wine and Milk' and 'Steak and Chips' in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), pp. 58-61 and 62-64.

      In the first of these pieces, Barthes writes: "Wine is felt by the French nation to be a possession which is its very own, just like its three hundred and sixty types of cheese and its culture. It is a totem-drink ..." [58] And in the second: "Steak is a part of the same sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state; and whoever partakes of it assimilates a bull-like strength."[62]

 

[3] Alexander Lee, 'Pot-au-Feu, France's National Dish', History Today, Volume 68, Issue 10 (October 2018). This excellent piece can be read on line: click here. 

[4] See Michel Houellebecq, discussing pot-au-feu as a French ideal in an interview with Marin De Viry and Valérie Toranian. Originally published in the Revue des duex mondes (July, 2015), it can be found in Interventions 2020, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2022), pp. 172-195. 

      As Houellebecq rightly says: "No other dish can boast such a literary past; there's no equivalent for the boeuf bourguignon or the blanquette." [174]

 

[5] Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas (1891), Chapter V. I am quoting from the English translation by Keene Wallace (1928), which is available on line as an ebook thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here. 

      Food is a central concern throughout Huysmans's work; for a discussion of this, see the MA dissertation by Laura Shine, 'De la pitance indigeste au divin pot-au-feu: la quête du bon repas comme thème dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans', (Université de Montréal, 2013): click here. 

Like a Virgin: Madame B. and Lady C.

Illustration of Gustave Flaubert and Mme. Bovary

from online arts and culture magazine Salon

http://www.salon.com/2005/08/21/flaubert/   

According to Andrea Dworkin, the modern era of rebellious married women who seek freedom via adultery and sexually transgressive acts begins with Madame Bovary (1856): she is the first in a long line of female characters for whom heroism consists in taking a lover and experiencing a genuine orgasm; i.e. in being fucked and fucked good.

But, somewhat paradoxically, Emma Bovary also redefines virginity as well as heroic rebellion. For according to Flaubert, a woman who has not been overwhelmed by sexual passion, not broken the law in order to be carnal - who has been fucked by a husband, but never been truly touched or transformed by her experiences in the marital bedroom - remains essentially a virgin and a type of slave who leads an unfulfilled life of domestic boredom and impoverished fantasy.

Of course, poor Emma's story ends tragically; she mistakes illicit romance for action in the real and wider social world and fucking becomes for her a "suicidal substitute for freedom", as Dworkin rightly notes. This, however, has not prevented a long line of writers finding inspiration in her sorry tale and inventing their own virgin wives whose only hope lies in what Lawrence describes as a phallic hunting out and which involves anal as well as vaginal penetration by the male.

In fact, it might be argued that Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is the ultimate example of this phallocentric and phallocratic fantasy in which a woman, if she is to be liberated, must be repeatedly stripped and penetrated (or pierced, as Lawrence writes - as if it were a knife or sword rather than a penis forcefully entering and occupying her body). 

Connie risks her life, but she is happy to die a poignant, marvellous death just so long as she is fucked; the one thing she really wants regardless of consequences and despite the fact that during her night of sensual passion she is almost unwilling, a little frightened, and obliged to be but a passive thing. 

It's over eighty-five years since Lawrence wrote his last and most notorious novel, but the model of female sexuality based upon a metaphysical virginity which he helped shape is one which continues to grip the pornographic imagination and continues to exercise a real effect over the lives of real women as an obscene form of categorical imperative.

As Dworkin writes: "no matter how much [women] have fucked ... no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon", it's never enough; these dumb bitches never learn! And so they must keep consenting to penetration, being desirable, looking hot (the pressure to do so being exerted across an ever greater age-range; from pre-pubescent girls to post-menopausal grandmothers).

Surely it's time to notice that whilst more girls and women are freer than ever to get fucked, they are still unable to share "a whole range of feelings, express a whole range of ideas, address [their] own experience with an honesty that is not pleasing to men, ask questions that discomfit and antagonize men in their dominance".      

And surely it's time to admit - without denying the great beauty and brilliance of their work - that dead male novelists, poets, and philosophers might not be best placed to help us all move forward into a world after the orgy.


Notes

See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, (Basic Books, 2007). The lines quoted are on pp. 140, 151 and in the 1995 Preface, pp. xxxiii-iv.

See also D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter sixteen. The italicized words are Lawrence's own.