Book Recs, Fall Treats, Wartime Love

Cozying up with The Land of Desire this autumn

Hello beloved subscribers,

Happy autumn! I don’t know about y’all, but I am absolutely ready for crisp weather, warm drinks, BBC murder mysteries and autumnal baking. I’m taking a break from not-so-funemployment next week to go pick apples with a friend - I’ve never done it before and I’m excited! Until then, I’m getting in the autumnal spirit by curling up with a good book. Luckily, my new “Women At War” miniseries means I’ve been doing nothing but curling up with one great book after another. Today, I’d like to share some of my favorite reads with all of you, some related to World War II and some not, along with a number of other French treats to give you that great fall feeling. Once you’ve checked out my list, please share your own book recommendations - my library queue needs some new books! Whether you’ve read some great books by French authors, great books about France, or simply great books set in France, click on the speech bubble at the end of the newsletter to chime in.

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It’s book season, y’all

It’s the Rentrée Littéraire! The three months following everyone’s August vacations see a huge spike in Serious Literary Publications. It’s the equivalent of “Oscar Movie Season” here in the US, and happens around the same time. Like Oscar movie season, the crowded schedule is a result of a) deadlines for big prizes and b) Christmas shopping and c) end of year lists. It’s a pain in the butt for French publishers and booksellers, but that doesn’t stop it from dominating the publishing cycle. This year, French publishing houses will be releasing 336 new French novels. Need somewhere to get started? Start with the shortlists for the Prix Goncourt, Prix Renaudot, and the Prix Femina. I’m most excited for Laurent Binet’s Civilizations, focusing on counterfactuals throughout history - what if Christopher Columbus sunk into the sea, and so on - and Véronique Blanchard’s Vagabonds, Thieves, Vicious, which explores how “deviant” teenage girls were handled in postwar France.

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When I was reading the memoirs of Gladys Arnold, the Canadian war journalist who partook in l’Exode of June 1940, one sentence really struck me:

Had I been chasing military and political stories I would never have had time to talk to and live with the people who gave me faith in the successful outcome of the war.

Prior to the 1960s, most Serious History was focused on Serious Subjects: war, politics, philosophy, and any other intellectual sphere dominated by men. You’d be hard-pressed to find academic studies about subjects like food, clothing, childrearing, household management, shopping - the kinds of things that everyday people, particularly women, had to navigate. The development of social history shifted that academic gaze, and we’ve had 50 years of fascinating studies which touch on the everyday experience of the past. As it turns out, those social histories often influence traditional Serious History. It turns out that studying servants, grocery shopping, candlemaking, gardening, sewing, and childrearing helps us understand things that were once inexplicable about war, politics and philosophy. I find this really satisfying, and really exciting! All of this is a lead up to introducing my favorite history book of all time: Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food.

The most strategic resource of all

“Make your bread last - cut thinner slices and save your crusts for soups.”

Early in her memoir, Gladys Arnold climbs onto a bus to the outskirts of a small French town, where an army is busy getting into action. Not an army of soldiers - an army of women, baking bread for 200,000 French fighters heading to the front lines.

Bread for 200,000 men in the front lines was made in enormous stone bake-ovens by mobilized bakers. The dough was hand-kneaded…The heavy crust preserved the bread for shipping and for use over a period of at least ten days…Weathered sheds at the edge of the village housed walls of canned preserves, dried beans, split peas, lentils, spaghetti, onions, dried fruits and sugar, while a constant stream of wine barrels rolled along a rack out onto railway cars. Twice a day two long trains slid out, packed to bursting, and headed for innumerable, smaller distribution points closer to the Front. It all went on so quietly that even the villagers were hardly aware of it.

This is the stuff that Lizzie Collingham’s masterpiece, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, centers around: the process of getting calories into soldiers and wartime industry employees. Calories are the most essential strategic resource of the war, and major military turning points of WWII only make sense viewed through the lens of this critical supply chain. I absolutely love this book, it’s very accessible to the casual readers, and it will change the way you think about World War II. I find it thrilling that a book could be published 68 years and ~3,724,938 theses after the end of hostilities, and it still provides so many fresh insights. This is the kind of book that makes me fall in love with history again. Hint: It’s going to feature heavily in next week’s episode about life during the German Occupation!

Wartime reading

Once you’ve finished The Taste of War - and you’ve told me all of your thoughts about it, I wanna discuss it with everyone forever and ever! - here are a bunch of other terrific WWII history books which I recommend, and which will make good companion pieces to my “Women At War” episodes:

• And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding: So excellent! I appreciate that Riding can give nuance and color to the individual stories while at the same time - and this is important - never letting people off the hook.

• Les Parisiennes: Resistance, Collaboration, and the Women of Paris Under Nazi Occupation by Anne Sebba: Obviously reading this book helped nudge me into finally launching this miniseries after three years of dithering! The most valuable part of this book is Sebba’s original research: an experienced journalist, she spent years tracking down survivors as recently as a few years ago, gathering incredible stories. A must-read for those who enjoy “Women At War”.

• The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War by Lynn H. Nicholas: I’m not going to go into too much detail because this will be centerpiece of one of my upcoming episodes. The book is truly excellent, and extremely thorough. It is a little on the dry, academic side (which I appreciate, this is a serious academic work, not popular nonfiction like Robert Edsel’s Monuments Men, etc) however it inspired my favorite documentary of all time. Don’t watch it until “Women At War” is over, but once the series is wrapped up, watch the documentary online here.

Non-wartime reading

Okay, you’ve gotten your fill of World War II, but you still want something cozy and French to curl up with?

• I first read Gustave Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education as a 19 year old just arrived to Paris for the first time. I’ve associated the book with autumn ever since, and I like to reread it every few years. It’s a wonderful book about a young man who moves from the sticks to the city and makes every mistake that young men make when they move from the sticks to the city.

• Alexandre Dumas is perfect for cold nights. Like Dickens, his best works were originally serialized, which means he had to master the art of the cliffhanger. I think his later works get really absurd, but The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are still a rollicking good time. If you’re a lucky duck in possession of a good fireplace, Dumas is the perfect author to read in front of it.

• Colette’s The Vagabond is a short, perfect treasure. Somehow I can only find one English language version on Amazon, and I’m not familiar with this particular translation - reader beware. It’s not hard to track down a copy in a used bookstore like I did, though, and it’s worth the hunt. I prefer it 1,000% over Cheri and her other popular works.

• Okay, Agatha Christie isn’t French, but Le Train Bleu certainly was, and there’s nothing more autumnal than a good murder mystery. Let Christie take you from the Gare de Lyon to the Riviera, solving crimes and making you wish you traveled only by luxury locomotive. It’s a treat.

• And while we’re talking about British murder mysteries featuring the French, the creator of the Paddington Bear books also created a series of detective novels. The detective lives in Provence and his name is MONSIEUR PAMPLEMOOSE and he has a dog named POMMES FRITES. The first book is here.

• A request: do you have recommendations for cozy mysteries written by French authors? French mysteries don’t tend to be very cozy (can you imagine?) but if you’ve read some great ones let me know in the comments!

Pairings

Alright, you’ve got your books all checked out from the library, there’s a crisp autumnal breeze in the air, and you’ve got a free evening. How do you really set the mood? By warming yourself up with some autumnal French treats, bien sûr!

Drink: Calvados

While I’m apple-picking in Northern California, the French are busy apple-picking in Normandy. Some of those apples will be turned into dessert (see below). A large portion will be fermented into apple cider, and some of that cider will be distilled into Calvados, a delicious, potent brandy, the apple-based counterpart to cognac. It’s usually enjoyed as an apéritif, a digéstif, or as a trou Normand: consuming it halfway through a rich meal creates a “Norman hole” in your stomach, a.k.a. more room! Pair it with any creamy, heavy meal. Like, say, this one, which takes advantage of another big autumn harvest in France:

Eat: Supremes de volaille aux champignons

If you’re intimidated by French cooking, this classic Julia Child recipe is a great place to start. It’s simply chicken breasts topped with a sauce of cream, white wine or vermouth, and mushrooms. It’s heavy, warm comfort food to get you through chilly nights, and you’ll definitely need a trou Normand halfway through! This cooking blog has done a nice job updating her instructions a bit.

Treat: tarte tatin

Whenever I want to try a tricky or intimidating recipe, I always start with Smitten Kitchen because she tests her recipes a million times. Tarte tatin is a gooey, caramel joy, a sticky apple upside down pie, but it’s tricky. You can read her notes here. I also recommend browsing the comments in the New York Times recipe.

Too intimidating? Try clafoutis aux poires. I love making a clafouti, and I can usually get from “I’m going to make a clafouti” to “the clafouti is in the oven” in under 15 minutes. The classic clafouti features summer cherries, but when the air gets crisp, the French put their fall harvest to good use. French YouTube cooking sensation Hervé Palmieri has you covered with this recipe, or try this classic Ina Garten version.

Watch: Maigret

I subscribe to both Britbox and Acorn to get my maximum fix of BBC murder mysteries. Right now, Britbox is streaming a new English-language adaptation of the classic Maigret mysteries, starring Mr. Bean (!!) available here. They’re all set in sleazy, post-Occupation Paris, where everyone is trying to recover, physically and morally, from so many years of collaboration.

What about something to pair with “Women At War”?

Looking for World War II movies set in France?

• Start with the classic Enfants du Paradis - filmed under the Germans’ noses, starring the (in)famous Arletty, and named the “Best Film Ever” by French critics. You can watch it on the Criterion Channel or Prime Video. It’s not literally about Occupied France, it is Occupied France.

• Irene Nemirovsky hid the manuscript she wrote in the days following l’Exode in a suitcase. She gave it to her daughters, and the suitcase was unopened until the 21st century. The book Suite Française is spectacular, but the recent film adaptation is so-so. Still, if you want high-budget recreations of the flight from Paris, it’s worth a watch on Netflix.

• I checked out Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants in college, back when you had to rent DVDs from a physical store. I forgot to return it and received a $2,000 late fee. Whoops. (I bought them a new copy on my graduation day as I peeled out of town.) Late fees don’t exist anymore, so you’re safe to watch this excellent movie about childhood, winter, and Jewish survival during the Occupation on the Criterion Channel.

• Henri-Georges Clouzot made his stunning, brave noir film Le Corbeau in the middle of the Occupation. It’s a movie about collaboration, denunciation, small town gossip and ethical choices in war. It caused enormous uproar when it came out for daring to suggest that French people might be taking advantage of the Occupation to sell out their enemies, or to gain advantage for themselves. Vichy France banned it - and you should watch it on Amazon Prime, if only to spite them.

• I haven’t watched this yet because I’m already knee deep in 3 historical miniseries as it is, but Résistance looks interesting. Even if the quality isn’t great, I’m a sucker for good production value and historical moments I’ve only read, not seen, you know? You can watch it on Amazon Prime with PBS Masterpiece.

A happy ending

I’ll wrap things up with a World War II love story:

Don’t watch this before an important meeting, because you’ll ugly cry watching this reunion between a D-Day veteran and his long-lost French love.

I can’t wait to hear all of your book recommendations - and if you try any of the autumnal recipes I shared, send me a picture!

Bisous,

Diana