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. 

Siderodromophilia (A Post for Valentine's Day)

The Simpsons (S4/E15): 

Lisa's card to Ralph

I've written elsewhere on this blog about objectum sexuality with reference to the fascinating case of Erika Eiffel [click here]. But I don't believe I've specifically mentioned the love of trains, or siderodromophilia as it is known amongst those who are in the know.

So, since it's Valentine's Day - and since I'm always happy to discuss fetishistic forms of desire and kinky romantic attachment (which may or may not incude an erotic component) - I thought I'd get on board with this topic here and now, giving locomotive lovers their fifteen minutes of critical attention.

All siderodromophiles are, to a greater or lesser extent, physically excited by trains; be they life-sized engines or Hornby scale models; powered by steam or electricity; stationary or rattling along the tracks.

Some are aroused simply by images of trains, or films featuring trains - such as The Lady Vanishes (1938) or Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Others like to be actual passengers and achieve sexual gratification by fucking in a private compartment, or, rather less salubriously, in one of the toilets. As one siderodromophile of my acquaintance told me:

"Travelling in style and comfort on a sleeper train - with or without a partner - is always a highly sexual experience thanks to the gentle back-and-forth rocking motion and the clickety-clack sound of the wheels on the tracks. Who needs the Mile High Club?"

We should, I suppose, also mention those who get their thrills via non-consensual acts on trains, such as rubbing up against fellow passengers or indecently exposing themselves. Arguably, however, frottage - like exhibitionism - deserves to be analysed as a practice in and on its own terms and shouldn't be seen as in anyway an essential component of siderodromophilia.  

Finally, it's important to point out that this particular paraphilia is as old as the history of trains themselves - that it's certainly not something peculiar to our age. Thus, for example, we discover that the decadent anti-hero of Huysmans's magnificent novel À Rebours - published in 1884 - is, amongst other things, something of a siderodromophile.

Women, he concedes, are a natural wonder who possess "the most perfect and original beauty". But, having said that, there's nothing anywhere on this earth to compare to the dazzling and outstanding beauty of the two locomotives that have caught his eye:

"One of these ... is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset ... whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express train.
      The other ... is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, gutteral cries, with a thick-set figure encased in armour-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her dishevelled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons."    

Des Esseintes concludes:

"It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found ..."

The irony is, that, as a homotextual whose pleasure is derived from fine writing, even though I don't have the slightest interest in trains, I find these passages extremely arousing ... 

Happy Valentine's Day to lovers everywhere in all their splendidly queer difference!  

See: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 23-24. 

Surprise musical bonus: click here.  

It All Comes Down to Artifice in the End (Notes Towards a Decadent Floraphilia)

A rebours by Ink-Yami (2017-18)

deviantart.com 

I.

For me, Rupert Birkin is literature's greatest floraphile: a man who loves plants with a vital and perverse passion; a man for whom nothing satisfies like the subtle and responsive touch of cool vegetation upon his naked flesh - not even the love of a good woman. For whilst Birkin reluctantly returned to the human world and married Ursula, he always knew where he truly belonged and where he most wanted to deposit his sperm - in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves.

Click here for further details ...

II.

Just as perverse is the floraphilia of the aristocratic anti-hero of À Rebours: "Des Esseintes had always been excessively fond of flowers", writes Huysmans. However, unlike Birkin, he doesn't put his fondness into ecosexual practice and go rolling around wet hillsides, masturbating amidst a clump of young fir trees. Rather, Des Esseintes expresses his love of plants in a far more sophisticated and refined manner.

Des Esseintes is also discriminating amongst plants and doesn't embrace all flowers "without distinction of species or genus". In fact, he despises the "common, everyday varieties" that blossom in pots for sale at the local florist; "poor, vulgar slum-flowers [...] that are really at home only on the window-sill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into milk-cans or old earthenware pots".

Des Esseintes isn't too keen either on what he calls stupid flowers, such as the convential rose; flowers "whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies". In fact, whilst he can't help feeling "a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks", he loathed the bourgeois blooms that one finds in "cream-and-gold drawing-rooms". Ultimately, Des Esseintes kept his admiration exclusively for the "rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated stoves".

But, best of all to his mind, are artificial hothouse flowers made from rubber, paper, or synthetic material: "As a result, he possessed a wonderful collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists ..." But of course, a Decadent is easily bored. And so, whilst enthralled by the admirable artistry displayed in his collection of künstliche Blumen, Des Esseintes begins to dream of another kind of flora: "tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes."

This comically perverse acceleration of Decadent philosophy's anti-natural aesthetic all the way to its absurd conclusion - thereby reversing, as Patrick McGuinness points out, the relationship between nature and artifice, copy and original - is one of the most admirable aspects of À Rebours.       

Having soon assembled his astonishing collection of real fake flowers, including some remarkably sinister looking specimens that suggested disease and deformity rather than health and vital beauty, Des Esseintes is beside himself with joy:

"Yes, his object had been achieved: not one of them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain and metal had been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible  to imitate the work of human hands, she been reduced to copying the membranes of animals' organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened skin."

Fatigued by his horticultural handiwork and hothouse philosophizing, Des Esseintes goes to lie down on his bed. He soon falls asleep, but, alas, his sleep is disturbed "by the sombre fantasies of a nightmare", which concludes with an erotic encounter with an ashen-faced plant-woman, "naked but for a pair of green silk stockings". Her eyes gleamed ecstatically. Her lips had the crimson colour of an anthurium. And her nipples "shone as brightly as two red peppers".

As the dream intensifies, the plant-woman enfolds Des Esseintes in her tendril-like arms:

"He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but with an irresistible movement she clutched him and held him, and pale with horror, he saw the savage Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs, with its sword-blades gaping open to expose the bloody depths.
      His body almost touching the hideous flesh-wound of this plant, he felt life ebbing away from him - and awoke with a start, choking, frozen, crazy with fear."

I suspect that Birkin, in contrast to Des Esseintes with his eurotophobia and castration anxiety, would have been far more receptive to such a dream and would have awoken with blissful joy rather than a cold sweat.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours), trans. Robert Baldick, introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness, (Penguin Books, 2003), Ch. 8, pp. 82-92. 

For a related post to this one on Des Esseintes (and his bejewelled tortoise), click here.

Reflections on the Death of a Jewel-Encrusted Tortoise

The decadent aristocrat Des Esseintes, whose retreat into an increasingly perverse and artificial inner life is depicted with such brilliance by J-K Huysmans in the 1884 novel À rebours (a title usually translated into English as either Against the Grain or Against Nature), is - as Patrick McGuinness points out - a fictional character, but he is not pure invention:

"Among the specific models for Des Esseintes was the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who designed an artificial forest with mechanical animals, but there were also Baudelaire himself, Edmond de Goncourt and a variety of fictional characters [...] The most obvious model, however, was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, an aesthete and eccentric who provided the model for Proust's Baron Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu ..."

Not only were many of the decorative elements of Des Esseintes's home based on details of Montesquiou's own, but the implausible figure of a jewel-encrusted tortoise creeping about Huysmans's novel was, outrageously, based on fact: "Montesquiou had the poor creature customized to his tastes, and when it died wrote a poem in its memory ..."

This certainly makes one read chapter four of Against Nature with a renewed fascination - and a greater sympathy - for the slow-moving beast:

"The tortoise was the result of a fancy which had occurred to him shortly before leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours [...] he had thought what a good idea it would be to place on this carpet something that would move about and be dark enough to set off these gleaming tints."  

Unfortunately, having purchased the tortoise and had it delivered to his home - and once it had been deposited on the carpet - it soon became apparent that "the negro-brown tint, the raw Sienna hue of the shell, dimmed the sheen of the carpet instead of bringing out its colours; the predominating gleams of silver had now lost nearly all their sparkle and matched the cold tones [...] along the edges of this hard, lustreless carapace".

Des Esseintes decides the only thing to do is to jazz the tortoise up a bit; to make it into a brilliant object (and artwork) in its own right; glazed in gold and encrusted with precious stones. But not just the familiar stones that vulgar people wear on their fingers; he wanted "startling and unusual gems " - both real and artificial - that, in combination, would "result in a fascinating and disconcerting harmony".

Job done - the tortoise suitably bejewelled - Des Esseintes felt perfectly happy and sat gazing at the splendid reptile as it lay "huddled in a corner of the dining room, glittering brightly in the half-light". Alas, his happiness doesn't last long as the tortoise dies: "Accustomed no doubt to a sedentary life, a modest existence spent in the shelter of its humble carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it ..."

And people complain about the crushing effects of poverty!

Interestingly, there are faint echoes of this scene in Brideshead Revisited (1945), when Rex Mottram presents his fiancée Julia Flyte with a small tortoise that has her initials set in diamonds in the living shell. Unlike Des Esseintes, however, the narrator of Waugh's novel (Charles Ryder) can see that the bejewelled tortoise is slightly obscene and in poor taste.

In even poorer taste, however, is what children of my generation used to paint on the backs of pet tortoises; believing their shells to resemble the steel helmets of German soldiers, we would cheerfully decorate them with Iron Crosses and swastikas. And if there's anything more depressing than a dandified, decadent tortoise, it's a Nazified tortoise ...       

Notes

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003). Lines quoted are from Chapter 4, pp. 40-49. 

Patrick McGuinness, 'Introduction' to Against Nature, ibid., pp. xxvii-xxviii.  

Eveleyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, (Penguin Books, 2000). The tortoise scene is in Chapter 6. 

For a related post to this one written in memory of J-K Huysmans (and his jewel-encrusted tortoise), click here. 

In Memory of Joris-Karl Huysmans (and His Bejewelled Tortoise)

Caricature of J-K Huysmans (1885)

To be honest, I increasingly find that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to read 19th-century French authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans who are a little too Symbolist, too Decadent and too Catholic for my tastes. One really has no wish to end up at the foot of the Cross, be it inverted or upright and I find elements of his philosophy - much influenced by Schopenhauer - highly suspect; suggestive as they are of weakness, rather than a more Nietzschean pessimism of strength. 

However, as Huysmans and I share the same star sign making us astrological kin - and as today happens to be the 170th anniversary of his birth - I thought I might say something in memory of this idiosyncratic writer, notorious for writing against the grain and against nature ...

The first thing that needs to be said is that Huysmans was clever - very clever. And I'm with Eliot on this question: the essential requirement of all good writing - be it prose or poetry - is intelligence. An inspired idiot is unfortunately still an idiot and inspiration won't compensate for (or disguise) a lack of learning and quick-wittedness for long. L'éternelle bêtise de l'humanité was not surprisingly one of Huysmans's pet peeves. 

His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), strongly influenced by Baudelaire. This was followed by a novel, Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876), which brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar in style: realistic and rather grim depictions of life in Paris.

Again, to be honest, you'd have to have a great passion for French literature or a scholarly interest like the middle-aged protagonist of Houellebecq's Submission (2015), to bother with these books. But on the other hand, his scandalous novel of 1884, À rebours, is a must read - if only for the bejewelled tortoise in chapter four. 

And that's particularly so for lovers of Oscar Wilde; for this poisonous tale of the aristocratic aesthete Jean des Esseintes - a man who rejects both the natural order and bourgeois society and attempts to live exclusively in a perversely sensual yet highly artificial world of his own invention - greatly influenced The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Amusingly - though not for poor Constance - Wilde first read À rebours whilst on honeymoon in Paris and it immediately became for him what it was also for Paul Valéry and, many years later, the punk singer Richard Hell - a bible and bedside favourite.       

See:

Michel Houellebecq, Submission, trans. Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Joris-Karl Huysmans, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003).

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Penguin Books, 2003).

To read an excellent essay by Adam Leith Gollner on 'What Houellebecq Learned from Huysmans', in The New Yorker (12 November, 2015), click here. 

For an interesting note on À rebours and its influence on Oscar Wilde, visit the British Library website: click here. 

For a related post to this one that reflects more closely on the bejewelled tortoise, click here.

Thanks to Thom Bonneville for suggesting this post.

Maschalagnia: Brief Notes on Armpit Fetishism

Sammy-Lee Smith (aka Fruit Salad) 

Photo: Ben Hopper from the Natural Beauty series

Both sexes have scent glands in their underarm region. But women have a greater number and produce a more enticing aroma - or range of aromas - as far as the heterosexual male nose is concerned. 

One such nose belonged to the 19th-century French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. He noted that brunettes and dark-haired girls have an audacious scent which, unfortunately, can sometimes prove fatiguing. Redheads, on the other hand, have a sharp, fierce smell; whilst in blondes, the armpits can be as heady as a sweet wine. 

Huysmans also tells us that - whatever their coloring - les femmes de Paris tend to have something acidic about them; something suggestive of ammonia or chlorine. In contrast, the bodies of honest country women aromatically convey something of wild duck cooked with olives and shallots. 

Whether this makes one hungry for love or simply hungry, I suppose depends on one's disposition. But there are certainly individuals who desire not only a hearty home-cooked meal, but to sniff, lick, kiss and ultimately fuck the armpits of their beloved (this latter activity is known as axillism).         

If some men prefer a smooth, hairless armpit (as they do a smooth, hairless pussy), the genuine devotee of this particular partialism always prefers an unshaven haven and a strong, pungent fragrance.

Thankfully, European women - in contrast to their Anglo-American sisters - have long understood that body hair and body odor play a powerful role within human sexuality at its filthiest and most inhuman. And they don't mind if you wipe it on the curtains.   


See: Joris-Karl Huysmans, 'The Armpit', in Parisian Sketches, trans. Brendan King, (Dedalus, 2004), pp. 126-28.

And see also the feature by Ellen Scott in the Metro (8 Aug 2017) on Ben Hopper's stunning Natural Beauty project which attempts to normalise the fact of female underarm hair: click here.