Waverly Root, in The Food of France (1958), enlivens his travelogue with stories about each region he visits, and in some chapters the commentary about geography and life ways is more interesting than the observations about food. In the chapter on "The Mountains" running along the eastern border of France, he characterizes the food as nothing special and makes some sweeping generalizations about the locals that make you question his judgment. "It is a fair question to ask how much the diet of mountain peoples contributes to their sometimes truculent independence." Couldn’t you say the same thing about people living in a desert?
Root vividly describes the mountain gorges of the Juras and says that streams and rivers have a way of disappearing underground and resurging miles away, where the locals may think they are living by the source.
This phenomenon was dramatized in 1901 when dwellers near the ‘source’ of the Loue were delighted to discover that it seemed to have turned to absinthe–weak in flavor, but nevertheless quite palatable. Two days before, the Pernod factory at Pontarlier, where absinthe was made, had burned down, and some 200,000 gallons of it had poured into the Doubs. It was therefore deduced that the Loue was a resurgence of part of the waters of the Doubs. The theory was tested by tinting the Doubs near Pontarlier with a strong green dye. Two and a half days later, the Loue was green also.
Root abounds with vignettes like this one, making The Food of France a picturesque armchair journey through the country. His geographical summary gives valuable information, when he is traveling in some of the lesser known regions. I did not know about the forest of La Joux, where the pines offer "France’s equivalent of the giant sequoia growths of the American Pacific Coast." Although not quite as tall as the sequoias, the pine trees are nevertheless impressive, says Root.
At the time Root published this book, over 60 years ago, winding roads into the high mountains of the Jura were dangerous and difficult to travel, which led to the development of a superior cheese production.
The mountain pasturage produces milk that makes particularly good cheese, but the chief reason for disposing of most of the Jura’s milk in this form is the prosaic one of difficulty of transport. To bring milk down from these high fields twice a day and then move it to the distant urban regions where it would have to be sent–for the sparsely settled Juras produce much more fresh milk than their own population could consume–would be an onerous process. So the milk is converted into cheese, and in this more readily transportable and less perishable form finally reaches the city markets.
When Root moves on to the higher Alps he notes that sports tourists from the cities–mountaineers and skiers–actually prefer the hardy fare of the region. Like the locals, they may be more interested in plenty of food as opposed to the refinement of cuisine that Root admires.
Root, as usual, gives generous detail about wines of the region, but since these local wines are generally consumed locally, they are not likely to show up at my local store, and I read these sections with a bit less interest than usual. However, a famous liqueur originates in a Benedictine monastery near Grenoble: Chartreuse. Root reveals that the secret formula for Chartreuse is based mostly on medicinal herbs flavored with saffron, cinnamon bark, and the seed coating of nutmeg.
Well, hooray. I’ve now finished reading the first section in Root’s book about the regions with cuisine based on butter. Now on to "The Domain of Fat," beginning with Alsace-Lorraine. By fat Root means lard, or fat of pig, and also fat of goose. Then lastly, he visits the domain of oil, or the Mediterranean.
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