The Belly of Paris Read online

  16. ANDOUILLES: Originally from northern France, especially Normandy and Brittany, andouilles are large smoked sausages sliced and eaten cold. In the Middle Ages they were considered a delicacy. Andouilles are filled with tripe, cut-up large intestines, and belly—all from pig. Twisting all of this into the black casing is no easy matter and is best described by the fact that it has led to an expression, on fait des andouilles, literally “making andouilles,” which refers to the squirming of restless children, an expression I know of in only one other language, Yiddish, in which it is called spilkes.

  17. PTÉS: The word literally means “crusted,” and in the nineteenth century and earlier pâté was a cooked loaf of seasoned ground meats, as it is today, but baked in a crust. Today this would be called a pâté en croûte, which is redundant in French.

  18. SAUCISSONS: Saucisse, or sausage, which comes from the Latin salsicia, meaning “salted,” as do similar words such as “salami,” is an ancient form of preserved meat. Saucisson means simply a large sausage, of which there are many kinds; if it is dried and ready for eating, it is a saucisson sec.

  19. CERVELAS: This is a term for a specialty sausage that varies from region to region; two of the most famous are the Alsatian and the Lyonnais. Cervelas sausages are usually made exclusively from larger chunks of meat and are of ten seasoned with garlic. They are cooked sausages poached in either water or red wine. The name may come from the original presence of pigs' brains, cervelles, though this ingredient has not been used in recent centuries.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. LE VIGAN IN THE GARD: Near Nîmes in Zola's native Provence.

  2. HE BECAME A REPUBLICAN: At the time this meant a supporter of the republic that the emperor Napoleon had overthrown and thus an opponent of the current repressive imperial regime.

  3. HE BECAME DISTRAUGHT AND RAN TO ALL THE “CLUBS”: In February 1848, bloody revolution established the Second Republic, which lasted only until the coup d'état in December 1851. The Second Republic had a heady, idealistic tone, and clubs were formed to air radical political theories.

  4. See note 2 on page 313.

  5. CORNICHONS: Literally “little horns,” these are the French version of what the English call gherkins, very young cucumbers harvested at between three and eight centimeters. Cornichons are pickled in vinegar, usually with some herbs, and they are a mainstay of charcuteries.

  6. PLASSANS: Plassans, in Provence, the seat of the fictional Rougon-Macquart family, is Zola's fictitious name for Aix-en-Provence, where he was raised.

  7. PETIT SALÉ: A cut of pork belly with adjacent ribs, spare ribs, that is rubbed and packed in salt, herbs, and spices, such as thyme and cloves, left for weeks, then boiled slowly. It can be eaten cold or heated.

  8. LARDOONS: Small strips of cured pork fat, here used in sausages but also drawn through some lean meats with a needle before roasting.

  9. BOUILLIES: This is a kind of porridge made by thickening a liquid with flour. It is often a dish for children, but it can also refer to any kind of thickened liquid. The word has the same origin as bouillon, which is a stock, bouillie, something boiled in liquid, and bouillabaisse, a Mediterranean fish soup. Here it appears to be some kind of thickened meat soup.

  10. GALANTINE: The word traces back to the Middle Ages, and its origin is debatable. Gelatine, the Chinese spice galangale, which is related to ginger, and a medieval jellied fish dish mentioned in Chaucer are among the proposed etymological roots. Further complicating the debate, in late medieval England the word referred to a sauce. In eighteenth-century France it meant a whole stuffed pig. But by Zola's time the word had the same meaning it has today, a chicken, turkey, duck, or other bird, or even veal, boned, stuffed, wrapped tightly in a cloth, slowly cooked and pressed, and presented shimmering in the aspic made from it. A good charcuterie item, it looks elegant sliced on a plate, revealing an attractive mottled cross section, and though it requires considerable labor to make, it does not demand great skill.

  11. CAUL FAT: This is the fat peritoneal layer over a pig's intestines. It can be softened in lukewarm water and stretched out to resembles a yard of white, airy lace, but it is made entirely of fat. Its delicacy is testified to by both the English name, caul, referring to a hairnet, and the French word, crépine, which eludes to crêpe, a light, crinkly type of silk. As a wrapping for pâtés, sausages, and meats, caul fat is an attractive and light way to both wrap something tightly and infuse it with a moderate dose of fat.

  12. CHANGED HIS NAME TO SACCARD: An example of how Zola loved to have the Rougon-Macquart books make references to one another. This financier cousin, who had changed his name from Aristide Rougon, was the leading character in the novel published the year before, La Curée.

  13. THE WORKERS HAD SOLD OUT, BUT HE NO LONGER EVEN ADMITTED TO HAVING SUPPORTED THE COUP D'éTAT BECAUSE HE NOW REGARDED NAPOLEON III AS HIS PERSONAL ENEMY, A REPROBATE WHO LOCKED HIMSELF UP WITH DE MORNY: In the people's revolution of 1848, the revolting working class put their faith in the man who later made himself Emperor Napoleon III, a significant betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution. Charles-Auguste-Louis-Joseph, duc de Morny, the emperor's half brother, who lived from 1811 to 1865, served as the emperor's minister of the interior, the cabinet minister in charge of policing and law enforcement.

  14. CORPS LÉGISLATIF: In this period this was the name of the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies.

  15. “THE CROWD UP IN THE TUILERIES”: During the empire, the Tuileries housed the imperial palace. After the empire fell in 1871, the rebels of the Paris Commune wrecked the palace.

  16. PAINS DE FROMAGE AND FROMAGE DE COCHON: These have nothing to do with bread or cheese. Pain de fromage from Italy, sometimes called fro-mage d'Italie, is a very fine-textured baked pork pâté. Fromage de cochon is sometimes called fromage de tête, in English head cheese. It is, by tradition, though this is not always true, made from all the pig's head meats, including ears and tongue. It is chopped up, pressed together, and baked. The head meats are very gelatinous, so that once it cools, the hardened aspic holds it all together.

  17. LARD DE POITRINE: This is essentially petit salé, except slightly higher into the spare rib part of the pork.

  18. SAINDOUX: Saindoux is rendered pork fat that is melted and allowed to cool and congeal to the consistency of butter. It is kept in an earthen crock, which keeps fat from turning, and is used for cooking. In American English saindoux is called “lard,” but this leads to confusion because lard is also a word in French that means something entirely different. In French lard is a strip of salt-cured pork from the outer layer that is pure fat without any meat striping.

  19. “YOU KNOW, FOR LARKS”: She is asking for the French lard. It comes in sheets, and she will cut pieces and tie them around the larks for roasting. The lard gives a little fattiness to such lean game birds.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. GURNARD: The French name for this spiny red fish commonly eaten in Europe but not in America is grondin. In English it is a red gurnet or gurnard, which few Americans have ever heard of even though it is related to the less edible sea robin, both in the genus Trigla.

  2. TENCH: Tench, Cyprinidae tinca tinca, has edible carplike flesh, and an eellike exterior of tiny embedded scales covered with slime. Legend has it that the slime will heal any fish it rubs against, which is why tench is sometimes called doctor fish.

  3. GUDGEON: Gudgeon is a small freshwater fish, common in Europe but not in the Americas, from the same cyprinid family as tench.

  4. BARBEL: This fish, which Zola called a “gros barbillon,” seems from his description to be of the genus Barbus, probably a barbel, which is a fairly large, whitish-gray freshwater fish common in Europe and unknown in North America. Barbel is also the word for feelers around the mouth. Barbus fish have barbels, and barbu means “bearded.”

  5. FAKE ASTRAKHAN: Astrakhan, in the delta of the Volga River, produces a fur from young lambs that is celebrated for its softness and was made fashionable by Russ
ian military hats.

  6. HE WAS AN HÉBERTISTE: Followers of Jacques Hébert, born in 1757, the son of a jeweler, who was one of the more bloodthirsty figures of the bloody French Revolution. As a leader of the radical faction sansculottes, he urged the ruling Jacobins to unleash the bloodbath known as the Reign of Terror and influenced the decision to execute Marie Antoinette. But in 1794, he himself was guillotined by the order of Maximilien Robespierre, who believed he had become too wildly radical. According to legend, at his execution he became hysterical at the sight of the guillotine. The sansculotte movement rose to prominence in the Revolution because it was a working-class movement, and as such it, including the hébertistes, remained active for much of the nineteenth century. The name, meaning “breechless,” referred to middle-class activists who refused to wear the knee-length breeches of the upper classes and sported workers' trousers.

  7. PIQUET: Piquet is a card game dating back to at least the sixteenth century, when it was mentioned by Rabelais. It is played between two people with a thirty-two-card deck that does not use the numbers two through six. In Zola's time it was the most popular card game in France.

  8. A TATTERED OLD COPY OF THE GUIDE TO DREAMS: La Clef des songes, a guide to the interpretation of dreams in encyclopedia form, was a popular book in nineteenth-century France.

  9. TULLE: Tulle is a stiffened silk netting, today more often made of nylon, for veils, petticoats, and ballet tutus, among other uses. The fabric is named after the town of Tulle, the capital of the Department of Corrèze in the Limousin region of central France, where tulle was once produced.

  10. “THAT'S SO MUCHE!”: This is another example of Les Halles slang. “C'est rien muche” is slang for “That's so cool.”

  11. LANGOUSTINES: Nephrops norvegicus, the Norway lobster to some of the English-speaking world except in Ireland, where it is a Dublin Bay prawn, is more commonly known in the United States by its French name, which means small lobster. It has the appearance of a tiny pink-and-white lobster though the white flesh is not nearly as rich or flavorful. The reason Americans tend to know it by its French name is that it is not an American species and many Americans have been introduced to it in France.

  12. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 revolutionary tract was one of the intellectual underpinnings of the French Revolution with its famous line “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau maintained that an individual's obligation was to his society, not his government, and that only the people could legitimize a government.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. POT-AU-FEU: A Paris dish that used to be the symbol of home cooking but in recent decades has shown up in restaurants as such lengthy preparations have vanished from Paris homes. It is made of a variety of meat cuts, some lean, some fat, cooked very slowly in water for hours with vegetables.

  2. CHICKWEED: In French mouron; the English-language name comes from the fact that the seeds are used for chicken feed. Chickweed, Stelleria media, grows wild in the temperate zones of the world and has edible spinachlike leaves that the ancient Greeks and Romans were particularly fond of. In past centuries with less food transport, chickweed was valuable in Europe because it was one of the few foods that would grow in the northern European winter and grew wild. But in Les Halles, Cadine was selling chickweed as bird feed.

  3. POSITIVISM IN ART: At this time, the mid-nineteenth century, positivism was a very trendy idea and one that had greatly influenced Zola. It was originated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who is sometimes considered the first sociologist. Positivism holds that knowledge cannot be attained through such intellectual pursuits as metaphysics and theology but only through scientific observation.

  4. SAINT-HONORÉ CAKES, SAVARINS, FLANS, FRUIT TARTS, PLATTERS OF BABAS: These pastries, though still easily found, were invented in mid-nineteenth-century Paris and were the height of culinary fashion at the time the novel is taking place. Saint-Honoré was, according to legend, invented in 1846 in the Paris shop of a celebrated pastry maker named Chiboust. It is a ring of puff pastry topped with little cream puffs filled with pastry cream and topped with caramel. Chiboust's great invention, chiboust cream, which is pastry cream blended with meringue and set with gelatine, fills the center.

  Savarins were invented at about the same time, in the Paris pastry shop of the Julien brothers. Their origin was the medieval Slavic cylindrical yeast cake known as a babka, which traveled to Alsace, where it became a yeast cake with dried fruit soaked in kirsch syrup, lost its k, and became baba. In Paris the dried fruit was eliminated, the yeast cake was baked in a small ring mold, the cake was soaked in rum syrup, and it was renamed after the great nineteenth-century French food writer Brillat-Savarin.

  5. FROMAGE BLANC: Fromage blanc is a fresh cheese made from milk, barely fermented so that it has at most the thickness of yogurt.

  6. GRAS-DOUBLE: A particular beef tripe. Tripe is made from the stomachs of ruminating animals—that is, cud-chewing animals such as cows and sheep, but also deer. Ruminators digest their food, usually grass, by regurgitating it through a series of stomach chambers until it reaches the fourth chamber, the abomasum, where it is finally broken down by gastric juices. All four chambers produce tripe, though the last, the most important to the animal, is the least important to us. The most popular tripe, the honeycombed, comes from the second chamber, the recticulum. Gras-double is made from the first chamber, called in French the fame and in English the paunch or rumen. The smooth exterior and rough interior provide two very distinct textures, thus double tripe, gras-double.

  7. “HE'LL GO BACK TO THE PENAL COLONY, YOU KNOW”: The word Zola uses here is le bagne, which originally referred to prison ships on which the navy kept as many as six thousand convicts off the coast of France. But after 1852, when the emperor Napoleon establishd the penal colony of French Guiana, it became known as le bagne and prisoners or former prisoners of French Guiana became known as les bagnards.

  8. IN THE CLASSICAL POSE OF LEDA: In Greek mythology Leda was the daughter of an Aetolian king and the wife of a king of Sparta. Zeus came to her in the form of a swan and raped her, a union that resulted in Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux. Since she also lay with her husband that night, there were varying theories about who was the father of whom. The legend of Leda and the swan became a popular Renaissance motif, painted by Michelangelo and Correggio, among many others. The swan, in what Zola calls “the classical pose,” is usually portrayed between Leda's legs, and there was always an inference, not missed by Zola and probably not by his contemporary readers, of an imminent sexual act.

  9. TO THE GAÎTÉ: At the time the novel is taking place, this popular theater was already nearly a century old. It was one of a number of theaters along boulevard du Temple, known as the boulevard du crime because of the melodramas that were popular there. This is the setting of Marcel Carné's brilliant 1945 film, Les Enfants du Paradis.

  10. restaurant philippe: See the note for Compas d'Or, page 313.

  11. PROMISED THEM AN OMELETTE AU LARD: An omelette with diced salt pork.

  12. CHRISTMAS EVE DINNER: Christmas Eve is called réveillon, and it is traditional in France to eat a huge feast to usher in Christmas after midnight Mass.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. WHAT HAPPENED IN ′93: In 1793 the French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror, when a Committee of Public Safety was formed to prevent any undoing of the gains made by the Revolution. Under the leadership of Robespierre and the hébertistes a sweeping program of arrests was undertaken. Under the Reign of Terror only two trial outcomes were permitted— either acquittal or execution. Some forty thousand people were executed, including many clergy and finally Robespierre himself in July 1794, which marked the end of the Reign of Terror.

  2. ONE PER ARRONDISSEMENT: One of a number of anachronisms in this book. Paris is divided into twenty sections called arrondissements, but this division was done in 1861 and the book takes place in 1858.

  3. MARRONS GLA
CéS THAT HAVE FALLEN TO PIECES: Candied chestnuts. The trick is to keep the chestnut whole while peeling it and then slowly cook it in sugar syrup without it crumbling. They are expensive because so many of them break, and then there is nothing to be done with the pieces except sell them cheaply to children.

  4. JEAN GOUJON'S NYMPHS: Goujon (c. 1510-68) was a leading architect and sculptor of the French Renaissance. His most famous works were in Paris, where he worked with the architect Pierre Lescot. These include the sculptures for the western wing of the Louvre and the fountain at square des Innocents. Goujon did six nymphs and other decorations. Not all of the fountain, built between 1547 and 1550, remains in the square, and some of Goujon's bas-relief decorations have been moved to the Louvre.

  5. BARLEY SUGAR: Sucre d'orge, a hard candy that was already two centuries old at this point. It is brown in color and resembles a hard caramel. Originally it was actually flavored with barley.

  6. CULS DE SINGE: Literally monkey bottoms, this is a slang term that shows up in many ways in France, usually for objects with grooves that recede toward the center. It is a type of military insignia, a woodworking term, a type of chair, and, in this case, a melon.

  7. “RAUCOURT”: Raucourt, annatto, or achiote is a pod from a tropical tree, the raucou tree, with small pebblelike seeds inside that give off a reddish orange dye. The first recorded use of annatto was by the Carib Indians, who rubbed it on their bodies to greet Columbus, and because of this, native Americans for centuries were called redskins, or peaux-rouges, as is sometimes still said in France. Today it is widely used in the Caribbean to make rice yellow. It was initially imported to Europe to give a reddish tint to chocolate, but by the eighteenth century it was being used in Europe to give a deeper color to cheeses and butters. It is the source of the color in most deep orange cheeses. It is a nearly natural process because annatto contains the same carotene, bixin, as is produced by cattle grazing on rich grasses. But in the wintertime in northern Europe, cattle are given feed, which does not allow them to produce the pigment, and butter and cheeses made from winter milk are very pale. The deeper color of spring and summer was correctly associated with richer milk, but butter and cheese producers made their products look richer in winter by the addition of just the right touch of annatto.