Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire 9781472592828, 9781474296144, 9781472592835

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Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris The Taste of Empire Lauren Janes

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Lauren Janes, 2016 Lauren Janes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4725-9282-8 978-1-3500-4568-2 978-1-4725-9283-5 978-1-4725-9284-2

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Janes, Lauren, author. Colonial food in interwar Paris: the taste of empire / Lauren Janes. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-9282-8 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4725-9283-5 (ePDF) – ISBN 978-1-4725-9284-2 (ePub) 1. Food–France–History–20th century. 2. Ethnic food industry–France–Paris–History–20th century. 3. Food habits–France–Paris–History–20th century. 4. France–Colonies. I. Title. TX637.J36 2016 394.1'209440904–dc23 2015030743 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Mom, Dad, Dustin, Daphne, and Teddy

Contents List of Tables List of Images List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Colonial Food in the First World War 2 The Exotic Luncheons of the Société d’acclimatation 3 Selling Rice to Wheat Eaters 4 Colonial Cuisine in Culinary Literature 5 Food and Taste at the Colonial Exposition of 1931 Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

viii ix x xi 1 19 45 69 103 127 161 167 201 217

List of Tables Table 1  French consumption of sugar, 1911–32  Table 2  French sugar imports, 1922–32 Table 3 Rice consumption in France in thousands of metric quintals, 1911–22

24 25 36

List of Images Image 1 “Famille française/Famille hindoue” Image 2 “La cuisine nègre” Image 3 “La cuisine bourgeoise de saison: Le moussaka à la turque” Image 4 Gabon section of the façade Image 5 Cacao, detail of the façade Image 6 Indochinese fishing, façade Image 7 Michel Géo, “Principal Export Items of Plant-based Products, panel 3” Image 8 Michel Géo,“Principal Export Items of Plant-based Products: oranges, tobacco, peanuts, henna, carob, dates, olives, cocoa, cork” Image 9 Postcard, Algerian pavilion Image 10 Henri Dormoy, “1830–1930, Algeria, a country of great agricultural production” Image 11  Tunisian restaurant Image 12  French West African restaurant Image 13  “Un déjeuner au restaurant nègre”

92 125 126 131 133 134 135

136 137 141 144 151 152

List of Abbreviations Affeco AEF AOF APOM AN ANOM ECI F10 F12 FM FP GERI MNHN SSHA UCF

Affaires économiques Afrique équatoriale française (French Equatorial Africa) Afrique occidentale française (French West Africa) Archives du comité central français pour l’outre-mer Archives nationales Archives nationales d’outre-mer Exposition coloniale internationale (1931 Colonial Exposition) Série F Agriculture Série F Commerce et Industrie Fonds ministériel Fonds privé Groupement des exportateurs de riz d’Indochine Muséum national d’histoire naturelle Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire Union coloniale française

Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to the many professors, family members, friends, colleagues, and institutions that have supported this project, which began as a dissertation project at the University of California, Los Angeles. I am especially grateful for the supportive faculty of the UCLA department of history and for the financial support I received there. Caroline Ford’s deep understanding of French social, cultural, and imperial history gave my work its foundation, but she also gave me the intellectual freedom to wander into food studies. She offered sound advice, insightful comments, and constructive critiques. Andrew Apter encouraged me to find deeper meanings in the story I was telling, often clearly articulating the ideas I was struggling to convey. Andrew’s enthusiasm for this project renewed my confidence at key stages of the process. Akhil Gupta gave me a compelling introduction to food studies. Teo Ruiz has been my advocate and mentor, and I am grateful to him. Many generous colleagues have commented on various stages of this project, but I especially want to thank Elizabeth Everton, who has read and insightfully critiqued early stages of nearly every chapter of this book. Liz also first found the image that is on the cover. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Erica Peters, Sylvie Durmelat, and Kyri Claflin have been helpful by reading sections or sharing ideas at key moments. For two years I found an intellectual home and kind friends at the University of California Washington Center (UCDC). Thank you for the hospitality, encouragement, and useful feedback. I especially wish to thank my colleagues in the history department at Hope College. Their kindness and generosity make Hope a great place to work. This research relies on the skillful help of archivists and librarians at the Archives nationales, the Archives nationales d’outre-mer, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA, and the Van Wylen Library at Hope College. Michelle Yost, the Interlibrary Loan Associate at Hope, made the final stages of this project possible by finding everything I needed. I am thankful to the following sources of funding for this project: the UCLA Department of History, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, the UCLA

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Acknowledgments

Graduate Division, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the Arts and Humanities Division at Hope College. Thank you to my parents Don and Mary Beth Hinkle. For my whole life you have encouraged every passion and talent I had and worked to make everything I wished to pursue possible. Thank you to Dustin. You are the love of my life, my best friend, my partner in everything, my fiercest advocate, and my best editor. Sections of this book have been published in earlier forms in various articles. This book has benefitted from the editorial support of reviewers and editors from the following publications: A small portion of Chapter 5 appears in “Writing about Cannibals and Consuming Black Africans in twentieth-century France,” French Cultural Studies 26, no. 2 (2015), 176–85. An early version of Chapter 4 is published as “Curiosité gastronomique et cuisine exotique,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire, no. 123 (2014), 69–84. A section of Chapter 3 appears in “Selling rice to wheat eaters: the colonial lobby and the promotion of Pain de riz during and after the First World War,” Contemporary French Civilization 38, no. 2 (2013), 179–200. Small sections of Chapters 2, 3, and 5 are a part of “Exotic Eating in Interwar Paris: Dealing with Disgust,” Food and History 8, no. 1 (2010), 237–56. Finally, an early version of Chapter 2 is included as “Python, sauce de poisson et vin: Produits des colonies et exotisme culinaire aux déjeuners amicaux de la Société d’acclimatation, 1905-1939” in Eva Barlösius, Martin Bruegel, and Marilyn Nicoud (eds.) Le choix des aliments: Informations et pratiques alimentaires (Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais and Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 139–57.

Introduction

From 1914 through the 1930s, the Parisian culinary world changed. Provoked by dire necessity, intriguing new availabilities, and cautious curiosity, Parisians experimented with a cornucopia of new foods and tastes from France’s colonies. Bourgeois cooking magazines published recipes for curry and various dishes “à la créole” while the Chamber of Deputies debated the appropriateness of adding rice flour to French bread. Home cooks used tropical fruits in their desserts and added pinches of curry powder to their sauces. The Cordon Bleu cooking school included in its curriculum dishes like sauté of veal in curry and fillet of sole à l’algérienne. A hygienic eating society and the National Association of French Colonialists published cookbooks and held cooking demonstrations to try to convince housewives to buy more Indochinese rice. The Acclimatization Society held annual banquets highlighting dishes with diverse ingredients such as peanuts, couscous, and fish sauce. In 1931 Parisians and visitors to the city tasted food and drink from all over the globe at the International Colonial Exposition in tasting rooms, restaurants, and concession stands. In short, interwar Parisians confronted new foods from the French colonies in both quotidian and spectacular settings. In the interwar period, food became central to the political imagination of what France’s global empire meant to the French nation. The loss of French agricultural self-sufficiency during the war, and the failure of the French empire to efficiently meet all of France’s immediate food needs, convinced many in the colonial lobby—those actively pursuing pro-imperial policies—that the organized expansion of colonial agriculture and the orderly and profitable export of colonial foodstuffs to France were the most critical aspects of colonial development. At the same time, the colonial lobby seized upon the example of those colonial foodstuffs that did reach France during the war as powerful symbols of the importance of the colonial project to the life of the French nation. The role of the empire in feeding France became a key aspect of a new narrative of Greater France, one which portrayed the colonies as necessary to sustaining life in the metropole. This narrative is illustrated in the image on

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Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

the cover of this book. In this poster advertising the 1922 Colonial Exposition in Marseille, representative subjects of the French empire offer up agricultural goods including wheat, rice, fruit, and an olive branch to France, represented by a gracious laurel-crowned Marianne draped in the colors of the French flag. As Marianne rises above her subjects, she appears to be supported by colonial agricultural abundance. There were serious limitations, however, to the popular consumption of this narrative. The wider French public lacked the enthusiasm for colonial foods shown by the colonial lobby. Many colonial foods were met with trepidation or disinterest by French consumers and with downright hostility by competing French producers. While French consumers embraced a few new colonial foods, many were never accepted. In recipes and restaurants, the inclusion of even those colonial foods that were embraced—such as tropical fruits and curry— was enough to set apart a dish or a meal as exotic. The cultural limitations on the use of colonial foods demonstrate resistance in France to the notion that the development of the colonies was essential to improving life in the metropole. Whether French cuisine and the French body could incorporate these new foods, and the anxiety over these questions, reflected a broader national discomfort with the incorporation of the French colonies into Greater France.

Food and identity By examining the trajectories of colonial food—how it moved through the empire, how it was promoted, and what place it occupied in French culture and cuisine—this book takes into account both discourse and practice in the center and at the margins of empire. My main focus, however, is on what Kyla Wazana Tompkins calls “eating culture”: looking “beyond food itself to consider the practices and representations of ingestion and edibility.”1 Eating may be quotidian, but what and how we eat is steeped in meaning. Food is complex and meaningful precisely because it is such a central part of our embodied lives, of the ways we “live inside, understand, and act through our own flesh.”2 While visual and auditory exchanges allow the observer to maintain a certain amount of distance from the object of observation, to taste something requires actually placing an object in one’s mouth, experiencing its smell and taste as well as the sensation of its movement down one’s throat. The food is then digested, nourishing or potentially poisoning the eater. The risk involved in eating is both a biological reality and a sociological construction. As nutritional

Introduction

3

sociologist Claude Fischler has argued, eating is dangerous because it “implies incorporation, i.e., taking the food in, across the body’s boundaries, and letting it become an integral part of the self.”3 As Carolyn Korsmeyer remarks, “This makes it, I believe, a profoundly intimate sense. Its mode of operation requires that its objects become part of oneself. Its exercise involves risk and trust.”4 This incorporation is more than just the material question of nutrition. Many human societies hold to some form of the “you are what you eat” principle— “the mental representation by which the food eaten transforms the person, who takes on the food’s real or imagined characteristics.”5 On some level, what we eat defines who we are, including what groups we are a part of. The English word “companion” comes from the Old French compaignon, meaning one “with whom one shares bread,” from the Latin roots for “together” and “bread.”6 If eating culture is a space for defining group identity, then it can also delineate difference. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson explains, “The array of food choices open to each of us supplies a cultural space in which we see ourselves and our difference from others. Every mouthful constructs as it performs culinary identity.”7 In some contexts, this performance of a culinary identity also makes eating a “racially performative act” where whiteness is constructed through the embodied practice of eating. As Tompkins describes, eating culture serves as a nexus “through which the white relationship to otherness is often negotiated.”8 This othering often happens through disgust reactions. Disgust protects the body by “rejecting distasteful and noxious foods,” but it has also evolved into a “uniquely human mechanism for internalizing cultural rules.”9 Disgust is an embodied reaction that can define insider and outsider status by categorizing outsiders as disgusting.10 In interwar Paris, diverse opportunities to eat (or to reject) colonial foods gave Parisians new spaces to identify themselves in relation to the colonies through their food choices. The ways in which colonial foods were promoted, mediated, described, and consumed show how the boundaries of French culinary identity clearly excluded the colonized as other and outsider. Foodways continue to play a large role in the debate about French national identity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The media discussions of halal burgers at Quick restaurants and halal slaughter practices at Parisian slaughter houses from 2009 through 2012 have many parallels to the racialized discourse of French versus colonized diets in the interwar period discussed in this book. Halal meat is meat that is permissible in Islam. The animal is slaughtered according to Islamic Law, which includes slitting its throat and fully draining its blood. In 2009, Quick, the second largest fast food chain in France, began selling halal hamburgers in eight restaurants. Quick had commercial

4

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

success with the halal menu and began selling only halal hamburgers in twentytwo of its French restaurants.11 France has Europe’s largest Muslim population, with about six million Muslims. Even though the French market for halal foods had grown to an estimated 5.7 billion by 2010, the halal menu at Quick, and especially the fact that these restaurants sold only halal meat, caused a firestorm of criticism in French media.12 Many commentators argued that halal burgers were either discriminatory to non-Muslims or not reflective of the values of republicanism. Wynne Wright and Alexis Annes analyzed the discourse on Quick in three leading French dailies and determined that “in their efforts to construct meaning around halal hamburgers, the media constructed a defensive gastronationalism which served as a political tool to reinforce French identity within national borders, using everyday foods, and, in this way, drew boundaries around who was French.”13 Commentators and politicians complained that Quick’s new menus excluded non-Muslims from eating there, but, of course, non-Muslims can eat halal meat. The idea that Muslim meat is somehow inappropriate for non-Muslim eaters was a powerful one. In something as simple as the burger—certainly not a central dish of traditional French cuisine—the incursion of Muslim practices into the diets of French citizens caused a reaction that defined Frenchness in a way that excluded Muslims. In the 2012 presidential campaign, the issue of halal meat dominated discussion on the political right for a few weeks in February and March. President Nicolas Sarkozy even claimed that halal “was the issue that most preoccupied France.”14 The controversy over halal meat in Paris began with a TV documentary that revealed that nearly all of the abattoirs in Paris followed halal slaughter methods, and that not all of this meat was sold under a halal label. Parisians, therefore, could be eating halal meat and not know it. Presidential candidate for the far right wing Front National party, Marine Le Pen, seized on to the issue, declaring that she was “disgusted” that “all of the abattoirs of the Paris region have succumbed to the rules of a minority.”15 Although it was soon clarified that only a small percentage of the meat eaten in Paris is processed in abattoirs in the region around the city, the fear that non-Muslims were eating halal meat without knowing it had taken hold. Down in the polls and attempting to attract voters from the far right, Sarkozy joined in the outrage by calling for regulations requiring the labeling of all halal and kosher meat and promising to ban halal meat from state-school canteens.16 While both Sarkozy and Le Pen claimed to be concerned about animal cruelty—as halal rules do not allow for the animal to be stunned before slaughter—the rhetoric of disgust and anger at the idea of unknowingly eating halal meat was most powerful because it raised

Introduction

5

the fear of the “Islamization” of France.17 Here, eating was indeed revealed to be a performative act of French identity, as the unintentional ingestion of halal meat by the Parisian public seemed for some to threaten the continuation of Frenchness itself. While the context of the present fear of the “Islamization” of France is a recent development, the role of diet in defining insiders and outsiders of the French nation has its roots in debates about colonial food imports in the first half of the twentieth century.

Cooking in France at the start of the twentieth century At the start of the twentieth century, French cuisine was divided into distinct categories based on class. Haute cuisine or grande cuisine was the cuisine of the great restaurants and the work of chefs serving elite clientele. It was, still in the early twentieth century, the creation nearly exclusively of male chefs, whether employed in restaurants or in the homes of the very wealthy. At the turn of the twentieth century, Georges Auguste Escoffier, “the king of chefs,” codified his modernized and simplified haute cuisine in Le Guide culinaire, a remarkably influential text on the art of French cooking. Contrasted with grande cuisine was petite cuisine or domestic cookery. Petite cuisine was also known as cuisine bourgeoise. This was the urban home cooking of both the upper bourgeoisie who employed cooks and of lower middle-class homes in which housewives did their own cooking. The food of the urban working classes, often eaten outside of the home, formed a third category of French cuisine. Finally, French regional cuisines and the cuisines of the countryside formed another distinct category and were sometimes lumped together in Parisian descriptions as cuisine de la grand-mère. These four categories of French cuisine were quite separate and recognized as such by contemporaries. Cookbook authors, magazine columnists, and gastronomes spoke of these different types of cuisine by name. Despite these class divisions, however, there were some important elements of consistency across most French cooking, and these different levels of cuisine had a lot of influence on one another. By 1900, a pattern of three daily meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) had become the norm across classes, and the “French dietary model” of a lunch and dinner each featuring at least an appetizer, entrée, and dessert was standard. Even at elite restaurants and upper-class households, service had transitioned from “French service,” where elaborate dishes were all served simultaneously, to the sequential presentation of courses known as “Russian service.”18 Haute cuisine meals had additional courses, as

6

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

did most cuisine bourgeoise meals, but the three-course minimum served as the base. For example, a typical bourgeois menu as published in the home cooking magazine, Le Pot-au-Feu, in October of 1911 called for the following five courses for lunch: fresh herring with mustard sauce beef à la mode ancienne terrine of partridge salad of lettuces and eggs pear gratin

and the following six-course dinner: soup solférino (a vegetable and potato soup) fillet of sole calf ’s liver braised with fresh cepes sirloin roast lettuces apples à la ninette19

These menus show the centrality of meat to the French meal and the marginal role of vegetables. Most bourgeois menus included a soup course with dinner. Both desserts, as was also quite typical, contain seasonal fruits. Bread and wine would have accompanied the meal, but their inclusion was assumed and did not need to be specified in the menu suggestion. Even among the working classes, by 1900, a “proper meal” consisted of three courses and wine. Nearly all restaurants, even those with a working-class clientele, proposed menus “couched in the categories of appetizer, meat dish with vegetables, and dessert. Bread and wine were almost incontrovertible accompaniments to the meal.”20 This sit-down lunch, however, was not affordable to all workers, and by 1900, Paris had “a whole street-food sector” featuring such quick eats as oysters, fried tripe, soup, and fried potatoes.21 Even though a “proper meal” was not attainable to everyone, it remained an organizing concept of what it meant to eat well. Across classes and regions, the French believed that France produced great food. Brillat-Savarin wrote in the 1890s: French soil is privileged [and capable of] naturally producing in great abundance the best vegetables, the best fruits and the best wines of the world. France also possesses the finest chickens, the most tender meats, and the most delicate and varied poultry. Its maritime situation gives it the most beautiful fish and crustaceans. It is, therefore, natural that the French become both good cooks and good eaters.22

Introduction

7

Tied to this respect for the products of French soil was an interest in traditional regional French cuisines within cuisine bourgeoise and to a lesser extent within haute cuisine. The popularity of regional cuisines in Paris increased in the interwar period with the growth in automobile tourism and the restaurant reviews of the Michelin Guide, but regional cuisine was also especially valued during the First World War as a source for practical and inexpensive cooking. Although cuisine bourgeoise celebrated a certain level of conspicuous consumption, thrift was also an important value and the unfussy dishes of cuisine de la grand-mère were celebrated for their inexpensive ingredients.23 Cuisine bourgeoise was also shaped by the rise of nutritional science, domestic education, and print media in the late nineteenth century. The educational reforms of the Third Republic included domestic education for girls, intended to prepare them to become skilled housewives and raise the children of the Republic. By the end of the nineteenth century, this domestic education focused on the “science of domesticity,” teaching girls that one of their primary functions as wife and mother was to serve simple and well-prepared meals to meet the nutritional needs of each member of their household. Spurred in part by concerns about the declining birth rate, a 1909 law mandated that upper primary school girls spend one-quarter to one-half of the day on domestic education.24 Gender differences in primary and secondary education were lessened in the interwar period, but by that point domestic educators outside of the school system were writing home management guides, cookbooks, and magazine columns, and teaching courses at institutions like the Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire and the Cordon Bleu. Sometimes these educators were chefs who had made careers in haute cuisine. In the 1920s, Escoffier wrote cookbooks highlighting affordable ingredients, including rice, and Henri-Paul Pellaprat became the head of the Cordon Bleu school in 1902, which at the time taught housewives and domestic cooks. Through domestic and culinary education and publications, some practitioners of haute cuisine had a hand in shaping cuisine bourgeoise, and in this way, men continued to have a role in shaping and critiquing the domestic realm.25

Colonial foods in France The availability of many colonial food products was not entirely new in the 1920s, but interest in them grew significantly during and after the First World War, and the volume of many colonial foods imported into France increased

8

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

in the 1920s and 1930s. For some older colonial products, with which French consumers were very familiar, increased colonial production aligned with protectionist trade policies to increase the amount of these imports from the French colonies. For example, French imports of colonial sugar increased from 57,070 metric tons in 1922 to 123,650 metric tons in 1932, despite the recovery of domestic French sugar production during the same period.26 The French colonies went from supplying less than 3 percent of France’s chocolate in 1913 to supplying 90 percent of it in 1938.27 Coffee gained popularity in France in the late seventeenth century as a luxury good coming only from Yemen in the Ottoman Empire. In the eighteenth century, the French developed coffee production in Saint-Domingue, and coffee became a colonial commodity and a “staple drink of most urbanites in France, whatever their social status or income level.”28 After the Haitian revolution, the French colonies produced very little coffee until after the First World War. Coffee, formerly exotic, became a normalized part of French culinary life before it again became a colonial product. French colonial coffee production met 11 percent of French demand in 1934.29 Although these older colonial goods—sugar, chocolate, and coffee—were already fully integrated into French cuisine by the beginning of the twentieth century, the role of the French colonies in bolstering the supply of these now indispensable elements of French culinary life during the war and the Great Depression illustrated the colonial lobby’s message that the colonies were essential contributors to Greater France. The First World War and the interwar period also brought new colonial goods to France and increased the availability of some lesser-known and unusual colonial foods. These new colonial foods had an impact on French cuisine and eating habits, and some of them faced significant resistance. Rice, which had been an uncommon ingredient in French cooking before the war, was heavily promoted during and after the war. French imports of Indochinese rice did dramatically increase in the 1930s, though most of this rice was used for animal feed. The loss of livestock during the war forced the French to eat frozen and canned meat from the colonies—the products of technologies that Parisians had previously resisted. France imported only 2,204 metric tons of colonial meat in 1913, but this amount increased to 19,395 metric tons in 1920.30 Tropical fruits had a significant impact on twentieth-century French cuisine and were potent symbols of colonial bounty. At the start of the twentieth century, bananas were available throughout French urban centers, but they were expensive due to high transit costs.31 In 1932, France imported 185,000 metric tons of bananas, of which the French colonies provided about

Introduction

9

50,000  metric tons.32 This reflected a dramatic increase in the availability of bananas, prompting one recipe author to say in 1935: “In the past they [bananas] were regarded as rarities, the same as pineapples and all colonial fruits, which we look upon now with the same indifference as apples and pears.”33 Quotas on foreign bananas along with production incentives increased French colonial banana production fivefold between 1932 and 1937, and by 1939, the French empire was “self-sufficient in the production of bananas.”34 Pineapples, both fresh and canned, also became more widely available and frequently eaten in France in the interwar period. Since the nineteenth century, pineapples had been a symbol of imperial dominance for European nations and of privilege for wealthy Europeans.35 In the interwar period, both fresh and canned pineapple were more widely available, and the pineapple became a symbol of colonial abundance despite the fact that the French colonies did not produce enough pineapple to supply the metropolitan demand.36 These new colonial foods—along with others that never gained much traction in France—were key elements of the public discourse about the role of the colonies in feeding France and the place of colonial foods within French cuisine. The increase in French colonial food imports in the interwar period was part of the increased interdependence between France and the colonies during the Great Depression. As economic protectionism caused overall French imports and exports to decrease, the percentage of colonial goods in French imports increased from 9.8 percent in 1913 to 12.4 percent in 1929, 23.7 percent in 1933, and 28.5 percent in 1936.37 The actual amount (by weight) of colonial goods imported into France increased to 3 times prewar levels in 1934 and 3.5 times prewar levels in 1937. Food played an absolutely central role in this dramatic increase in French colonial imports. In the late 1930s, the Ministry of Colonies estimated that 85 percent of colonial exports to the metropole were foodstuffs.38 Not only were foodstuffs the majority of French colonial imports, but colonial foods also made up the majority of all foods imported into France in the 1930s. According to the French Ministry of Finance, 70 percent of foodstuffs (objets d’alimentation) by weight imported into France in 1936 came from French colonies.39 This increased to 74 percent in 1938.40

The colonial lobby The increase in French-colonial commerce was in part due to the efforts of the colonial lobby, which pushed for tariffs protecting colonial goods as well as

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Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

investment in colonial production. The French colonial lobby began to take shape in the 1880s as loosely organized groups with business and scientific interests in the colonies.41 In the 1890s, these various groups organized more formally with the founding of independent entities like the Committee for French Africa (1890), the Committee for Madagascar (1895), and the Committee for French Asia (1901). These groups sponsored research and exhibitions and lobbied ministers about colonial concerns. Two developments in the 1890s led to a great expansion of the influence of the colonial lobby. First, in 1892—at the height of the Anglo-French colonial rivalry—Eugène Etienne, the deputy representing the Oran district of Algeria, founded the groupe colonial, “a caucus of pro-colonial members of the lower house of parliament.” The senate version formed in 1898. The groupe colonial grew rapidly, reaching two hundred members—about a third of the Chamber of Deputies—in 1902. Second, business interests from across the empire came together in the Union coloniale française (UCF) in 1893. The UCF became a leading organization in the French colonial lobby in the twentieth century, seeking both to pressure government for policies favorable to colonial business interests and to promote colonial products and the benefits of imperial expansion directly to metropolitan consumers.42 French historians have articulated a few different names to describe the community of individuals and interest groups committed to the French colonial project. C. M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner identified the development of the “colonial party,” revealing the many connections between the parliamentarians of the groupe colonial and the business interests of the colonial party. The “parti colonial” label has been the most favored among most Francophone historians.43 English language historians however, have come to favor “colonial lobby,” which is the nomenclature that I embrace in this work. “Colonial lobby” accurately describes the actions taken by this group in the interwar period—lobbying both government and public opinion in favor of colonial development. As opposed to broader terms such as Martin Thomas’s “imperial community,” “colonial lobby” helps to distinguish those groups and individuals who actively promoted colonial development from those who were drawn into the discourse on empire through other interests such as nutrition.44 The experience of the First World War spurred the colonial lobby to push for changes in the way the French nation defined itself in relation to the colonies. These shifts were articulated in the phrases “mise en valeur” (value creation) and “plus grande France” (Greater France). Mise en valeur was, in its most simple form, the argument that investment in organized colonial development

Introduction

11

would make the colonies more economically productive and socially stable, therefore benefitting both France and the colonies. Albert Sarraut was the most well-known and influential spokesman of this plan for colonial development and governance. He served as the governor general of Indochina from 1911 to 1914 and from 1917 to 1919 and as Minister of Colonies in successive national bloc ministries from 1920 to 1924. In 1921, Sarraut introduced his plan for infrastructure spending in the colonies for consideration in the National Assembly. In 1923 he published an essay in defense of this plan titled La mise en valeur des colonies françaises. Sarraut’s plan was never implemented, or even voted upon, but it defined the debate about colonial development throughout the interwar period.45 The genesis of a policy of state investment in organized colonial development for the benefit of France took place during the First World War, as the colonial lobby struggled to supply France with raw materials, especially foodstuffs. Conferences and committees met to begin to develop a plan for the mise en valeur of the empire during the war, though they garnered very little attention from the metropolitan government, which was more concerned with the pressing needs of the war and its aftermath. Sarraut’s plan, as set forth in La mise en valeur des colonies françaises, called for using German war reparations to fund a fifteen-year plan for colonial development through public work projects improving infrastructure.46 His experiences governing Indochina during French food shortages convinced him that France must take better advantage of colonial resources. Sarraut made the potential of the colonies to supply France with more food a part of his argument for the essential role of the colonies in France’s post-war renewal: Indeed, now more informed about her colonial possessions and about the value of the elements of revival, restoration, of national vitality that she can draw from them, France organizes her future on more powerful bases, will ask of her colonies and of her protectorates men for her army, money to alleviate her fiscal burdens, materials and products for her industry, her commerce, her feeding [alimentation], her trade.47

La mise en valeur des colonies françaises also included Sarraut’s rejection of assimilationist policies and defense of associationist governance in the colonies. Associationism depended on the cooperation of an indigenous elite in each colony to help govern and was based on Sarraut’s belief that all of the colonial races were at different states of evolution, and therefore could not all be expected to assimilate at the same pace.

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Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

The other key phrase of interwar colonial policy and propaganda was “la plus grande France” or “Greater France.” Sarraut presented the idea in the following passage: The idea, the image, little by little it takes shape in the spirits of a new entity where the continental Patrie and the overseas French . . . make up the real force of a plus grande France basing her security no longer on 40 million, but on 100 million human beings, and will be able to demand all the food for its life from the whole of a domain twenty times larger than the mother Patrie.48

For Sarraut, Greater France meant a French army staffed by colonial soldiers and French meals made with food grown in the colonies. The notion of Greater France was very popular among the colonial lobby, and also among republicans more broadly after the First World War. It was the “general but imprecise idea that the colonies were somehow integral parts of ” an expanded French nation.49 Gary Wilder has argued that this concept revealed “the anxiety of an imperial nationstate confronting crises of republican and colonial legitimacy.”50 My analysis of the discourse surrounding colonial foods in the interwar period supports Wilder’s conclusion that the concept of Greater France reflected the anxiety in France over the place of the colonies in defining French national identity. Food— incorporated into our bodies—became a powerful symbol in interwar Paris of the incorporation of the colonies into France. The unease of many Parisians with new colonial foods was in some part an embodied expression of their concern over the cultural incorporation implied in the notion of Greater France. Just how interested the French public was in the colonial empire has long been a point of debate among French historians. The traditional view is that only the colonial lobby was truly engaged with imperialism while most of the broader public remained indifferent to the colonial project despite occasional fashions of exoticism.51 More recently, scholars, especially Anglo-American historians of France, influenced by the cultural turn and postcolonial studies, have more often portrayed the empire as central to French history and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Eric Jennings concisely summarizes, these works examine “the ways in which colonialism insinuated itself into metropolitan French life.”52 Some Francophone historians have taken this view as well. Nicolas Bancel goes so far as to speak of a “habitus colonial,” and Sandrine Lemaire claims to show how the state created “the colonial spirit.”53 This book bridges the gap between these two branches of French historical scholarship. While it is a work of cultural history that examines colonial foods as an aspect of imperial influence on Parisian life, it also chronicles the work of the small,

Introduction

13

elite, colonial lobby in promoting these foods. As to the question of the extent to which “colonialism insinuated itself into metropolitan French life” and what this says about general French interest in imperialism, I argue that colonial foods were one way in which the empire was present in everyday life, but this did not lead to a widespread enthusiasm for Greater France. Confronted by new foods from the French colonies, Parisians frequently rejected them. Only a select few exotic imports were integrated into French cuisine. Although eating culture does not fully summarize the French experience of empire, it does reveal some of its complexities. Edward Berenson has recently credited contemporary issues surrounding the “suddenly visible presence of dark-skinned immigrants in France” with the shift in French colonial historiography to a “new orthodoxy” that presents finde-siècle France as “saturated with the imagery of empire.” My work, initially inspired by the presence of immigrant cuisine in contemporary Paris, certainly fits Berenson’s characterization. He also critiques this newer work for failing to “gauge to what extent and in what ways individuals received or assimilated what historians have labeled the ‘popular culture of imperialism.’ ”54 By analyzing the limits of exotic dining and the integration of colonial food into French cuisine, I attempt to understand to what extent the French assimilated the culture of imperialism. In her study of tobacco and chocolate in the early modern Atlantic world, Marcy Norton highlights the syncretism that took place as the Spanish learned to use these products in the Americas and then brought this cultural knowledge to Europe.55 My analysis of colonial foods in interwar Paris reveals a different process of assimilation, one in which communities from the colonies had very little impact on how the French understood new colonial foods. Some colonial foods—rice, tropical fruits, and curry powder— were incorporated into the margins of French cuisine, and any other interest in colonial foods outside of nutritional scientists and the colonial lobby was limited to spectacular events of exoticism such as the 1931 International Colonial Exposition.

The violence of colonial food production Although some of these colonial foods were newly available to the French public in the interwar period, they already had a long and complex history that was intertwined with the history of European imperialism and the oppression of nonwhite peoples throughout the globe. On his second voyage to the “New World,”

14

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

Columbus brought with him sugar cane from the Spanish Canary Islands. By 1516, enslaved Africans in Saint Domingue were laboring to produce sugar for export to Europe.56 On that same voyage in 1493, Columbus “discovered” the pineapple in Guadeloupe. As the New World colonies developed plantation agriculture, production and consumption were intimately linked across the Atlantic. While increased colonial production of sugar transformed the European diet, the European demand for sugar radically altered the economic structure and the realities of labor in the New World including in the French “sugar colonies.”57 In the modern French empire, forced labor practices and the economics of colonial domination bound workers to the production of sugar and other agricultural goods for export.58 French demands on the colonies during the First World War intensified the violence of the French imperial project. In many cases, France demanded food from colonies where there was simply not enough food to sustain the local population, much less to send to France. At the start of the war, French West Africa (AOF) had no surplus food production and its granary reserves were depleted after years of drought and aridity from 1911 to 1913.59 The French conscription of colonial soldiers to fight the war made matters worse as depopulation disrupted the agricultural economy.60 And yet, it was in this context of scarcity of food and manpower that France demanded from the empire more food for the metropole. French officials requisitioned wheat from the Maghreb, wheat and groundnuts from French West Africa, rice from Indochina, and sugar from Guadeloupe and Martinique to help feed French troops and civilians during the war. In many cases, French officials demanded more than they could transport, causing precious food to rot on the docks. Tragically, French requisitions and conscriptions combined with drought and increased food-import prices to bring famine to much of French Africa between 1917 and 1921, including the severe Algerian famine of 1920.61 In addition to the hardships caused by wartime policies, the “modern” agricultural development of Algeria intensified the effects of the famine for native Algerians. By 1920, 98 percent of the Tell, the breadbasket of Algeria, had been expropriated and exploited by European settlers. The imposed system of private land ownership ended the ability of local leaders to distribute grain reserves during times of famine.62 As Susanne Friedberg poignantly summarizes, “The modern history of famine makes brutally clear that colonial subjects did not enjoy the same basic food rights as citizens. . . . France, so proud of its own food abundance, tolerated repeated incidents of famine in its African empire. The right not to starve . . . did not extend to the dark-skinned colonies.”63

Introduction

15

One of the significant effects of the First World War on French colonial policy was a shift in colonial agricultural development toward supplying metropolitan France with foodstuffs, part of the broader “reorientation of production towards European markets” that was central to the imperial project.64 This reorientation made indigenous farmers throughout the colonial world vulnerable to fluctuations in global food prices, and the imperial customs union that bound them to trade predominantly with France left them especially vulnerable to swings in French taste and production. Even in periods of economic recovery in the colonies, such as from 1925 to 1930, it was primarily Europeans who profited. During this period, viticulture was the most profitable agricultural sector in Algeria, and Europeans owned 90 percent of it. The same was true for 70 percent of the production of vegetables and citrus fruit and 40 percent of grain production in Algeria.65 Although this book focuses on the impact of colonialism on French diets, it is important to recognize the long-term effects that the colonial agriculture policy developed during this period had on the postcolonial world. As Friedberg has demonstrated, “The experience of agrarian change under colonial rule was brief relative to the longue durée of African agricultural history, but long enough to establish lasting relationships and hierarchies on both a local and transnational scale.”66

The story of colonial foods in interwar Paris Without following a strictly chronological structure, this book tells a narrative of change over time. Before the First World War, interest in colonial contributions to the French diet (beyond the old colonial goods of spices, sugar, chocolate, tea, and coffee) was limited to colonial and nutritional scientists. This changed during the war. The sudden need for more food for France and the attempt of French colonial administrations to provide colonial food to the metropole during the war made the potential of the colonies to feed France a central concern of the colonial lobby and contributed to the development of the plan for the mise en valeur of the empire and the concept of la plus grande France. After the war, the colonial lobby worked to promote colonial foodstuffs, especially rice flour and then rice, to the French public. Popular interest in new colonial foods was always limited, but it peaked during the vogue of exoticism centered on the 1931 International Colonial Exposition. When the Great Depression hit France in the early 1930s, French imports of colonial foods increased, even as resistance from metropolitan agricultural interests mounted. This story takes place primarily in

16

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

Paris, though it includes events and people from many different French colonies and throughout France. It was in Paris, where the colonial lobby focused most of its efforts, that French national cuisine was defined, and where the great events of colonial propaganda exposed more people to the diversity of colonial foods than anywhere else in France. The following chapters examine these changes by focusing on key events, groups, and foods, beginning with the First World War. Chapter 1 examines how the colonial lobby came to believe that one of the central functions of the empire was to feed the metropole. During the war, colonial administrations and the Colonial Ministry in Paris worked with private business groups to supply France with its immediate food needs and to lay the groundwork for growing colonial food production to serve the metropole. Colonial administrators in French West Africa (AOF), Madagascar, and Indochina all failed to export much colonial food to France during the war. The experience of trying to send rice, beans, and lard to France while he was the wartime governor general of Indochina influenced Sarraut’s future plans for the mise en valeur of the empire, and the shared experience of the colonial lobby in trying to feed France led to the development of this mise en valeur ideology among French imperialists. Food also brought those outside of the colonial lobby into the discussion about where the colonies fit into French life. Nutritionists, domestic education teachers, recipe writers, home cooks, and consumers all engaged with the idea of Greater France through colonial foods. Chapters 2 through 5 look closely at colonial foods in Paris from before the First World War through the interwar period, focusing on the specific foods, events, and media that brought the debate about the place of the colonies in France to those who were not part of the colonial lobby. The scientific community was on the forefront of issues of diet and nutrition, and some scientists were especially focused on the potential of food from the colonies to improve French diets. Chapter 2 analyzes the efforts of the Société d’acclimatation to diversify the French diet through colonial agriculture, especially through a close study of their annual colonial-themed banquets. This analysis highlights a shift in emphasis caused by the First World War from experimentation to promotion at these banquets and demonstrates that food was absolutely central to this group’s visions of mise en valeur and Greater France. These pro-colonial scientists were perhaps the group most likely to embrace colonial foods. The next chapters examine the place of colonial foods outside of the colonial lobby. Chapter 3 follows the promotion of Indochinese rice in France from the First World War through the Colonial Economic Conference of 1935. It analyzes the reasons for the various forms of rice promotion, the resistance to rice in France,

Introduction

17

and the intersection of the interest groups involved. It demonstrates the effects of changing global and national economic conditions—from the First World War to the Great Depression—in shaping the promotion of this colonial good and ultimately the relationship between France and her colonies. This shifting debate over Indochinese rice raised the larger issues of national and imperial self-sufficiency and the meaning of Greater France. While some of these promotional efforts emanated from scientists, landowners, and the colonial government within Indochina, most of the debate was centered in Paris, where the Indochinese lobby interacted with legislatures, scientists, chefs, housewives, and competing interest groups. Further examining the question—raised in the first three chapters—of which colonial foods were accepted by the French and why, Chapter 4 traces the development of a new “colonial cuisine” within French national cuisine in the first half of the twentieth century through an examination of two cooking magazines. Understanding national cuisine as a cultural code, this chapter demonstrates how a new French colonial cuisine drew upon the availability of food products from the colonies, especially tropical fruits and the vaguely defined colonial flavor of curry. While new dishes integrated colonial foods into the French culinary code, they remained on the periphery of French cuisine. Only a few aspects of colonial foods—those that were associated with an unspecific, homogenized, disembodied colonial other—were successfully integrated into French cuisine. The alterity of colonized peoples and their culinary cultures, repeatedly emphasized in gastronomic writing in these magazines, set boundaries of French identity that did not include the colonial subjects of the empire. Encompassing both promotion and consumption, representation and reception, Chapter 5 looks at colonial food at one historic event that brought together many of the individuals and groups discussed throughout this book in a singular Parisian space—the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 (ECI). This final chapter analyzes the use of food and taste at the ECI to better understand the messages given by colonial administrations and explores the experience of visitors participating in a whirlwind tour of the colonial world. Although much colonial food was displayed, served, and eaten at the ECI, this did not reflect a general embrace of colonial culinary contributions to France. The mediation of colonial foods, the limits to how they could be presented to French diners, and the rhetoric of savagery and cannibalism that often accompanied exotic dining experiences point to serious limitations in the French public’s interest in colonial foods. My examination of food at the Colonial Exposition demonstrates the centrality of incorporation in the messages of the colonial lobby.

1

Colonial Food in the First World War

France was agriculturally self-sufficient before the First World War, with agricultural output growing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Food exports to France, therefore, were not yet a central goal of the colonial project. The First World War caused a sudden disruption to domestic agriculture, increased food prices, and food shortages throughout France. Although the French did not suffer from hunger as profoundly as the Germans, the need to import food during and after the war led French officials to look to the empire in a new way. In their attempts to bring colonial foods to France during the war, colonial administrators often had interests that conflicted with those of the metropolitan government. While officials in Paris sought to supply France’s wartime needs as quickly as possible, colonial officials often recognized the problems this could cause for local and global colonial economies. Colonial officials also often considered the colonies’ long-term development, an issue far from the minds of metropolitan officials who were concerned primarily with winning the war. Private businesses in the colonies, organized through the UCF, also worked to coordinate sales of colonial foods to the French government and to promote the long-term interests of their colonial food industries. The resulting attempt to move food throughout the global empire during the war was deeply flawed as many tons of food and other agricultural products purchased by the government never reached France, and these requisitions contributed to hunger throughout the empire. Overall, the actual amount of colonial foods imported during the war was rather small. Yet, in a time of high food costs and limited supply, they were significant enough to highlight the role of the colonies as life-giving suppliers of food to the metropole, a theme that would resonate in colonial policymaking and propaganda throughout the interwar period. Sugar imports from the French West Indies helped maintain French sugar consumption throughout much of the war. Sugar was an especially valuable commodity as other calorie-rich

20

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

foods such as bread and meat were in short supply. Severe logistical limitations hampered efforts to transport African wheat and groundnuts, Indochinese rice, and frozen meat from Madagascar, but some of these products did reach France. These foods played an important symbolic role in French popular opinion about the importance of the colonies and a direct role in shaping interwar colonial political ideology. The efforts of colonial administrators and business leaders to supply food to France during the war raised hopes that the colonies could become major suppliers of food to France. The botched attempt to move goods throughout the empire revealed so much future potential that before the war had ended, colonial government and business leaders gathered several times to plan future colonial development that would help the colonies more successfully supply France with food. In this way, the wartime experience—its successes and its failures— shaped the development of the concept of mise en valeur. The key spokesman and popularizer of mise en valeur policy, Albert Sarraut, was governor general of Indochina during the war and involved himself in the wartime problems of producing, transporting, and promoting rice and other Indochinese food products. This experience certainly influenced his plans for the empire in the interwar period. This chapter will examine the role of the First World War as a turning point in French political imagination about the purpose of the colonies. France’s need to import food—which began during the war and continued through the 1920s—made feeding France a key function of the French empire. This chapter begins with a discussion of the economic realities of the First World War France, which caused French administrators to look to the colonies to help feed the military and civilian populations. Next, it traces the development of a new wartime bureaucracy dedicated to the importation of colonial foods and then examines the interaction of that bureaucracy with colonial administrations and the UCF in French West Africa, Indochina, and Madagascar. A close look at the efforts to supply specific colonial foodstuffs to metropolitan France reveals the problems of colonial infrastructure, manpower, and transport, and the significant cultural limitations to the eating of certain colonial foods. This chapter concludes with an analysis of how the effort to supply France with colonial foods during the war left imperialists optimistic about the empire’s potential bounty and laid the foundation for the mise en valeur colonial development plan of the interwar period. The UCF was a key organization involved in many efforts to sell colonial foods to the empire during and following the First World War. The UCF was founded

Colonial Food in the First World War

21

in 1893 by merchants from Marseille and Bordeaux who were concerned primarily with the future of their commercial installations in West Africa. It soon expanded to include sections dedicated to promoting French business interests in all regions of the French empire.1 Membership in the UCF was broad, including entrepreneurs, financiers, farmers, senior functionaries, and politicians. It brought together representatives from more than four hundred French companies. Although it often included leaders in government positions and worked closely with government officials in the colonies and the metropole, the UCF remained an independent organization representing business interests. The UCF worked to improve conditions for colonial business both through lobbying public officials and through attempts to influence public opinion in favor of continuing, expanding, and developing the French overseas empire.2

The food crisis in France Deficient labor supply was first “among the causes of the decay of French agriculture.”3 In August 1914, the first mobilization of French troops raised 2.9 million men out of a male workforce of 12.6 million. Within ten months, another 2.7 million followed, and the army remained at about five million men throughout the war. By the end of the war, 75 percent of all metropolitan men aged twenty to fifty-five had mobilized.4 This led to a major decrease in the agricultural workforce and therefore in yield per acre. This decrease in available labor led some farmers to shift from more demanding crops to meadows, further decreasing food production. The requisition of horses also impeded production.5 The Western Front of the First World War was fought in one of France’s richest regions. Northeastern France is most famous for producing most of the nation’s steel, coal, and iron ore, but it was also an important agricultural region. In 1913, the soon-to-be invaded area produced 20 percent of the wheat, 25 percent of the oats, 12 percent of the potatoes, 50 percent of the sugar beets, and an estimated 10 percent of the livestock in France.6 Loss of manpower, livestock, and agricultural land combined to severely decrease France’s ability to produce its own food, especially wheat, meat, and sugar. Most devastating was the dramatic decline in wheat production. French wheat production was 86.92 million tons in 1913. Production decreased to 89 percent of that amount in 1914, 70 percent in 1915, 64 percent in 1916, and all the way down to 42 percent of 1913 levels by 1917.7 Although a national strategy for food procurement took shape only in the second half of the war, mayors of French cities began capping

22

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

prices on bread, meat, and wine right away, and in February 1915, wheat had become so scarce in Paris that military authorities began requisitioning wheat in the provinces to feed Parisians. In 1917, metropolitan authorities began making serious demands for food from the colonies. In 1920, wheat production was still back to only 74 percent of 1913 levels.8 Overall, prices of primary foodstuffs in Paris increased by an average of 50 percent by the end of the war.9 This dramatic drop in wheat production levels was especially significant, because, as historian Steven Kaplan has repeatedly demonstrated, bread has been central to the French diet since at least the eighteenth century and carries symbolic importance beyond its dietary significance. Kaplan summarizes: Psychologically, culturally, politically, and economically, bread was one of the most powerful “structuring structures” that governed private and public life in Old Regime France. It was at the core of both the material and symbolic organization of everyday existence. France was not merely “panivore,” following the picturesque contemporary idiom; it was obsessed with bread. Bread was its primary means of survival, its paramount vector of sacrality, and its most comforting trope.10

Making sure Paris was supplied with bread of acceptable quality—wheat bread that was at least partially white—was a key focus of French governments since the Old Regime. Bread remained central to French diets and cultural life in the early twentieth century, and wartime scarcities again brought the issue of provisioning Paris to the forefront.

Sugar Domestic French sugar production was also severely limited during the war, and yet throughout most of the conflict, the metropolitan French were able to maintain sugar consumption at near prewar levels. Sugar is a particularly interesting case because it began as a colonial product before the French developed domestic sugar production. By 1650, sugar had become common in Europe as a commodity only available from outside of Europe, primarily from the “sugar colonies” of the Caribbean.11 Later, when the French lost access to Caribbean sugar sources in the nineteenth century, they developed domestic sugar beet production. When the battlefields of the First World War destroyed half of the sugar beet fields of France, the French turned back to colonial sugar. So sugar—a commodity made in two different forms of similar value in France

Colonial Food in the First World War

23

and the colonies—provides an interesting case study for how decreased wartime production led to increased colonial imports. Understanding the complexities of French sugar production and consumption requires a bit of historical context. Historically, sugar has played a less significant role in French cuisine than in English and other European cuisines, despite the significance of the craft of pastry making and the fact that French interests dominated the European sugar trade in the seventeenth century. Although England established dominance over the sugar trade in the eighteenth century, the French “sugar colonies” of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Domingue continued to export vast amounts of sugar until the end of the eighteenth century.12 The English consumed nearly 15.5 pounds of sugar per person per year in 1792, and this increased to 20 pounds per person per year from 1800 to 1809. Meanwhile, despite Saint-Domingue’s position as the leading sugarproducing colony, French sugar consumption was only 1.8 pounds per person per year from 1781 to 1790, and it dropped to 1.05 pounds per person per year from 1803 to 1812, dramatically less than British consumption during the same period.13 This decline in French consumption was due to two factors. First, the Haitian Revolution ended French control of its largest sugar-producing colony. Second, the British blockade of continental ports during the Napoleonic Wars cut off supplies from the West Indies and Southeast Asia. In response, the French began to refine sugar from sugar beets. The world’s first sugar beet factory was built in Silesia in 1801. Napoleon, dealing with the British blockade, urged French businessmen to pursue production in France. By the 1840s, fifty-eight sugar beet factories in France produced enough sugar to meet the entire domestic demand. Meanwhile Britain continued to import colonial cane sugar.14 Beet sugar production yielded a cheaper product of similar quality to cane sugar. The availability of this cheaper product greatly increased sugar consumption in France by the end of the nineteenth century, though never to British levels.15 French consumption jumped from 2.6 pounds per person per year from 1815 to 1824 to 26.4 pounds per person per year from 1885 to 1894.16 On the eve of the First World War, in 1913, the French consumed about 18.1 kilograms of sugar (40 lbs) per person per year. Domestic beet sugar production met most of this demand (see Table 1).17 Domestic sugar production decreased dramatically during the war, plummeting to just fifteen percent of prewar levels by 1919. Yet, this drop-off in domestic production did not dramatically affect the amount of sugar eaten by the French. During the first three years of the war, French sugar consumption remained relatively consistent, supplied by foreign and colonial sugar imports. In 1917, the Ministère du ravitaillement (Ministry of

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

24

Table 1  French consumption of sugar, 1911–32

Year

French sugar consumption

Indigenously produced sugar

Imported sugar, foreign and colonial

Sugar exports from France

Total

Per Person

Thousands of quintals

Thousands of quintals

Thousands of quintals

Thousands of quintals

Kilograms

1911

6,485

1,641

1,186

6,940

17.5

1912

5,540

2,902

1,773

6,670

16.8

1913

7,818

1,801

1,726

7,169

18.1

1914

No data

1,633

No data

No data

No data

1915

2,845

5,215

1,035

7,025

”

1916

1,605

5,431

940

6,096

”

1917

1,608

5,247

752

6,103

”

1918

1,887

1,780

638

3,030

”

1919

1,177

6,038

781

6,434

16.6

1920

1,823

6,079

764

7,137

18.2

1921

3,336

3,566

105

5,814

14.8

1922

3,615

5,700

1,403

7,912

20.1

1923

3,922

4,836

1,229

7,530

19.0

1924

5,161

4,516

1,466

8,210

20.5

1925

6,958

3,171

1,758

8,372

20.6

1926

5,840

4,102

1,767

8,175

20.0

1927

7,097

3,292

2,131

8,258

20.2

1928

7,074

4,133

2,365

8,842

21.5

1929

7,410

4,751

2,737

9,424

23.4

1930

7,709

3,789

2,492

9,006

21.6

1931

8,877

3,111

2,315

9,673

23.1

1932

8,535

3,769

2,718

9,587

22.9

Source: “Tableau II: Consommation des pommes de terre et du sucre,” Annuaire statistique de la France 49 (1933): 178.

Colonial Food in the First World War

25

Supply) requisitioned the entire sugar production of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion.18 Total domestic French sugar consumption decreased significantly only in 1918 and returned to just below prewar levels the following year. With so many beet fields destroyed and so little labor available in France, domestic sugar production was even lower in 1919 than during the war and did not rebound to prewar levels until 1925. Imports remained high, not only maintaining French consumption levels but also increasing them. As domestic production increased in the second half of the 1920s, imports remained fairly consistent. Only about a quarter to a third of these imports came from French colonies; the rest were foreign imports (see Table 2).19 Consumption continued to increase throughout the 1920s, reaching 23.4 kilograms (51.6 lbs) per person per year in 1929, a nearly 30 percent increase over 1913 levels. Although the French colonies actually contributed only about a quarter to a third of France’s imported sugar in the 1920s, cane sugar was perceived culturally as a colonial product. The colonies were, therefore, perceived as having helped to maintain French sugar consumption at relatively consistent levels during the war and at increasing levels after the war. Sugar was an especially powerful symbol because Table 2  French sugar imports, 1922–32 Year

Unrefined from French colonies

Unrefined from foreign countries

Refined from foreign countries

Thousands of metric quintals 1922

592.7

2,525.5

2,604.1

1923

570.7

1,847.4

2,395.9

1924

776.6

1,771.9

1,967.0

1925

1,035.3

1,804.1

331.9

1926

1,020.4

2,572.5

509.3

1927

1,007.4

2,140.5

143.9

1928

930.7

2,750.4

451.5

1929

476.7

3,965.9

308.8

1930

952.1

2,753.7

83.1

1931

987.3

2,063.3

60.4

1932

1,236.5

2,480.9

51.8

Sources: “Tableau I: Consommation, importation, et exportations des sucres,” Annuaire statistique de la France 41 (1925): 267; “Tableau I: Consommation, importation, et exportations des sucres,” ibid. 44 (1928): 221; “Tableau I: Consommation, importation, et exportations des sucres,” ibid. 49 (1933): 261.

26

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

the destruction of sugar beet fields was so great that without colonial sugar, both French-owned and foreign, French diets would have been dramatically affected. Beet sugar—originally developed to replace colonial cane sugar—was itself replaced by colonial cane sugar during a time of great domestic scarcity. Through the requisitioning of sugar, the colonies were called upon during and after the war to help maintain some level of normalcy in the French diet. In fact, the shortage of other high calorie foods like animal fat, while sugar availability remained relatively stable, may have contributed to increased sugar consumption and the further integration of sugar into the French diet as consumption levels continued to grow throughout the interwar period. In 1925, the Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire recommended increasing the consumption of sugar as a cheap source of calories.20 Sugar also demonstrates how the politics of colonial agriculture later shifted dramatically during the global Great Depression of the 1930s. By 1934, domestic sugar production had recovered while colonial production had also grown, and French beet farmers were asking for more protection from competing colonial sugar imports.21 As the example of beet sugar production shows, metropolitan food production did not rebound immediately at the end of the war. Domestic sugar production reached prewar levels only in 1929 (see Table 1). The heavy losses exhausted the French agricultural sector, which faced the immense task of bringing the land back to productivity.22 Throughout the 1920s, the agricultural sector struggled to recover from the loss of manpower and damage to the land. The 1919 American “Report of the Agricultural Commission to Europe” documented war losses and anticipated that Europe would need increased food imports for years to come. The primary shortages, in order of severity, were of “wheat, meat, concentrated feeds, sugar, fertilizers, farm machinery and dairy products.”23

The 1917 turn to the colonies With food production in France so fully disrupted, some in the metropolitan government turned to the colonies to fill the void. The colonies provided troops and workers for the war effort, so why not food?24 Colonial government officials and private business groups were often eager to offer colonial bounty to help quell French hunger. In June 1917, the Governor General of French West Africa, Joost Van Vollenhoven, expressed this spirit: It is under the pressure of these requirements that the metropole has looked toward the colonies and has realized the marvelous assistance that it can expect.

Colonial Food in the First World War

27

Indochina, the greatest producer of rice in the world, can assure nearly alone the task of supplying France. North Africa produces wine, grains and livestock. Our old colonies give sugar and its derivatives. Madagascar exports rice and livestock. Our oceanic possessions supply meat and copra, and if French Equatorial Africa, the most recent of our grand colonies, does not yet play a considerable role on the global markets, French West Africa, by contrast, where the pacification is complete, where the indigène produces gladly whenever he finds it to his advantage, where the commerce is strongly organized, French West Africa, which is so close, finds itself selected to play a crucial role.25

The reality, however, was much more complicated than Vollenhoven’s statement suggested. Shipping rice and other foods from Indochina to France during the war proved costly and, at times, impossible, and rice imports were only useful if the French would eat them. As we have seen, colonial sugar helped maintain French consumption levels, but only when greatly supplemented by foreign imports. French military rations were reliant on lots of meat, but cultural hesitations against refrigerated and frozen meat had prevented the infrastructure for its import from being built, and new protein sources like soy were not well received. North and West Africa faced even greater problems as French shipping and collection efforts failed and the French military recruited African men away from agricultural production. Throughout the empire, problems with production, manpower, acquisition, transport, and conflicting food cultures plagued the efforts of colonial administrators to supply food to France. The bureaucracy to facilitate colonial material contributions to the war effort built up slowly. It began within the Colonial Ministry and did not gain much attention until the dramatic drops in domestic food production in 1917, when wheat production fell to below half of prewar levels. At the beginning of the war, in September 1914, the Commission consultative coloniale was formed within the Colonial Ministry in Paris. This “unwieldy” organization was tasked with taking stock of the resources available in the colonies, but it “ground inconsequentially to a halt within a year.”26 It was replaced in November 1915 by the Service de l’utilisation des produits coloniaux pour la défense nationale, which was founded with the goal “to constitute a permanent organization of liaison between the ensemble of our overseas possessions and the national supply [ravitaillement national], with the goal of obtaining the colonial products capable of responding to the needs of the metropole, in that which concerns the feeding of men and of animals.”27 The Service de l’utilisation dealt with military requisitions and studied questions of production, describing its own role in 1917 as including suggesting prices, giving instructions to local authorities for increased production,

28

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

organizing maritime transport to France, resolving any local problems with production, and regulating local treasuries.28 The Service de l’utilisation dealt mostly with requests from the Ministère du ravitaillement and other ministries, but it was not proactive in promoting colonial goods for metropolitan use or effective in organizing production and acquisition on the ground in the colonies. Both of these tasks fell mostly, instead, to the governor generals in the colonies. In December 1916, the Service de l’utilisation asked colonial governors to increase the production of foods that could be shipped to France, and then thought that not much more could be done.29 Although this lack of action by the Service de l’utilisation was frustrating to some in the colonial lobby, it was not without good reason. The head of the Service de l’utilisation, Jules Reinhart, was not impressed by the colonial lobby’s claims of potential increased production, most importantly because France did not possess the means to bring more colonial materials to France. Before the war, France’s merchant navy carried only 2.5 million metric tons while Britain’s carried twenty-one million. The war decreased the capacity of the French merchant navy, and by the end of 1916 French ships carried only a quarter of French imports. The problem was exacerbated by the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. That April, a quarter of the vessels leaving Britain were sunk and Britain’s food stocks fell to only a six-week supply. The British government, therefore, demanded the return of a third of the British ships that had been helping to supply France. The immediate crisis passed, but shipping was a serious concern for the Allies throughout the end of the war.30 It is therefore not surprising that some colonial administrators were hesitant to invest in increased food production, as there was no guarantee that this potential bounty could be transported to France. But while shipping was severely limited in 1917, the need for food in France was growing. By 1917, France faced a food supply crisis as the wheat harvest fell to less than half prewar levels and domestic sugar supply took an even harder hit, spurring the turn to the colonies to which Vollenhoven was responding. This dramatic increase in need, as well as the arrival of a new colonial minister, opened a window for colonialists to make the case for investment in colonial production. André Maginot, Minister of Colonies from March to September 1917 before going on to his influential role of Minister of War in the 1920s, was inexperienced in colonial affairs and susceptible to pressure from the colonial lobby and the “attractive simplicity of colonialist logic.”31 In June 1917 Maginot called a Conférence coloniale, gathering 250 parliamentarians of the colonialist party, local and national colonial administrators, and representatives of colonial

Colonial Food in the First World War

29

business interests, and tasked them with finding a way to supply France with colonial food.32 Delegates to the conference spent much of their time voicing anger at the failures of the French government and French capitalism for not having developed the colonies’ potential. They passed nearly a hundred resolutions, calling “for everything from tariff reform to the increased provision of midwives.” The vast majority of these remained merely resolutions. Maginot was in power for only six more months, and the only action he took on these matters was the appointment of an executive commission to work with the colonial administrations toward the “realization of conference resolutions.”33 This executive commission came up against the problem of transport. On October 4, 1917, at the second meeting of the executive commission, chairman Henri Bérenger acknowledged, “Our program has been aimed at intensifying colonial production. But the produce can no longer be shipped. . . . As a result, we shall have to investigate a decrease in production because we cannot foresee any increase in shipping, at least in the near future.”34 Even though few concrete actions were taken in the immediate aftermath of the conference, the bringing together of government and private industry to discuss how the colonies could better supply France with food demonstrates how the First World War was a turning point in the political imagination about the importance of the colonies to France, and many of the ideas raised at the conference contributed to Sarraut’s later plan for the mise en valeur of the empire.35 While the Colonial Ministry turned its attention in 1917 to trying to increase production to aid France, the role of the state in supplying food to French citizens grew. In September 1914, a Direction du ravitaillement was created under the Ministry of Commerce, but it was not elevated to cabinet level until December 1916 with the creation of the Ministry of Public Works, Transport, and Supply (ravitaillement). In April 1917, that ministry was split into the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation and a new Ministry of General Supply and Marine Transport (Ministère du ravitaillement général et des transports maritimes). In November of 1917, the focus on food supply became especially evident as the ministry became the Ministère de l’agriculture et du ravitaillement. In all of its forms the Ministère du ravitaillement was included in the War Committee to which the Ministry of Colonies was also added in 1917. Through the Ministère du ravitaillement, in all of its forms, the French government attempted to take control of the food supply on both the front lines and the home front. The Ministère de l’agriculture et du ravitaillement controlled rationing and began distributing bread cards in November 1917.36 Finally, in February 1918, a law was passed giving the government total

30

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

authority over “the production, distribution, and sale of products for human or animal consumption.”37 This came to involve requisitioning crops, instituting rations, controlling prices, and educating housewives about how to feed a family under wartime food restrictions. The First World War was in many ways a battle of resources. Governments throughout Europe “were thrown into the roles of suppliers and distributors of foodstuffs, and much of the food policy formation was piecemeal, at times chaotic, in nature.”38 Kyri Claflin has shown how piecemeal and contested this policymaking was in the case of provisioning Paris.39 French attempts to mobilize colonial food resources were even more disjointed. The following sections discuss attempts at exporting colonial foods to France during the war in French West Africa, Indochina, and Madagascar. The administrations of each of these colonies had different products to offer and each faced distinct challenges in its attempts to send foods to France. A close look at these issues reveals some of the problems of supplying colonial foods to the metropole during the war. It also demonstrates the role of established French foodways in determining colonial contributions to feeding France. Some foods were understood as more appropriate and more appealing for French soldiers and civilians than were others. Sugar and wheat were in high demand, while colonial administrators and business leaders worked to overcome French resistance to lesser-known foods like rice and frozen meat. Often, the interests of the colonial bureaucracy conflicted with those of the Ministère du ravitaillement and other metropolitan ministries.

“There is a basic conflict between these demands”: Food and men from Africa In May 1917, Vollenhoven, Governor General of the AOF, wrote to the Minister of Colonies about new requests from the Ministère du ravitaillement général for the AOF to supply food for metropolitan France: “Because of the rising difficulties of the national supply of wheat and fat, the Government has decided to call upon the production of French West Africa to supply the Metropole with substitution foods in the greatest amount possible.”40 Vollenhoven was writing to the Colonial Minister to discuss the many problems he foresaw in meeting these demands and to suggest a plan for more effective action. He saw the challenges in two broad categories: the requisition of goods and their transport to France. He was very concerned that government agents should not just try to purchase

Colonial Food in the First World War

31

this food without understanding the complex local economy. He pointed out that there were very few food reserves on hand and that local farmers had the motivation to grow more than what they needed for their own subsistence only if they could trade the surplus for factory goods. With the decline of trade with Europe during the war, these factory goods were not available. Therefore, he argued, experienced traders should purchase this food. He organized French traders working in the AOF into the Union des maisons françaises de la Côte d’Afrique, and they agreed to facilitate purchases for the government. Vollenhoven then went on to warn that even if he and the Union des maisons were successful in acquiring this food, their efforts would be wasted if transport to France was not made available. He ended by emphasizing that unless all of these forces were coordinated, the push for increased production could not succeed.41 Vollenhoven was right to caution that the production, collection, and transport of food to France could not be accomplished without great organization. In most cases, this organization did not happen. One key problem was that while the Ministère du ravitaillement was demanding more food from Africa, the Ministry of War was demanding more men. Conscription had already contributed to revolts in 1916, and by 1917, a total of 120,000 Africans were serving in France. Resident General of Morocco, Hubert Lyautey, summarized the problem as follows: “France calls on Morocco to provide soldiers, workers and cereals. There is a basic conflict between these demands. The demand for troops and workers absorbs almost all our labor supply, leaving only the rejects for agricultural production.”42 In the AOF, military recruitment for battles within Africa also moved laborers away from farms. Around 60,000 porters from Southern Gabon were sent to fight in Cameroon between December 1914 and the defeat of German forces there in January 1916.43 At the start of the war, the AOF had low granary reserves and was suffering from three years of drought and aridity. The pressures of military recruitment and resistance caused production of some key goods to decrease during the war. In Senegal, between 1916 and 1917, millet production fell by half and groundnut production fell by a quarter.44 Frustrated by all of these conflicting pressures, Van Vollenhoven resigned in January of 1918, demanding “to know how West Africa could send 400,000 tons of groundnuts to France while its villages were depopulated.”45 The other major problem with exporting African food to France was transit. It turned out that the goal of producing 400,000 tons of groundnuts for France was completely worthless without the ships to transport them. The French demand for imported food and peanut oil (for both cooking and industrial uses) spiked at the same time that unrestricted submarine warfare resumed in

32

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

February 1917, making shipping between France and Africa dangerous and costly.46 In August 1918, the Chief Inspector of the AOF, M. Revel, wrote to the Minister of Colonies detailing the export situation. He argued that the problem lay not with production or collection, but with transport.47 He reported that as of August 10, 1918, “on the docks or in storage,” 3,018 tons of shelled peanuts; 176,500 tons of peanuts in their shells; and 28,000 tons of wheat were waiting to be shipped. Some shipping space could be saved, he suggested, by shelling some of those peanuts in factories in Senegal, but then those shelled peanuts would need to be exported quickly as they would rot faster than whole peanuts. Overall, it was a rather hopeless situation with only about 40,000 tons likely to be shipped before the next harvest of peanuts. The attempts to increase production should therefore be halted, he warned. This inspector saw beyond the immediate wartime needs of metropolitan France to the long-term effects on the colonies. The supply of the metropole by the colonies, or more so the effort of the colonies at the supply of the metropole, includes two operations: collection and transport. To not limit the effort of the first by the possibilities of the second would be an economic error vis-à-vis the metropole and a political error vis-à-vis the colonies. . . . To incite the indigènes to produce and, because of lack of transit, to leave their harvest to waste or to be sold at a low price, is to trouble the populations and to paralyze . . . an agricultural development rather necessary to France for its supply during the war and its renewal after the closure of hostilities.48

The observations of this colonial official point to some of the longer term consequences of the wartime demand for colonial foods in metropolitan France. Although the problems of shipping prohibited West African production from being especially helpful to French diets in the near term—despite 10,000 tons a month still being exported—Revel saw the political stability of the colony and its agricultural development as essential to the supply of France and her renewal after the war. The potential of the colonies to fuel postwar renewal became a common theme of colonialist rhetoric in the interwar period. Despite the foresight of some officials like Revel, some of his worst predictions came to pass. Large amounts of food were wasted in Africa because they had been requisitioned for export to France but could not be transported. In April 1917, for example, hundreds of tons of grains rotted in Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast, waiting for French ships that never came.49 In 1919 the colonial administration in Senegal was forced to throw out large stockpiles of Senegalese groundnuts that rotted before they could be shipped to France. “Even Morocco was left with ‘thousands of sacks of wheat rotting on the wharves of Safi while there was a shortage of bread in France, only three days’ sail away.’ ”50

Colonial Food in the First World War

33

Indochina and the beginnings of mise en valeur Transportation was also a central stumbling block in attempts by administrators of French Indochina to help feed France during the war. Another major difficulty was that the French public did not readily accept most of the foods Indochina had to offer. Imperial administrators and businessmen in Indochina attempted to use metropolitan needs during the war to introduce new foods into the French diet, but short-term success eluded them. While the Indochinese did not face the severe food shortages Africans did during the war, the key concern for the colonial lobby in Indochina was maintaining established trade relationships with Asian nations. Business leaders and administrators in Indochina pursued two distinct goals for food exports during the war. First, they attempted to align production and government requisitions with the limited transportation realities in order to protect their existing trade relationships in Asia. Second, they worked to expand their presence in the European market by selling rice and other food products to France. Albert Sarraut, governor general of Indochina from 1911 to 1914 and from 1917 to 1919, led this effort in coordination with the UCF. The first government purchases of Indochinese rice were for French soldiers as well as colonial workers and soldiers in France. The Ministry of War ordered ten thousand metric tons of white rice that was transported in October 1915, and Indochina provided the Services militaires with 162,000 metric tons of rice and corn in 1916.51 In the beginning of 1917, the French government became interested in purchasing Indochinese rice not just for soldiers but also for the French civilian population.52 The shift from wanting rice only for soldiers to procuring it for the civilian population represented some significant changes. It reflected the need for grain resulting from the 1917 wheat shortages and the increased role of the state in procuring food for the civilian population. It also revealed the very beginning of some acceptance of the idea that rice could serve as a wheat substitute for the French civilian population. Much more effort would go into encouraging the French to voluntarily eat rice and rice flour during and after the war. Sarraut was intimately involved in the rice trade throughout the war, personally signing telegrams, taking orders from various metropolitan agencies, and confirming shipments.53 He was constantly asking metropolitan authorities to be more precise about their needs and shipping abilities. He complained to Minister of Colonies Doumergue in February 1917 that he was afraid grain would be wasted if metropolitan authorities did not send him

34

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

precise numbers on their shipping capacity. An exceptional harvest had made more than 1.3 million metric tons of rice available, so only what France could really transport should be set aside. He lamented, “Indochina offered a gift of 7.5  million francs in Indochinese grains that the Metropole accepted but has not yet indicated a mode of use or shipment date.”54 He was still calling for more precise information and more organized shipping the following June when he wrote that he could easily purchase 200,000 tons of rice for the metropole by December, but that the “metropole should supply the boats” and send fifteen days’ advance notice so that Saigon could be ready.55 Judging by the vast failures of organization that led to tons of peanuts and wheat rotting in African ports, Sarraut and the UCF were correct in their assumption that the metropolitan government was willing to requisition significantly more than it could transport. Although Sarraut and the UCF wanted to sell rice and other foods to France, they were constantly struggling against state control of food imports and metropolitan interference in the Asian rice trade. Together, they continued, throughout 1917 and 1918, to protest against impromptu requisitions of Indochinese rice.56 Finally, in 1918, producers, importers, and sellers came together in the Groupement des exportateurs de riz d’Indochine (GERI) to coordinate with the government and lobby on behalf of their business interests. The GERI was based in the UCF headquarters in Paris. The firms agreed to bring to the group all of their business selling rice from Indochina to the metropole. They also agreed to follow the directive from the Under Secretary of State that Indochinese rice must be transported in government chartered ships or ones under government protection. On the day after the signing of the armistice, the GERI and the metropolitan government reached an official agreement to organize rice imports. It was agreed that the GERI would control the purchasing and importation of Indochinese rice for the French state, but that the state would charter the transportation. The governor general of Indochina would supervise the supply of rice, and an agent from the Ministry of Agriculture and Supply would supervise the shipping.57 This cooperation between the metropolitan government, the government of Indochina, and private business came after years of disagreement and disorganization during the war. The agreement lasted only a couple of months. On January 4, 1919, a decree ended the strict regulations on the sale of rice. Following the decree, the Ministry of Agriculture and Supply refused to send ships for rice that it said it no longer needed.58 A sudden drop in demand was exactly what Sarraut had feared. Throughout the war he had wanted to take the effort to feed the metropole further, not just by

Colonial Food in the First World War

35

organizing the collection of existing crops, which he eventually, though briefly, accomplished through the Groupement des exportateurs de riz d’Indochine, but also by diversifying Indochinese agriculture to better meet metropolitan needs.59 As the comments of the Minister of General Supply that rice was desired for “the supply of the army and the workers from the Far-East, as well as . . . the working class population,” make clear, rice was seen as a low-value grain and not an equal substitute for wheat.60 Sarraut realized that rice would not be quickly embraced by the French public, and he enthusiastically sought out more “French” food crops to develop in Indochina. His enthusiasm, however, was not reciprocated in the metropole. In early 1917, Sarraut petitioned the Minister of Colonies to help him get more information from the Ministry of General Supply and Marine Transport as to the specific needs of France so that he could direct Indochina’s agriculture accordingly. He suggested, for example, that more beans could be produced if France would purchase them. He was especially concerned about the long-term intentions of the metropolitan government, asking whether the Minister of Supply and Marine Transport thought “insufficient national production and recourse to the colonies” would last only through 1917 or “would extend for a certain duration after the end of hostilities.”61 Sarraut’s desire to develop colonial agriculture to meet French needs reveals the roots of his mise en valeur politics during the war. There was some demand for Indochinese foods other than rice during the war, but most of it was limited to certain social groups. For example, in February 1917, a telegram was sent to Reinhart, the general inspector of Indochina, from the Ministry of Colonies inquiring primarily about beans. In addition to the rice and corn already used by the military, the author was interested in some of the beans Reinhart had mentioned in a previous report. He hoped that Indochina could supply white beans that were appropriate for “European consumption.” The need for these beans was urgent, and the writer thought demand would continue for a certain period after the war. He also asked Reinhart to investigate the inexpensive “small indigenous beans” and see if they could be fed to horses.62 The actual amount of colonial foods imported during the war was rather limited. Despite all the efforts by the Ministère du ravitaillement, Sarraut’s administration in Indochina, and the UCF, total French rice consumption actually decreased during much of the war and its immediate aftermath (see Table 3). Over the entire course of the war, the total amount of Indochinese rice exported to France was only about 200,000 metric tons.63 This discussion of beans—the white ones suitable for Europeans, the “indigenous” ones only for horses—points to a common theme in the discussions

36

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris Table 3  Rice consumption in France in thousands of metric quintals, 1911–22 1911

2,270

1912

1,604

1913

2,213

1914

2,951

1915

1,950

1916

1,938

1917

2,350

1918

1,706

1919

1,481

1920

 729

1921

1,403

1922

1,395

Source: “Tableau IX: Riz,” Annuaire statistique de la France 49 (1933): 461.

of colonial foods during the war. Not all foods eaten by colonial peoples were considered appropriate for the French to eat. Some were considered appropriate for certain groups of French peoples, such as soldiers or prisoners, but not for most. Dealing with this cultural limit on the demand for Indochinese goods, some administrators worked to convince the metropolitan government of the usefulness of their foods. Rice was initially imported only for soldiers until the wheat shortage of 1917, when it was considered acceptable for helping to feed the working class. Fish sauce was ordered, but only to feed Indochinese workers in France.64 Indochinese tea was also imported specifically to satisfy colonial troops and workers.65 In 1917, Sarraut argued directly with the Ministère du ravitaillement that France should import Indochinese lard and fish fat in response to the shortage of fat and protein. What little fat was imported from Indochina was used in tanneries and not for human consumption.66 Soy was in some ways similar to rice. Europeans did not embrace it, but some did think it had the potential to help feed the civilian population. In 1917, an administrator in Hanoi sent a telegram to the Colonial Ministry suggesting that France import significant amounts of soy from Indochina. He claimed that when soy was shelled and milled into flour, it made a “first order food” for the feeding of indigènes, prisoners, and even civilian populations. He pointed

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to the results of lab tests in Paris, which showed this soy flour to be high in fat and nitrogen.67 Indochina was capable of providing two to three thousand tons in 1917, he claimed. Despite the enthusiasm of this colonial official, the metropolitan government almost never purchased such unfamiliar foodstuffs as soy, and I have found no evidence of any purchases or shipments of soy to France during the war.68 Nutritional arguments were most often not sufficient to persuade the French government or consumers to consider new foods. Throughout the war, Sarraut worked to coordinate Indochinese food production and the purchase and transport of that food to France. The French need for Indochinese food most often put colonial government and business in conflict with metropolitan ministries who frustrated Sarraut and others in the colony with their lack of concern for existing Indochinese trade and long-term colonial development. The experience of trying to organize the transport of rice and sell other Indochinese food products to France led Sarraut and many others in the colonial lobby to argue that the colonies should be developed so as to better serve the metropole. Colonialists in Madagascar were also frustrated by the lack of metropolitan support for colonial development before and during the war.

“Frigo” meat from Madagascar By the second half of the war, France faced a meat supply crisis. This was partly due to the destruction of livestock during the war, but it also stemmed from the large amount of meat used in French military rations. At the beginning of the  war, French soldiers received between 400 and 500 grams of meat per day, while the prewar average daily meat consumption in France was about 102 grams per day. Overall, military meat rations in 1915 were more than 565 thousand tons. Rations for some soldiers were lowered the following year, but consumption was still estimated to be around 520 thousand tons.69 With decreased livestock production and increased meat consumption, France faced a sudden need for large amounts of imported meat. This need continued in the aftermath of the war. In 1920, American inspectors observed that “in order that the cattle supply of France recuperate quickly, the farmers should hold back from market their young stock, and frozen meat should be imported while these young animals are becoming mature.”70 Importing frozen meat into France, however, was not as simple as this American inspector made it sound. The British, who were already reliant on

38

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

imported meat before the war, had developed a frozen meat import trade with Argentina, and owned 90 percent of the world’s refrigerated vessels. In 1912, France imported only four thousand tons of meat, including frozen meat and livestock, amounting to about 6 percent of beef consumption.71 French colonialists in Madagascar had tried to develop a meat export industry, but they had struggled in part due to French resistance to eating frozen meat and tariffs that protected domestic meat production. The French resistance to frozen meat had its roots in France’s sufficient livestock production and a cultural discomfort with refrigeration. As refrigeration developed and grew in popularity in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, French consumers remained skeptical. In France, where city dwellers lived right above stores and the food shopping was done twice daily, there was no perceived need for refrigeration. “Consumers who bought fresh food daily expected shopkeepers to do the same.”72 The French were also skeptical of the commercial uses of refrigeration. The regulations of the Les Halles wholesale market in Paris prohibited merchants from keeping their stocks overnight, and those items that did go into the cool basement had to be sold separately from the fresher goods. This skepticism of refrigeration was so great that in 1880, when leading fruit wholesaler Omer Decugis installed France’s first commercial refrigeration chamber in his Paris store, his customers rebelled and he had to destroy the system in the public square to win them back. When Decugis rebuilt his cold storage chamber twenty-three years later, “he was still the first fruit wholesaler in Paris to operate one.”73 One of the first refrigerated ships to carry meat across the Atlantic was invented by a Frenchman, but most of his countrymen and women were disinterested in this development. Charles Tellier, France’s “father of cold,” crossed the Atlantic with his ship, the Frigorifique, full of refrigerated meat in September 1876.74 There was little fanfare at his initial arrival in Portugal, but he got an enthusiastic reception when his next voyage arrived in Argentina. Tellier had hoped to make meat a cheaper part of French diets by importing it from South America, but French farmers and the well-organized butchers’ union resisted his efforts.75 These groups persuaded the French government to impose stiff tariffs on foreign meats. Consumers’ hesitations and the butchers’ union’s resistance applied equally to imported frozen meat as to refrigerated meat. Both frozen and refrigerated meat became known as “frigo” meat, and consumers often did not know the difference.76 Strict tariffs, which among other things required that any imported carcasses must arrive cut into four corners, not be further butchered, and have the organs

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39

still inside, severely limited the imports of frozen and refrigerated meat into France and therefore the development of a meat export industry in the French colonies.77 Only in 1912—faced with a crisis of high food prices and food riots—did the French government allow very limited imports of frigo meats into France.78 While Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand developed major beef export companies to supply Great Britain, the attempts to develop a beef export business in Madagascar lagged far behind. When the First World War started, the small livestock industry in Madagascar worked to try to quickly increase production and find transport for frigo meat. The UCF saw the loss of French livestock during the war as an opportunity to develop the colonial meat industry, hoping that the newfound demand would spur investment in colonial livestock production and refrigerated shipping. On May 20, 1915, the Chamber of Deputies adopted a law authorizing the Minister of War to purchase 120,000 metric tons of frozen meat annually from foreign and colonial sources. This meat would feed the army, and the leftovers could be fed to the civilian population. The law did not specify how much had to be purchased from the French colonies, and the UCF asked that it be amended to require that at least fifteen thousand metric tons be purchased from the colonies. According to the UCF, Madagascar produced about nineteen thousand metric tons of meat for export annually, and Senegal produced another four thousand tons. If the government were to spur the development of this industry by purchasing its products, then the industry could grow and “bring to the colonies the wealth currently being sent to Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand.”79 The UCF argued that the government should help them turn the needs of the war into an opportunity for colonial development. Government officials in Paris, however, often did not see things the same way. From their perspective, any hopes for colonial development were of little importance compared to the immediate needs of the war effort at home. The main competition for the limited French market for frigo meat came from American exporters in Argentina. When the war suddenly created some demand for imported meat, the UCF was angered when the French Under Secretary of Supply made a deal with French companies to launch new refrigerated cargo ships on routes between Argentina and France. The Under Secretary also signed a three-year contract with American factories in Argentina to supply France with frozen meat. This was especially frustrating to the UCF, which felt that it was a lack of sufficient refrigerated transit that was delaying further development of the colonial meat industry. Sending more ships to Argentina would benefit the American companies in a way that would surely continue after

40

Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

the war. They lamented, again, that it was the previous restrictive French tariffs that had inhibited the development of more robust colonial livestock production in the first place. The Americans, the UCF complained, also had the advantage of being able to sell to the British, who were used to buying frozen products. In France, the young industry still had to familiarize French consumers with refrigerated and frozen products.80 The Under Secretary of State responded to these complaints saying that these deals should not impede the growth of the colonial meat industry because France could, in addition to its purchases from Argentina, consume all the meat that the colonies could produce.81 The city of Paris invested in some of the infrastructure necessary to import frozen meat during the war, with sixteen points of sale prepared to sell frozen meat in 1916.82 France imported 278,000 metric tons of beef in 1919.83 With the difficulties of both shipping and selling frigo meat to France, some of the French-owned packing plants in Madagascar instead produced canned beef for the army, but this did nothing to help the colonial meat industry in the long term. The canned meat was incredibly unpopular with soldiers who referred to the Madagascar meat as “monkey.” During the war, about 50,000 animals were slaughtered a year in Madagascar and exported to France, half of those by the Compagnie frigorifique générale. The First World War “marked a turning point in refrigeration history” in France. The “high demand for red meat weakened political opposition to chilled and frozen imports and spurred state investment in refrigerated steamships and cold storage.”84 But interest in this colonial food was not long-lasting, as France imported meat from Madagascar only while the domestic livestock industry rebuilt after the war, then stopped in 1921.85 Despite the abrupt fall in French imports so soon after the war, the exposure to frozen meat had a lasting impact. By the 1920s, “cold storage was more widespread and less mysterious, and more butchers and consumers knew how to handle meat subject to its influence.”86 The government issued pamphlets on how to prepare frozen meat. French importers learned how to better display and market frozen meat, and a small number of shops specializing in frozen cuts opened.87 The meat industry in Madagascar survived after 1921 by selling to Egypt, Italy, and Britain. There was a brief boom in Madagascar meat exports during the Second World War, but it faded by the 1950s. France imported only about 32,800 metric tons of meat from the colonies in 1938, of which only 7,500 metric tons was frigo beef from Madagascar. Most of it was mutton and lamb from North Africa.88 The experience of eating wartime frigo meat changed French diets, but the meat industry in Madagascar was not able to take advantage of these changes over the long term.

Colonial Food in the First World War

41

Shifting colonial politics Throughout the French empire, the pattern was the same: The metropolitan government, often through the Ministère du ravitaillement, looked to the colonies for food only in times of great need and sought to meet metropolitan needs as quickly as possible, even when this had tragic effects in the colonies. The infrastructure was often not in place to produce and gather this food on such short notice. Wartime actions by the metropolitan administration— demanding both soldiers and grain from Africa, letting food rot on the docks for lack of transit, purchasing frozen meat from South America instead of Madagascar, requisitioning rice destined for paying customers, and ignoring more exotic products like soy—frustrated colonial administrators and private enterprise in the colonies. Sometimes, these actions had dreadful repercussions for colonial subjects. Colonial administrators and the UCF attempted to treat the metropole’s wartime demands as an opportunity to create a long-term market for colonial food in France. Although the difficulties of coordination and shipping severely limited the amount of colonial food that actually reached France during the war, the sudden metropolitan demands raised hopes throughout the colonial lobby that the colonies could become a major supplier of food to France. This enthusiasm is demonstrated in a packet titled “The Colonies’ Effort,” by the then Minister for Liberated Regions, Albert Lebrun. Discussing the economic contribution of the colonies, he claimed that “it would be unjust, however, to undervalue the importance of the supplies in food and raw materials she [France] has likewise derived from her overseas possessions, the manifold variety of which reflects the diversity of the climates from which they are drawn.” He went on to praise the wheat, barley, oats, wine, cattle, and horses from Algeria; grain from Tunisia; and grains, wool, and eggs from Morocco. He also cited rice and rice products from Indochina and frozen and tinned meat from Madagascar. He praised the sugar from Guadeloupe and Martinique, “an especially valuable contribution, now that part of our beet fields are in the hands of the invader.”89 The importance of colonial foods, however, went beyond propaganda and symbolism. Scientists, agronomists, and the Colonial Ministry examined the potential of colonial foods while the war was still being fought. In addition to Maginot’s 1917 Colonial Conference discussed above, the National Museum of Natural History, which was home to the Société d’acclimatation, also hosted a conference on colonial contributions to the war effort in 1917 entitled “our

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colonial riches.”90 The conference concluded that each colony should produce those products, desired by France, that grew best in their respective climates. The same idea would be central to Sarraut’s plan for mise en valeur a few years later.91 Also in 1917, the UCF began an investigation of colonial agriculture in order to end French reliance on foreign agricultural imports. In May 1918, the Congress of Colonial Agriculture drew “on more than 300 reports covering every aspect of colonial agriculture.” Their conclusions called for a massive colonial investment, including expanding the merchant fleet and a five-fold increase in colonial railways. But in the spring of 1918, with the Germans only forty miles from Paris, most of France was concerned only with winning the war, and not planning for colonial development and economic recovery.92 Despite the practical barriers to garnering widespread support for colonial development in the immediate aftermath of the war, Christophe Bonneuil persuasively argues that the “blending between science and colonial development for national salvation” became “more precisely focused on colonial agriculture at the Congress of Colonial Agriculture” in 1918.93 Even though no immediate action was taken, the congress produced the Comité d’action agricole et colonisatrice and influenced colonial political thought. After the congress, the Minister of Colonies Henri Simon presented a plan for the economic development of the colonies, which was followed by many other plans. As the war drew to an end, the Commission d’étude des questions coloniales posées par la guerre (Commission for the study of colonial questions posed by the war) formed as a departmental agency within the Colonial Ministry. It became essentially a colonialist pressure group that argued for the “importance of the empire in underwriting the postwar reconstruction of France.”94 This litany of conferences, commissions, studies, and plans during and immediately following the war demonstrates the widespread interest within the colonial lobby in developing the colonies to more efficiently supply France with food and other goods. The war revealed both the failure of prewar colonial development and the future potential of colonial contributions to France. Sarraut’s plan for the economic development of the empire grew not only out of his own experiences in Indochina, but also from the colonial lobby’s efforts during the war to begin to plan for the colonies’ role in France’s economic renewal.95 It was Sarraut’s hope, and that of many in the colonial lobby, that the experience of the war would also galvanize support among the broader French public. In La mise en valeur des colonies françaises (1923), Sarraut highlighted the role of the war in increasing the interest among both colonial leaders and the French public in developing the potential of the colonies. The war had the one

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“certain advantage,” he said, “of revealing the colonies to the French public.”96 He went on to elaborate on the war’s role: Up until 1914, the colonies were for many of our citizens only useful for the development of our military glory, for the ventures of adventurous explorers, for the noble experiences of our civilizing genius. Their economic and political value was neglected. They have long been considered the costly fantasy of a great nation. This legend persisted still, on the eve of the war. When, after the aggression of 1914, the first battalions of black soldiers arrived, soon after followed by Asian, Antillean, [and] Malagasy battalions, when our factories were peopled by Indochinese workers, active and silent, when our ports and our warehouses were filled with the abundant products of our overseas establishments . . . [the French] suddenly perceived that the labor, which had been ignored, of our soldiers, of our administrators, of our colonials, has not been in vain.97

It certainly was not the case that all of the French came to praise the colonial project after the war. But the war did increase the visibility of the colonies in French life, not least because of the presence of foods from the colonies. As Sarraut discovered during his attempts to promote Indochinese foods to French officials, however, there were significant cultural barriers to the consumption of many colonial foods in France. The First World War led both colonial officials and metropolitan bureaucrats to attempt to use colonial imports to solve France’s food supply crisis. Competing demands on colonial resources, a dramatic shortage in marine transport, and resistance to new foods in France severely limited these imports. But some colonial foods did reach France and these food imports were powerful symbols of the colonial contribution to the French war effort. Wartime exposure to colonial foods—familiar ones like sugar and unfamiliar ones like rice—gave these  foods  a foothold into the French culinary imagination. Meanwhile, the sudden demand for colonial food and the problematic wartime attempts at supplying it shifted the colonial lobby’s focus to developing plans to better fulfill France’s food needs in the future. One group that was committed to aiding in the mise en valeur of the empire was the Société d’acclimatation. The following chapter looks specifically at the place of colonial food in the work and discourse of this society of pro-colonial scientists, demonstrating how food was absolutely central to their commitment to the mise en valeur of the empire and understanding of Greater France.

2

The Exotic Luncheons of the Société d’acclimatation

On April 14, 1921, ninety-seven diners gathered for a grand luncheon banquet at the Buffet de la Gare de Lyon in Paris. The group consisted mostly of members of the Société d’acclimatation, including France’s leading zoologists and botanists. The guest of honor, Albert Sarraut, now the French Minister of Colonies, was unable to attend, but the table of honor still hosted a variety of top-level colonial officials. The theme of the meal was seafood from the French colonies, and the diners sampled Vietnamese fish sauce, an “economic” fish stew, marinated mullet and tuna, and large fish from Mauritania. They were also served fruit preserves and rum from Martinique, coffee blended from Martiniquais and Indochinese beans, cane sugar from Tonkin, and Indochinese cigarettes. Nearly all regions of the French empire were represented. Speaking at the dinner, a vice president of the Société d’acclimatation, M. le baron d’Anthoüard, praised Sarraut’s recently released plan for the mise en valeur of the empire and emphasized the potential of the French colonies to provide food for metropolitan France. “Is not our déjeuner a program of colonial politics put in practice in the most original and most satisfying fashion. This menu . . . teaches you that we can draw a great variety of food resources from them [the colonies], and their preparation is the interesting work of the French.”1 These annual banquets, the déjeuners amicaux, were indeed programs of colonial politics, ones that were repeated annually from 1905 to 1939 except during the war. This tradition of French scientists, bureaucrats, colonial lobbyists, journalists, and their wives gathered around a banquet table to dine on food from the empire is a unique case study for examining the colonial lobby’s interest in colonial foods. The Société d’acclimatation2 had a long history of interest in using the resources of the colonies to contribute to the French diet, and these banquets were an important part of that effort in the twentieth century. By analyzing the changing menus of and rhetoric around these meals and their relation to other

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works of the Société d’acclimatation, this chapter will examine how colonial political ideology was expressed in the Society’s promotion of colonial foods. The banquets themselves, as opposed to the other works of the Société, are particularly revealing because the act of eating is such an intimate one, and this embodied experience is distinct from intellectual interest in diet and consumption. The risk of incorporation leads new foods and changing diets to sometimes cause significant anxiety. To overcome this anxiety, most new foods go through some process of mediation before being eaten. New, foreign, and exotic foods must be presented in ways that appeal to the diner. The diner must be able to comprehend the foods from within his or her own culinary code. Even for the Société, the group within the colonial lobby most dedicated to introducing a variety of colonial foods to the French diet, foods served at the banquets went through several levels of mediation. The science of acclimatization itself sought to adapt plants and animals to different climates, and many of the products at the déjeuners amicaux were the results of this process. More immediately, the menus were designed and the dishes created to appeal to French audiences, and the meal followed the structure of a full French banquet. The process of mediation—the choice of foods, their preparation, their presentation, and the rhetoric surrounding them—shifted throughout the first half of the twentieth century, revealing increases in the amount and type of colonial influence seen as acceptable within this group of colonial scientists. Even with all of these layers of mediation behind the déjeuners amicaux, the members of the Société were significantly more adventurous diners than the general Parisian public. This relative openness to colonial foods came not only from political, economic, and scientific interest in the colonies but also from the social distinction that came from consuming rare foods. The Société d’acclimatation had many levels of interest in colonial foods and colonial agricultural development, including its core mission of applying the natural sciences to solve practical problems. By the twentieth century they had established a tradition of involvement in agriculture and food supply issues as well as a tradition of studying and helping to exploit the empire. Many of the Society’s members had direct financial interests in colonial agricultural development. This chapter, therefore, examines the group within the French colonial lobby that was most likely to embrace colonial foods in the interwar period. This study of which colonial foods were presented at the déjeuners amicaux in different periods and how these foods were mediated reveals the role of food in the colonial lobby’s hopes for French colonial development in the interwar period as well as shifts in their views of the imperial relationship

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overall. The Society’s relative enthusiasm, however, should not be mistaken to represent general French attitudes toward imperialism. The following chapters will examine the factors that limited the embrace of colonial foods outside of the colonial lobby. The colonial lobby had a growing and serious interest in colonial foods during the interwar period. The shifting interests of the Society reflect the influence of changing interwar colonial ideologies, especially mise en valeur and la plus grande France, in the interwar period. The eating of acclimatized and colonial foods at the déjeuners amicaux began in 1906 as a way of connecting the meal to the interests of the Society. From 1910 to 1914, the déjeuners were used as tastetesting laboratories and were part of the Society’s effort to aid the expansion of the French empire. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the meals promoted the politics of mise en valeur and the potential of the colonies to help feed metropolitan France. In the interwar period, the influence of colonial culinary cultures on déjeuners menus increased, reflecting a recognition of la plus grande France, the idea that French citizens would benefit from recognizing that they were part of a multidimensional empire.

The Société d’acclimatation and the beginning of the déjeuners amicaux While the tradition of eating acclimatized and colonial foods at Société d’acclimatation banquets was established only in the late nineteenth century, finding new foods to ameliorate the French diet has been a central part of the science of acclimatization since the eighteenth century. Most famously, André Thouin, head gardener of the Jardin du roi, worked for the introduction of breadfruit from the West Indies in the 1780s. He and other “improving acclimatizers” hoped that breadfruit, which was considered the perfect food and responsible for Tahitian physical perfection, would contribute to the forming of a utopian social state.3 In 1793, the Jardin du roi became the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, and most of the Old Regime staff remained in this now republican institution.4 Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, a zoologist at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) and member of the Académie des sciences, founded the Société zoologique d’acclimatation in February 1854. He was committed to the practical uses of zoology, which he felt were being stifled by the museum’s focus on theoretical research.5 The Society’s activities, even from its earliest

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years, included a wide range of scientific studies and cultural endeavors, including “popular natural history, anthropological displays, dog and cat shows, the breeding, display and sale of exotic animals; consultancies in colonial and domestic agriculture and industrial development, promoting the inclusion of horsemeat and exotic animals in the French diet, and wildlife conservation and preservation.”6 The active core of the Society was made up of zoologists and botanists, most of whom were professors at the MNHN. The membership of the Society, however, was wide ranging, forming an association “of naturalists, landowners, breeders, the curious and enlightened men of France.”7 Membership was open to any man who could pay the 10-franc initiation fee and the yearly dues of twenty-five francs. These “rankand-file dues-payers, who eagerly associated themselves with the group’s progressive aura of scientific activity” were an essential source of funding for the Society.8 Many provincial landowners joined the Society, attracted both by the fashion of owning exotic animals and by hopes of improving French agriculture through acclimatization. During the Third Republic, the Society also drew a large colonial constituency including many colonial functionaries in Algeria. Professors from the MNHN most often led the Society, and while the governance of the Society was always centralized in Paris, there were significant affiliated branches in the provinces and Algeria, which became some of the most important sites of research.9 The Société d’acclimatation was at its strongest during the Second Empire, when it received funding and enthusiasm from Louis Napoleon. Michael Osborne, who has studied the nineteenth-century Société, connects the Society’s success during this period to its function as a “quasi-official spokesman for Napoleon  III’s program of domestic and colonial agriculture reform.”10 The Society’s relationship to colonialism was deeper than its relationship to the Emperor, and it continued throughout the Third Republic. Osborne calls acclimatization the “essential science of colonialism.”11 Acclimatization taught that organisms can adapt and thrive in new environments. This theory shaped colonial agriculture and made the colonies an essential base of research for seeking plants and animals that could improve French agriculture. The belief in the ability of organisms to adapt to their new environments was applied to people as well, contributing to the government’s confidence, despite many difficulties on the ground, that French men and women could successfully settle and work the land in Algeria. While the political influence of the Société began to fade in the Third Republic, “enthusiasm remained robust,” and in 1884, it still claimed 2,400 members. Membership declined to only 452 by 1911, but rebounded to

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799 in 1924.12 Yet, even as the size of the Society dwindled, the popularity of the déjeuners amicaux grew, attracting 107 guests in 1912, and at its peak, 300 guests in 1931.13 At the turn of the twentieth century, the Society went through what Osborne calls the “colonial turn.” At the end of the nineteenth century, a colonization section was added to the Society. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Society president Edmond Perrier, who was also president of the MNHN, sought to increase the political influence of both the Society and the Museum by reclaiming the Society’s historic role as scientific advisor to the empire. The Society published the scientific findings of its members’ studies and the minutes of its meetings in its Bulletin. The Bulletin was distributed to Society members, and also to the Ministry of War and colonial government officials. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Society separated the shorter and more accessible Bulletin from its more “scientific” journal called the Revue des sciences naturelles appliqués, in part to reduce the cost of publishing the Bulletin.14 While they were occasionally patronesses and prizewinners in the Society since the 1850s, women did not gain membership until the early twentieth century, and they were then still not represented in the Society’s leadership. Women attended the déjeuner amicaux banquets, often as spouses of male members. In 1921, the Society added a section on keeping aquarium and terrarium animals. This section appealed to and attracted more urban amateurs, especially women. In 1921, the Society also selected its first woman vice president.15 The tradition of hosting luncheons with exotic foods had its roots in the Society’s experience of Paris’s “tragic year,” 1870–71. From September 1870 to February 1871, Paris was under siege by the Prussians. The peace deal that ended the Franco-Prussian war only brought more chaos to Paris with the declaration of the Paris Commune and the short but bloody civil war that followed. Both the Prussian siege and the suppression of the Commune filled Paris with violence and hunger. Under the siege, food was scarce, including grain and, especially, greens for feeding the animals. The Society’s leadership made the sad but necessary decision to sell some of the animals to butchers, starting with the most common animals, which were those being bred in the Bois de Boulogne. Although Parisian historical memory of the siege centers on the “sacrifice” of zoo animals for the starving working class people of Paris, in reality, the Society’s animals were sold at high prices to “elite merchant butchers located on the chic Boulevard Haussmann,” who, in turn, sold them only to the richest Parisians and the most expensive restaurants.16 The Society sold the most exotic animals only as the siege dragged on and there was not sufficient food with which to feed them.

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Colonial Food in Interwar Paris

Albert Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire and a small group of Society leaders gathered for a meal of the most precious zoo animals that had been sold to butchers. It is this meal that was later cited by the Society as the founding example of the eating of exotic animals at the déjeuners amicaux.17 The experience of the siege became a foundational example for the Société, demonstrating that with their guidance, the French could be convinced to eat new and even shocking foods. The Society had worked to vary the French diet before the siege, most notably in its encouragement of tropical and acclimated agriculture in Algeria, and had long advocated the eating of horsemeat. While the most famous foods of the siege were elephants and yaks from the acclimatization garden, the Society’s culinary focus during the siege went way beyond the zoo. Horses and sheep were some of the first animals to which people turned to find new sources of meat. One transportation company sold the government 2,942 horses to put toward the national defense, and of those, 2,027 were used as food for the public and 122 to feed the military. The same company butchered its 400 sheep, distributing the meat among its employees. This sort of resourceful eating was strongly encouraged by the Société. Parisians in the siege also ate, often in the form of sausages, such animals as donkeys, deer, dogs, cats, rats, and mice. In an 1870 bulletin, Albert Geoffrey Saint-Hillaire and others “carefully reported their impressions” on a meal of “cat, dog-liver brochettes, horse soup, and rat salami with sauce Robert.” These meals provided the precedent for taste testing as an act of practical science at the Société and, as such, laid the foundation for the déjeuners amicaux of the 1910s.18 Some members of the Société saw this temporary extension of French understandings of what was edible as an opportunity to expand the French diet for the long term, proposing that perhaps not all of these dietary curiosities need stay curiosities.19 Société scientist Augustin Delondre looked outside of Europe for culinary inspiration. Exploring the notion that “each food that is for us a curiosity is not one for other peoples” in a series of articles in the Society’s journal, Delondre discussed non-Western cultures that he claimed eat insects, elephants, hippopotamus, manatees, whales, and pigeons.20 His interest, however, expanded beyond animals. He paid particular attention to the Chinese practice of making “a cheese with peas” (referring to tofu) and an African mushroom rumored to grow large enough to serve thirty people. Delondre hoped that with improvements in transportation and preservation methods, tropical fruits would become available in France. He even looked to the agricultural practices of indigenous South Americans for inspiration for French botanists. He was very interested in the tubers ulloco, oca, and

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arracacha of the Andean region of South America, and argued that French botanists should focus on developing edible roots in both acclimated and native plants in France.21 That Delondre called for botanists to work to help vary the French diet by following the example of indigenous South American agriculture is particularly revealing. His interest in these culinary “curiosities” was much more than curious. Delondre concluded by calling for more museum exhibits displaying “the diverse substances used in the diets of diverse peoples,” arguing that an ethnographic curiosity about the culinary practices of others can have a direct impact on the work of zoologists and botanists, and eventually on the French diet.22 The dietary restrictions of the siege led Société d’acclimatation leaders to do more than taste-test the taboo meats Parisians found themselves eating out of desperation. Inspired by the siege experience of eating things previously not considered edible, Delondre looked to non-Western cultures for inspiration. In this way he foreshadowed the efforts colonial scientists and the colonial lobby would make in the interwar period. In 1884, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Société d’acclimatation, its leader Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire thought that dining on animals from the zoo’s collection was a good way to celebrate the Society’s survival through those tumultuous years. One hundred and fifty members of the Society gathered for an exotic meal of acclimated animals at the Hotel Continental. The menu included yak consommé, kangaroo stew, and the neck of a giraffe. A few years later, when a nandou (a species of South American ostrich) was injured in an exposition, Société d’acclimatation members gathered to dine on its flesh, establishing a tradition within the Society of eating exotic animals from their collection even once the hunger of the siege had passed.23 The first official Déjeuner amical, an annual banquet of the Société d’acclimatation, was held in 1905 and featured a traditional French meal held at a restaurant close to the Jardin des plantes. At the déjeuner, the president of the Society, Edmond Perrier, declared that at the next gathering they should become acquainted with some colonial and foreign dishes.24 By doing so, he was recalling the nineteenth-century tradition of dining together on exotic animals while seeking to connect the gathering to the Society’s emphasis on promoting the practical uses of acclimatization and its commitment to colonial expansion. This development—bringing acclimated and colonial foods to the official déjeuners amicaux—is in some ways bold and surprising, as it brought the practical work of the Society directly into its banquet, itself a structured French tradition. It is not surprising, however, that Perrier was the one to make this push, as he was

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committed to the Museum’s and the Society’s roles in French colonial expansion and eager to increase their influence in the Colonial Ministry.25 In May 1906, at the restaurant of the Jardin des plantes, members of the Society dined on nandou egg omelets before holding a meeting and touring the botanical gardens. Society member M. Debreuil, who was raising nandous in Melun (a  town southeast of Paris) supplied the nandou eggs. Praise for the omelet was high, but Perrier was not satisfied, and announced that in the future he hoped that the members of the Society would contribute more acclimated and foreign plants and animals to the meal. He called on members to help “put together a menu d’acclimateur, permitting us to observe the practical results of the work of the Society.”26 By 1909, the déjeuner amical menu was composed primarily of foods acclimated by members of the Society, such as ostrich eggs, roasted nandous and kangaroos, and even nandou liver paté. Significantly, bananas from Martinique were served in both savory and sweet dishes. Bananas were available in French urban centers by this time, but they remained expensive, and most did not come from French colonies.27 They were known to the French only in their sweet ripe form, and most commonly as an ingredient in desserts. Serving green bananas as a vegetable demonstrated a commitment to using colonial foods to continue to expand the French diet in new directions, and the inclusion of bananas from Martinique promoted colonial production.28 These déjeuners were social gatherings, celebrations of the work of the Society, and demonstrations of the practical use of acclimatization and the benefits of empire. The menus were very much in line with the Society’s general interest in acclimated and colonial foods. Between 1904 and 1909, the Society’s Bulletin published articles on colonial banana and orange production, African grain production, kola nuts, Indochinese coconuts, Cambodian rice, and the potential diversity of West African agriculture, and had lengthy discussions about Tahitian culinary culture.29 The Société was so supportive of developing colonial food production that in 1905, they called on French consumers to eat bananas from the Antilles “fresh, dry, or as flour, whether we like them or not, in order to assure the prosperity of these colonies.”30

Taste testers In 1910, the news that the pièce de resistance would be a python drew a significantly larger crowd to the déjeuner.31 Two pink pythons from India were indeed served, and the Society’s secretary, Maurice Loyer, found it necessary

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to defend this choice of food in his report in the Society’s journal. “There are those who accuse our Society on this subject, of seeking out, with a goal of propaganda, the strangest dishes possible in order to popularize their usage in France. This is a misunderstanding of the goal we are pursuing.” It was not a ridiculous accusation. The pythons represented a clear departure from the foods served at previous déjeuners, as they were wild and not acclimated animals, and therefore serving them may have appeared to be merely an act of culinary exoticism. Loyer did, however, connect them to the scientific and public service interests of the Société: We don’t search, a priori, for strange dishes to bring before us, we simply want to know if those dishes used in such or such part of the world present a culinary interest, if they are inferior, equal, or superior to the products of our country or those which are already imported, and if we should . . . recommend their introduction and use in France and in our colonies.

He admitted that he knew that python meat would likely never be popular in France, but he argued that travelers had spoken highly of the taste of the meat, and that in the colonies, “these animals could be recommended for frequent occasions where fresh meat is hard to attain.”32 The déjeuner became an act of practical science, a laboratory testing gastronomic possibilities, precisely in line with the goals of the Société d’acclimatation. The Société took on a role of determining what French colonial settlers could and should eat in their challenging environments, just as they had previously taste-tested rat and dog recipes during the siege. They concluded that python flesh was just as tasty as that of eel, but firmer and less greasy, and since one python could feed upward of twenty people, it was a very efficient food. Other colonial experiments undertaken in this gastronomic laboratory in 1910 included replacing the expensive sea turtle in turtle stew with Algerian land tortoise (an utter failure) and roasting an African gazelle (a delicious success).33 This shift in the stated purpose of the déjeuner likely developed because a Society member in India offered to send or bring pythons for the meal. The spectacle of the python was sure to draw many interested members and guests to the banquet, and the Société leadership was forced to defend itself against accusations of mere exoticism. By taking on the role of taste testers, the Société d’acclimatation scientists formed a scientific justification that fit the mission of the Society to promote practical zoology, but aspects of exoticism certainly remained. The 1911 menu featured an image of a topless African woman,

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demonstrating that despite the practical experimentation, the meal still played on exotic fantasies of the French colonies.34 Even though the python was justified by its potential to help feed French settlers, eating something so rare carried a certain amount of distinction and cultural capital.35 The members of the Society, through these tasting experiments, set themselves apart, not only as scientists who could participate in experiments and come to conclusions, but also as elites with brave and discerning palates. Although they claimed to be testing foods for colonial settlers in need of new foods, they showed their own cultural and economic capital by eating extremely rare game. As the purpose of the déjeuners shifted throughout the first half of the twentieth century, this view of attendees as elite diners remained consistent. These trial and error experiments at the déjeuners amicaux continued until the First World War, with a variety of culinary hypotheses being put to the test. In 1911, the members of the Society were among the first to try the newest creations of Li Yu Ying, the technical director of a soy-products factory near Paris. They had many suggestions for improving the soy “ham omelet” and soy “cheese,” and disliked the salad of sautéed soybeans and the soy bread. There was unanimous agreement, however, that this remarkable versatility made soy a very interesting plant. The Minister of Colonies, Aldolphe Messimy, was present, and the diners also enjoyed fish and crustaceans from the coast of Mauritania.36 In 1912, the diners judged that American black bass was delicious and suggested that it be acclimated to France. They also determined that zebu (a type of cattle) from Madagascar and beef from Algeria were just as good as their European equivalents, that Chinese yams, known to acclimate well to France, were as delicious as potatoes, and that the golden melons of Malaga (from southern Spain) were sweeter than French melons and would be especially appreciated in the winter.37 In 1913, the members judged that roasted gnu (a type of African antelope) was quite delicious. It could prove to be very useful, they argued, since the gnu are the size of horses, acclimate well to France, and were already being raised on ranches throughout Europe.38 In all these instances, the descriptions of the déjeuners in the Society’s journal focused on the role of the diners as taste testers who came to practical conclusions about the utility of different foods based on their taste and adaptability to French dishes. By serving to help determine what plants and animals were best-tasting, and hence worth breeding and growing, the meal itself was a part of the process of acclimatization. Society members participated in this process of testing and tasting, of exploring what foods might be of use both in France and the

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colonies outside of the déjeuners. At Society meetings, those present discussed fruit and vegetable samples sent in by members.39 This spirit of member participation in scientific and culinary experimentation is best exemplified in an article by Professor Désiré Bois in 1910. Bois was a vice president of the Société, and a professor at the MNHN and at the École coloniale who went on to publish widely on domestic and colonial plants, especially those with culinary uses.40 In “Ansérine Amarante (Chenopodium Amaranticolor) Experiences of Cultivation of 1909,” Bois reported on the observations of Société members from different regions of France and the Maghreb on the growing and cooking of a new type of spinach. He cited letters discussing the best growing season and harvesting techniques in different climates. Some members harvested mature leaves and cooked them as one would prepare common spinach and liked the results. M. Roland-Gosselin from Villefranche-sur-Mer had a different suggestion. He thought the plants tasted best when harvested young, when the leaves are pretty and the whole plant is tender. He suggested that those wanting to sell this produce in Paris should harvest the plants young and sell them whole and packaged in boxes “like radishes.”41 Here, like at the déjeuners amicaux, Société members were involved in developing and tasting ingredients and dishes. Topics discussed at meetings of the botany and colonization sections between 1909 and 1913 included the consumption of yams and rice in Madagascar, the indigenous vegetables studied on a recent trip to Dahomey, the difficulties of transporting bananas from Guadeloupe to the metropole, the production and eating of seaweed in Indochina, and the market competition between Indochinese and American rice.42 During that same period, the Bulletin ran articles on coconuts, bananas, peanuts, and a Congolese tuber, as well as multi-part series on vanilla, indigenous agriculture in tropical Africa, and the culinary plants of Tonkin.43 Clearly, the colonial foods tasted at the déjeuners amicaux were not simply culinary exoticism but a reflection of an interest in and commitment to colonial agriculture by the prewar Société. The menus centered on using exotic meats and vegetables as substitution ingredients in French dishes.44 This cultural mediation—including colonial foods in traditional French cuisine—made them taste relatively familiar. This served the purpose of these luncheons, as the taste-testing scientists could use French ingredients as a point of comparison. The excitement of eating the unfamiliar was perhaps the meals’ main attraction, but the test of these ingredients was to see how they compared with French equivalents and how they tasted in French dishes. This search for substitution ingredients for French dishes continued

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in the interwar period while a new interest in the flavors of colonial cultures emerged. The overall purpose of the déjeuners, however, shifted dramatically from an exercise in experimentation to a promotional event, reflecting the growing importance and urgency of la mise en valeur ideology to the colonial lobby after the war.

Promotion and culinary science From its inception, the work of the Société d’acclimatation emphasized the potential of colonial agriculture to contribute to French diets, but in the context of the continuing high food costs of the 1920s, it was more focused than ever before on using the colonies to find new and inexpensive ways to feed the French public. As Alexandre Gauducheu recalled while in the midst of another war in 1941, “The war of 1914–1918 led our society to redirect its efforts to the practical side of acclimatization and to provisions. It became apparent, indeed, that the naturalists were called upon to give their opinion on the production and utilization of our animal and vegetable resources, metropolitan and colonial.”45 Society members were also committed to teaching the French public about the benefits of empire. They understood that public enthusiasm was essential not only to financially support colonial products like rice and bananas but also to spur investment in the colonies that would allow for future research and for the infrastructure to help these products reach France. The Société supported mise en valeur in many other ways as well, such as promoting the French colonial banana industry, researching and cataloging colonial plants and agricultural products, publishing reports by directors of colonial agriculture, gathering information from members in the colonies, and sending scientists to examine colonial production.46 Sarraut cited examples of the Society’s support of his efforts in 1933: [The Society] helps us to lay out the vast inventory of colonial resources, to recognize the value of those we had neglected, to multiply their abundance and their use, to acclimate them outside of their original territory, to preserve, in sum, the future guarantee that they offer to the national destiny. It helps us to conserve and fertilize this immense overseas patrimony that is the robust infrastructure of French grandeur. And by the curiosity that it arouses by the vulgarizations to which it devotes itself and the missions that it encourages and rewards, they teach to the Frenchman, who has too long ignored it, that he is a citizen of a France of five million people, the owner of an empire twenty times larger than his country, and that he must find through all the fluctuations, in the

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reality of this present and future potential, the force and the reason to have faith in the power and the durability of his country.47

The Society used the déjeuners amicaux to “teach the French” about the benefits and responsibilities of the empire, and in the interwar period they did so by promoting colonial products and culinary technologies that could make food cheaper and more abundant in France. After the First World War, the Society’s Bulletin no longer described the déjeuners amicaux using the language of the laboratory. The role of the meal shifted from one of experimenting on new foods to one of promoting foods that had already been somewhat tested, such as the colonial seafood and other products at the 1921 banquet. At the 1920 déjeuner, Society president Edmond Perrier announced that “all of these gatherings have only one goal: to show that it is possible to multiply our culinary resources and make more familiar and appreciated the products of our colonies.”48 The food shortages that burdened France during and following the war led the Society to again, as it had during the Siege of Paris, look for more immediate options for feeding the French public. There was a new spirit of urgency expressed in the menus and speeches of the déjeuners amicaux as well as in the contents of the Bulletin. Opening a meeting in December 1918, Société vice president Désiré Bois called for “a return to agriculture, too long neglected, that will be able to provide us with unlimited riches if we know how to utilize all of our resources, as much colonial as metropolitan, to increase and ameliorate the productions of our soil.” In order for this to happen, according to Bois, not only would known resources need to be restored but also new ones created. The Society therefore needed “to put to profit our studies, too often left speculative.” This was how the Society could “work more and more for the good of our country.”49 This focus on the part of the Société was developing even during the war. In 1917, the Bulletin ran a twopart series by colonial agriculture inspector A. Fauchère extolling the need for a systematic mise en valeur of colonial agriculture and calling for the “colonial education of the French public.”50 The déjeuners amicaux immediately following the First World War were part of the Society’s efforts toward this goal. The shift from experimentation to education was most striking at the first postwar déjeuner in 1919. The theme of the meal was rice and its potential for becoming a staple of the French diet. The Society was not bashful in acknowledging this shifting purpose, starting its report on the 1919 déjeuner by stating that it “was organized to try to promote the usage of rice in France,” and featuring a representative of the Syndicate of French Rice Processors as a guest speaker. Many different rice dishes were presented, and for the first time at the

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déjeuner, a packet containing information and home recipes was distributed to the diners. This meal was not set up as an experiment but as “proof ” that “well prepared rice is an excellent food completely worthy of representation on all of our tables.”51 Eight different rice dishes were served at the 1919 déjeuner, and the packet of rice information distributed to the guests and printed in the Bulletin included recipes for twenty-four more. This meal was not primarily about the adventure of trying something new, though that was, of course, still part of the draw, but about demonstrating how colonial products could become part of French home cooking. The announcement in the Bulletin read in part: Rice, which our colony of Indochina provides us in abundance and which should find a place on all tables, can be prepared in many different ways; we are far from claiming to name them all here, but we give the necessary principles for its proper cooking and publish some new or lesser known recipes, which, if they are well executed, will interest, we are certain, many amateurs.52

So, soon after the Great War, with France’s economic, colonial, and even culinary future seeming unsure, the draw of these déjeuners amicaux was the immediacy of their potential impact. Diners no longer taste-tested items that would only possibly become available to them, but instead ate and learned to prepare foods that could alter their diet in the near future. Some culinary exoticism remained in the déjeuner menu. Diners at the 1919 déjeuner were served Indian antelope with curry sauce on top of rice. Yet other dishes served and many of the recipes distributed to the guests mainly used rice as a substitution ingredient, an economic filler in more traditional French dishes such as “beignets de riz,” “riz au gratin,” and “salade de riz.”53 The recipe booklet distributed at the banquet included many different cooking methods for plain rice to be served as a side dish or under a stew or curry. These cooking methods were all named after different rice-eating cultures such as “riz au naturel à l’annamite,” “riz cuit à l’indienne,” and “riz à la créole.”54 The distribution of recipes at the 1919 déjeuner was the beginning of a trend. In the interwar period, recipes were frequently printed in the menus of the déjeuners amicaux and also appeared separately in the Bulletin. These recipes were not merely culinary curiosity or gastronomic ethnology. They were focused on preparations that used accessible and inexpensive ingredients and were intended to translate the lessons of the déjeuners to home cooking. The recipes featured both exotic foods, such as the “Indian meal” presented at a Société meeting in 1919,55 and dishes that used new ingredients with familiar flavors like “Siamoise en choucroute à l’Alsacienne,”

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which replaced the cabbage in Alsatian sauerkraut with the Siam pumpkin that was featured in the 1922 déjeuner.56 The déjeuners menus immediately following the Great War emphasized thrift, centering on inexpensive foods, or ones that had the potential to become less expensive after further colonial development. In addition to 1919’s rice-themed meal, the 1920 banquet highlighted its “economic dishes”; the 1921 déjeuner premiered fish sauce as a cheap protein substitute; and the 1922 menu focused on new vegetables that could be “obtained at a good price and in abundance.”57 Yet, despite this emphasis on accessible foods, the members of the Society still portrayed themselves as dining elites with brave and discerning palates. Speeches at the déjeuners emphasized the trendsetting role of elite diners. In 1919, there seemed to be a sincere expectation that the meal would contribute to the popularity of rice in France by promoting rice as not only economical but also fashionable. This hope for a sort of trickle-down culinary change continued throughout the interwar period. At the 1922 déjeuner, guest speaker and colonial novelist, Pierre Mille, emphasized the role of the social elite in spreading culinary change: And it is only individuals who are very intelligent, very reflective, whose education has taught them to control their first instincts, who are able to dare to eat that which they do not know. And it is through them, through the example of this elite that the new food descends, next, into the working classes. That is the history of the potato; that is also the history of tea in France. . . . Voilà, why you come to give a great service to those who are not elite, because those who are not elite have a spirit of imitation and will want to eat it.58

Although Mille certainly oversimplified the social process of how a new food “descends,” he was correct that in early modern Europe, foods from the new world—especially stimulants like coffee, tea, and sugar—did shift from elite to everyday working-class foods.59 Pierre Bourdieu, however, argued that in twentieth-century France, “the art of eating and drinking remains one of the few areas in which the working classes explicitly challenge the legitimate art of living” by continuing to favor “substantial dishes” and choosing “belly over palate.”60 The Société was wrong to assume that the popular classes “have a spirit of imitation.” Yet, their emphasis on the economic benefits of rice, also promoted by many other organizations, seems to have been correct. In 1972, Bourdieu found that skilled manual workers spent a slightly higher percentage of their average food expenditures on rice (0.6 percent) than did foremen (0.4 percent) and clerical workers (0.5 percent).61

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The fact that rice really was and continues to be an inexpensive source of calories and can be integrated into a variety of dishes and cuisines was certainly the primary reason why it, more so than other new colonial foods, eventually gained general acceptance. This sort of trickle-down effect, however, was not the norm for other colonial foods, especially those with more distinct or exotic tastes. The career scientists and amateur scientific enthusiasts of the Société celebrated their elite status by continuing to eat rare and exotic foods. In 1927, the guest speaker, Miguel Zamacoïs, praised the members of the Society, “all curious exotics by definition,” and mocked the popularity of regional cuisines in Paris: The restaurants and gourmets loudly celebrate the acclimatization to Paris of a few regional dishes—goose confit, foie gras patés and bouillabaisses!—and in great publicity stunts award themselves diplomas of imaginative boldness! Let us laugh! Let us laugh, us who are the guests of a poly-regional and multiprovincial meal, we, for whom the regions are named China, Siam, Chili, and the provinces named Gabon, Madagascar, Mexico and Indochina. . . . Let us laugh at this trivial boldness! . . . At these prehistoric culinary practices, we who have the first fruits of this sensational revelation—the intrasauce chickens, scientifically embalmed with aromatic liquids, mysteriously impregnated in their deep flesh by fermented liquid which gives them a second nature, unknown until this day of more subtle palates.62

The pride shown in Zamacoïs’s speech of having the boldest of palates, which enjoyed the most global of menus and the newest cooking methods, clearly demonstrates an awareness of the cultural capital of eating the rare. Even while trying to promote colonial foods with some chance of becoming inexpensive options for the working classes, the déjeuners amicaux maintained a spirit of elitism. Zamacoïs’s praise for the new preparation method intrasauce points to another aspect of the interwar déjeuners menus and work of the Society: attempts to use not only acclimatization but also chemistry and the physical and culinary sciences to create new foods and improve on old ones. In his allocution at the 1920 déjeuner, Sarraut praised the role of the “men of science, who, in the silence of the laboratory and the office, demonstrate . . . the proper methods and means of increasing without end the riches of our colonies and augmenting the value of their production.”63 The “value of their production” was raised not only by research and acclimatization, but also through scientific improvements to food products. From the viewpoint of colonial scientists, the land had to be cultivated under the guidance of French agricultural science, and some of the foods were

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scientifically improved upon in order to see if they could be made worthy of French diners. The déjeuners amicaux of the 1920s were also forums for presenting and promoting successful results of this scientific work. One example of this is the repeated use of nuoc-mam (Vietnamese fish sauce) in déjeuners menus in 1921, 1923, and 1924.64 As explained by chemist and Society member Lucien Nigg, the French government needed a large and affordable supply of fish sauce to feed Indochinese soldiers fighting in Europe during the war. Nigg created a process of macerating fish in a little bit of sea water at a very high and constant temperature (as opposed to the traditional method of letting the jars of fish roast in the sun for months), so that it could be inexpensively mass produced anywhere in the world where small fish are plentiful.65 In his promotion of fish sauce to banquet diners, Nigg argued that this nutrient-packed food allowed the Indochinese to live on little more than fish sauce and rice and could ameliorate the diets not only of the colonial population but also of the French.66 The celebrated nutritional aspects of fish sauce included high levels of nitrogen, protein, and amino acids.67 Although Nigg created an efficient way to make the sauce, he continued to make alterations, trying to develop a product that would be palatable to the French. By the time nouc-mam was served again in a stew at the déjeuner of 1923, Nigg had altered his method so that it made a rich thick fish paste that was neither as salty nor had the intense fermented smell of his earlier attempts.68 Even with these “improvements,” the taste of the product was never praised in the summaries of the banquet. When fish sauce with rice was served in 1924, the description included with the menu emphasized the economic advantages of replacing the pasta and meat in one’s diet with rice and fish sauce.69 Another Société scientist, Alexandre Gauducheau, also focused during the interwar period on using science to develop less expensive foods and presented his results at the déjeuners amicaux. Gauducheau introduced his new food, “képhir de sang” (fermented blood), at the déjeuner amical of 1924. During the submarine blockade of France during the First World War, Gauducheau began experimenting with fermentation to better preserve food. He created this new dish by fermenting excess blood collected from slaughterhouses in a similar way to how milk is fermented to make kefir. The Bulletin’s article on the 1924 déjeuner suggested that Gauducheau’s experiment demonstrated that “blood fermented in this way, added in small doses to dietary rations, acts as a first-class tonic.” It also pointed out that this “curious technical innovation” was exactly the type of “work of applied natural history that is the goal of our Society.”70 Képhir de

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sang only made the one appearance at the déjeuners amicaux, but Gauducheau continued to experiment with ways to improve upon food through science. Moving on from creating new foods to making existing ones taste better, Gouducheau introduced his intrasauce method at the 1927 déjeuner. It involved injecting the meat with a flavorful liquid before cooking it. In its debut performance, the intrasauce method was used to inject chickens with tarragoninfused cognac, but the hope was that in the future it could be used to improve the taste and aroma of such lower quality meats as Algerian lamb and cabbageeating rabbits.71 At later déjeuners, the intrasauce method was applied to rabbit (1928), pork liver (1929), veal (1935), and pork again in 1938, in a dish with the futuristic name “Cochon 1938.”72 Gauducheau also wrote about his new method in the publications of the Société and elsewhere.73 Applying his new technology both to old problems and to new ones that resulted from the growing global food trade, Gouducheau hoped that intrasauce would “contribute to the economy of our alimentation” by using flavoring agents like garlic, truffle, and nutmeg to remove the taste of urine from kidneys and improve the flavor of meats that were frozen for too long.74 Although such gastronomic technologies were discussed mostly as ways to provide less expensive food to metropolitan France, there was also the hope that they would help improve life in the colonies. In 1932, when no intrasauce items were even on the menu, the main speaker of the déjeuner, prolific author and pro-imperialist, Jérôme Tharaud, in his praise of the many good works of the Société, heavily emphasized the wonders of the invention of the intrasauce method and the potential for a true intrasauce revolution in the colonies: Have we really measured exactly, ladies and gentlemen, the consequences of this triumph of the syringe? No more bad meat! No more bad meals! No more need to fatten cattle, sheep, poultry! It’s high cost of living defeated! . . . Our colonials, it must be said, carry always in their heart the regret of lost cuisine. This paradise you will return to them. . . . What great change it will be to their life and the whole of life in the colonies. . . . Now, we all know that one is not the same man after a good or bad lunch. What about thirty years of good or bad lunches! I see in the future functionaries that are well nourished, agreeable, benevolent; their wives, delivered from their culinary worries, having a constantly egalitarian air, and in consequence, multitudes of satisfied natives; in short, a beneficent calm that intrasauce itself injects in the veins of the Administration.75

Tharaud’s statement is dramatic hyperbole, but it reveals a basic understanding that incorporation matters beyond nutrition and points to an underlying belief

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in the “you are what you eat” principle.76 For Tharaud, the potential of intrasauce to change character seems connected to the metaphor of improving blood so evident in the intrasauce method itself. For its inventor, Gauducheau, intrasauce’s potential came from making meat more available. Gauducheau believed that the slow improvement of the European diet over time and the acceleration of this change over the previous century were responsible for making white Europeans the strongest and most vigorous race.77 The most important aspect of this change, according to Gauducheau, was the increase in the amount of “animal protein, meat, milk, and eggs” eaten in “the majority of the countries occupied by the white race.”78 He argued that, in addition to heredity and the environment, diet and hygiene affected the evolution of the races. The role of meat in French military rations in the First World War shows that the connection between strength and meat eating was a common belief. Gauducheau claimed to have come to this realization while in Madagascar. While there, he met some native black sailors who seemed in a much better physical state than other indigènes and learned that they had been fed the French ration of “bread, meat, dairy, and wine.”79 This led Gauducheau to consider how differences between the races might have developed partly because of diet. He went so far as to argue that the colonized races, especially the “rice eaters,” could, over time, become more like the whites if their diet changed. The issue for Gauducheau, however, was not rice, which he thought equal to bread, but the amount of other key foods in their diets: “It is likely that, if one day the current rice eaters, the Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Indians, are abundantly provided, like us, with meat, with milk, with fermented foods, with alcohol, etc., their well known nonchalance will become vivacity and their character, after a few generations, will approach our own.”80 So though Gauducheau was committed, in the aftermath of the First World War and the run-up to the second, to making the French food economy more efficient, his emphasis in the interwar period on making meat less expensive and more accessible was also his way of participating in the evolutionary development of the French race and the eventual elevation of her colonized peoples.81 Gauducheau’s view of the races as at different stages of human evolution was similar to the racial thinking behind Sarraut’s plan for mise en valeur and call for associationist policy. The two men articulated their theories of racial evolution differently: Gauducheau as evolution from rice eaters to meat eaters, Sarraut as evolution from savage to civilized.82 Their underlying assumption, however, was a shared belief that the “inferior” races could and would continue to evolve, and that with France as their “guide and their tutor,” they would evolve faster and

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for the better. The various peoples of the French empire were believed to be at diverse stages of evolution, and therefore, Sarraut argued that “the old error of the theory of assimilation” needed to be replaced with an associationist policy that allowed different peoples to acquire autonomy as their relative evolution merited, though they would never reach equality with the French.83 The déjeuners amicaux of the interwar period, especially those of the 1920s, supported mise en valeur policy through the promotion of colonial food products, colonial agriculture, and culinary technologies. In this way, the Society participated in the colonial lobby’s interwar effort to educate the French public and rally them to the colonial cause. Many of the dishes and techniques highlighted ways to make these foods more palatable to French diners, such as a gratin of rice, Nigg’s “improvements” to fish sauce, and Gauducheau’s efforts to make lowly meats more appetizing. Yet, there is a significant difference between the promotion of rice and the promotion of fish sauce that points to another important shift in the menus of the déjeuners amicaux and another trend in colonial politics: an interest in indigenous colonial contributions to the empire, known as la plus grande France or Greater France. Rice is a crop cultivated throughout much of the world, including in the Indochinese colonies, with which the French were already familiar. It could be combined with exotic flavors or familiar ones, with recipes most often favoring the familiar. Fish sauce, in contrast, is a creation of Vietnamese and other Asian cultures, the ingredients for which (salt water and small fish) are not unique to Asia. By recognizing the nutritional value of fish sauce (if not appreciating its culinary merit) and searching for ways to make its production more efficient and ameliorate its taste for French diners, Nigg was drawing not merely from colonial natural resources but also from colonial culinary cultures to improve metropolitan diets.

Exoticism and authenticity In the early years of the déjeuner, wild game, seafood, and produce from the colonies were roasted, stewed, covered in traditional sauces, processed into paté, and turned into jam much as traditional French ingredients would be. Even those more rare and exotic ingredients, like the python from 1910, were served in French-style dishes. In the 1920s and 1930s, alongside the French dishes, there was a much greater inclusion of colonial and indigenous tastes and cooking methods. Some of this culinary exoticism stemmed from the increased

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exposure of the metropolitan French to colonial cultures, thanks to the presence of colonial workers and soldiers in France during the war, as did Nigg’s interest in fish sauce. Other factors, however, were also at play. Josephine Baker’s 1925 Parisian debut in La Revue nègre and her star-making performances at the Foliesbergère in her banana skirt are just the most famous examples of the popularity of exotic entertainment in interwar Paris, which likely contributed to an interest in exotic dishes.84 A taste for exotic flavors was seen in the repeated use of curry at the déjeuners in the 1920s, most often including less familiar meats such as turtle, goat, and antelope.85 Curry was not unheard of in French gastronomy. The home cooking magazine Le Pot-au-feu published a recipe for chicken curry as early as 1895, and the dish grew in popularity in the interwar period, making more frequent appearances in Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu.86 In these home-cooking magazines, curry recipes used common French meats and vegetables and most often presented curry as a broadly “oriental” exotic flavor. This was a very different approach than the one taken by the Society, which used the presence and commentary of experts to distinguish itself through an interest in the authenticity of its curry. The 1920 déjeuner featured a guest chef described as an expert on curry. His dish of curry à la mode Ceylon was praised as a dish of the highest taste. The curry was served with green apple chutney and apricot preserves (as a replacement for mango chutney).87 At the conclusion of its report on the déjeuner, the Bulletin ran a short article titled “Observations on the Curry and the Chutney” by Society member P. Carié who was present at the déjeuner. Carié referred to himself as an “old colonial” who had spent a significant amount of time in India. While he liked the curry à la mode Ceylon, he preferred curry from the Malabar coast and included his own recipes for curry paste, meat curry, mango chutney, and onion chutney.88 By focusing on regional varieties of curry and highlighting the work of a “native” guest chef and the opinions of an “old colonial,” the Société seems to have had an interest in replicating the authentic tastes of exotic cultures, not merely in using their plants and animals in French cuisine. Curry, however, “is in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture.” No Indian or Sri Lankan in the colonial period “referred to his or her food as curry.”89 It was the British who lumped together a wide variety of Indian dishes under that name. British cookbooks tended to divide Indian cuisine into broad regional varieties of curry, often including recipes for two types of curries outside of India’s borders, Ceylon and Malayan curries.90 That the Société served one of these popular types of curries

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demonstrates how even their more exotic and “authentic” dishes were mediated through colonialism. Although there was a demonstrated interest in making authentic curries and an interest in regional variation—at least through the lens of British and French colonialism—the ingredients did not usually reflect any geographical authenticity. At the déjeuners amicaux, curry seems to have become a solution for how to prepare unusual meats. There was no geographical logic, for example, behind serving Patagonian hares from southern Argentina in “Madras curry” in 1920.91 Curry was exotic and from the colonial world, but it was familiar enough to be categorized and understood as food. The interest in dishes that had some sort of claim to authenticity, as opposed to just exotic ingredients, was not limited to curry. Like the 1920 curry dish, these dishes gained credibility as authentic because of the input of “natives” or other experts. At the 1924 déjeuner, one of the honored guests was a representative of Morocco who recommended an expert who helped the chefs prepare “the real couscous.”92 In 1934, a corn cake was prepared “according to the method used by the natives of the Ivory Coast” as taught by a Society member who had been a colonial administrator in the Ivory Coast.93 In 1928, with an official at the Japanese embassy and a Japanese doctor from “one of most ancient families of Japan” present, the chef had Japanese aides help prepare five Japanese dishes, and diners were taught how to use chopsticks.94 In both 1935 and 1937, a course of stir-fried rice dishes was presented by Restaurant Shanghai in Paris.95 As seen in these examples, many interwar déjeuners featured dishes from non-Western cultures that were not colonies, but colonial products and dishes continued to be central, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese dish alongside. The geographical diversity of these dishes might suggest that they were merely offered for exotic flair, but the presence in the kitchen, in the planning stages, or as a commentator, of someone who claimed authoritative knowledge on indigenous culinary culture demonstrates some interest in the gastronomic contributions of these cultures. This emphasis on authenticity was a new way for Society members to distinguish themselves as elite diners. Eating these dishes was, in their selfunderstanding, not about exotic allure but about possessing a modern spirit that was willing to look outside of Europe for inspiration. Novelist Marcel Prevost, who was the featured speaker in 1926, expressed this view. He again cited the potato as the great example of the initial resistance to new foods: The curriculum of a modern well-balanced spirit must be to expand his life. To expand in all of the senses and in all domains, to know more science and more

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ideas . . . to smell new flowers . . . and (why exclude from this vital expansion one of our senses?) to taste new flavors. We have, this morning, thanks to the Société nationale d’acclimatation, taken a zig-zag voyage from Annam to the Volga, from Siam to Algeria, from Peru to Madagascar. Wow! We have really expanded our horizon.96

This “program of a modern spirit” did not imply global human equality but was a reflection of the imperial hierarchy. France, as the imperial patriarch, possessing this modern spirit, could take the best of the world and make it its own. Since the nineteenth century, taking the best of the world and making it French has been understood as one of the great strengths of French cuisine. It is, therefore, not surprising that those who took the French diet seriously and amassed cultural capital through elite eating would be some of the first to see colonialism through the lens of la plus grande France—a France that benefitted from its diverse empire. This was not in opposition to la mise en valeur but an extension of it, another argument for organized development of the empire for metropolitan gain. The distinction of cultural capital associated with eating authentic colonial dishes gives us some insight into the important differences between the colonial lobby’s interest in la plus grande France and the broader popular enthusiasm for colonial-themed exoticism, though they are certainly linked. Exoticism is more than an interest in subjects defined as exotic. It is a way of thinking about the other that implies cultural distance and reflects power structures.97 This was certainly the case for the exotic dishes of the déjeuners amicaux that were always mediated to fit into a French meal and judged by French diners. The constructed exotic dish was a representation of the colonial other, and its mediation by the Society members demonstrated their power to represent the colonized, who were understood as incapable of representing themselves.98 Yet, the Society’s emphasis in the interwar period on establishing a dish’s authenticity by connecting it to representative individuals from indigenous cultures, or to those who claimed knowledge of these cultures, makes the expression of exoticism in interwar déjeuners amicaux rather different from the popular exoticism of 1920s and 1930s Paris. Bret Berliner describes popular exoticism in his study of Jazz-Age France thus: “Exoticism is escapist: it looks far beyond one’s social and material world. It is, however, less about reality than about ideals and fantasies. Indeed, the exotic is constructed as a distant, picturesque other that evokes feelings, emotions, and ideals in the self that have been considered lost in the civilizing process.”99 Société members thought of themselves as scientifically minded elites

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who were above the emotions of popular exoticism, but aspects of exotic fantasy still permeated their banquets. The déjeuners amicaux were a space of interaction with other cultures through foods and tastes, but always within a colonial power structure. The changing ways in which the foods were mediated for French diners reflect changes in prevailing colonial ideology in France. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the déjeuners were used to seek adequate substitution foods for French colonials far from the culinary comfort of the metropole, as the colonies were seen mostly as a place to be conquered and civilized by French culture. After the First World War, as the colonies came to be seen more as places that could help France recover from the war and rebuild its economy, more tastes from colonial cultures were included. As the menu progressed from merely using colonial resources and products in French dishes to including more tastes from indigenous cultures, so too the representation of the French empire shifted from a primitive place to be civilized by French tastes to a diverse place with the potential to contribute to French life. Most significantly, however, these meals and the shifts in attitudes toward the colonies they reflect took place within the colonial lobby. In fact, the Société was perhaps the segment of the colonial lobby most interested in a wide variety of colonial contributions to the French diet. While the déjeuners amicaux and the other food and agriculture-related activities of the Société d’acclimatation demonstrated a clear embrace of la mise en valeur and an openness to the potential of la plus grande France, they were not a reflection of the broader Parisian society. The next few chapters examine the promotion, embrace, and rejection of colonial food and colonial cuisine within and outside of the colonial lobby to reveal some of the reasons why the Society’s embrace of colonial foods was not representative.

3

Selling Rice to Wheat Eaters

When the Société d’acclimatation hosted their rice-themed banquet in 1919, representatives of the Syndicat de la rizerie française (French rice refiners syndicate) and the Agence économique de l’Indochine were in attendance.1 This moment—which brought together colonial scientists, an organization supporting French rice refiners, and the newly formed office of the Indochinese administration in Paris—introduced some of the key figures in the interwar effort to convince French consumers to eat more Indochinese rice. Scientists were at the forefront of this effort that eventually came to be dominated by organizations supporting French rice exporters, importers, and refiners, represented most strongly by the UCF. The Indochinese colonial administration, led by the Governor General’s office and the Agence économique de l’Indochine, was also involved, as was the Colonial Ministry in Paris. Although there were at times disagreements between various colonial business groups, the UCF, the Indochinese Governor General, and the Colonial Ministry, they attempted to coordinate their efforts to increase the amount of Indochinese rice consumed in France. I refer to this group of interested parties as the Indochinese lobby, as they worked together not only to influence public opinion but also to sway government decisions relevant to French trade with Indochina. Absent from the 1919 déjeuner amical, however, were many of the other characters in the story of rice in interwar France such as French farmers who resisted its import and the consumers who were ultimately responsible for its integration into French cooking. This chapter tells the story of the promotion of Indochinese rice in Paris from the First World War through the 1930s, analyzing the reasons for its promotion, the resistance to rice in France, and the intersection of interest groups involved. It demonstrates the effects of changing global and national economic conditions, including the First World War and the Great Depression, in shaping the promotion of colonial goods and ultimately the relationship between France and

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the colonies. During and immediately following the First World War—a time of wheat shortages and high food prices—the Indochinese lobby focused on trying to introduce rice-flour bread into French diets. The failure during this period to persuade legislatures, bakers, and consumers of the merits of rice flour, along with increased French wheat production in the second half of the 1920s, led to a shift in emphasis to table rice in the late 1920s and 1930s. The efforts to promote table rice faced significant cultural resistance. As the Great Depression took hold in France in the 1930s, the Indochinese lobby confronted French wheat farmers who demanded tariffs and quotas on rice entering France. This shifting debate over Indochinese rice raised the larger issues of national and imperial self-sufficiency and the boundaries of French identity within Greater France. Those seeking to increase French rice consumption faced considerable barriers to rice acceptance, yet they were successful in increasing the overall Indochinese rice exports to France. This amount increased from an estimated 216,000 metric tons in 1913 to 223,000 metric tons in 1929, 523,000 metric tons in 1933, and 544,000 metric tons in 1938.2 Most of the Indochinese rice imported into France, however, was not for human consumption but for fodder. In the 1930s, table rice accounted for between 9 percent and 21 percent of French rice imports. Another 10 percent to 20 percent was used in French industry, such as for brewing beer, and the vast majority was used to feed livestock.3 The overall increase in rice imports, therefore, was not necessarily the result of a successful campaign to promote rice for human consumption. This increase in metropolitan access to inexpensive rice, however, certainly increased French exposure to rice, and, combined with the Indochina lobby’s promotional efforts, increased the prevalence of rice in French cooking. From the 1860s through the beginning of the twentieth century, the large international market for rice in the Far East allowed colonialists and investors to profit greatly from the relatively small population and a vast reserve of land suitable for rice cultivation in Indochina.4 The vast majority of Indochinese rice was produced in Cochinchina, where the dredging of rivers and construction of canals in the south greatly increased the acreage of rice fields from the 1890s through the 1930s. Overall, Indochinese rice exports increased thirtyfold between 1860 (when 58,000 tons were exported) and the record year of 1928 (1,797,000 tons).5 By 1930, a quarter of the rice sold in the global market came from Indochina.6 These exports went primarily to Asian markets. Up until 1930, Indochina engaged in more commerce with the Far East than with the metropole. China, Japan, and the Philippines purchased most of the Indochinese rice.7 The dramatic impact of the First World War on French agriculture opened

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the opportunity to supply the French need for grain with Indochinese rice. The protectionist tariffs of the 1920s, and especially those in response to the global economic crisis of the 1930s, limited Indochinese access to Far Eastern markets, thus increasing exports to France just as French grain production rebounded. As discussed in Chapter 1, the French need for food during the war led the Governor General of Indochina, Albert Sarraut, to work with the UCF to form the GERI to organize rice sales to the French government. In the immediate aftermath of the war, efforts to promote the commercial interests of French Indochina were further consolidated in Paris. Many colonial governments formed agences économiques or offices colonials in Paris. These offices worked to promote the interests and products of the colonies in France by building relationships with the metropolitan press, organizing the participation of their colonies at expositions and conferences, and facilitating the relationship between colonial governments and metropolitan business. Albert Sarraut conceived of the first of these—the Agence économique de l’Indochine, founded in May 1918—as “a permanent museum of Indochinese enterprises in Paris.” This agency worked in conjunction with the UCF, the Governor General’s office, and the Colonial Ministry to promote and lobby for increased rice consumption in France throughout the interwar period. In 1919, the Office colonial in Paris, which had been founded in 1899 and functioned primarily as a statistics bureau, expanded under the new name Agence general des colonies to become a “central information body for overseas empire.”8 In the 1930s, the Ministry of Colonies created its own propaganda committees for a variety of colonial goods, starting with rice in October 1931.9 These different promotional bodies facilitated the efforts of the central colonial administration in Paris as well as diverse colonial governments to influence public discourse about the colonies and sell colonial goods. With the exception of the Communist Party, even those members of the Chamber and Senate who opposed colonialism in the interwar period limited their criticism to extreme colonial abuses and showed little interest in quotidian colonial matters. Because of this general disinterest, pro-colonial majorities dominated the colonial commissions of the Chamber and Senate.10 The organized colonial business lobby, including the UCF, therefore, had significant influence in shaping French colonial policy. Colonial matters generally attracted resistance only when they either demanded significant French funds—such as Sarraut’s failed attempt to fund his project of mise en valeur—or were seen as in conflict with metropolitan interests. Metropolitan interest groups contested the raising and lowering of tariffs and quotas on agricultural products. Throughout

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the interwar period, trade groups of rice importers, exporters, and processers, working through the UCF, the Agence économique de l’Indochine, the Governor General’s office, and the Colonial Ministry pushed the issue of Indochinese rice into the public discourse as they attempted to increase French rice consumption. In doing so they brought various metropolitan interest groups like nutritionists, bakers, chefs, and metropolitan wheat producers into the debate about the place of rice in France. The effort to increase French rice consumption began during the First World War with the idea of incorporating rice flour into French bread. There were also scientists in Paris working to promote rice flour and table rice to the French public. As we saw in the previous chapter, the scientists at the Société d’acclimatation were one of the first groups to promote table rice as a practical and inexpensive food in 1919. The Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire (SSHA) had worked to promote both table rice and rice-flour bread directly to Parisian consumers even earlier. Founded in 1904, under the original name Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire et d’alimentation rationnelle de l’homme (Scientific society of alimentary hygiene and the rational feeding of man), the SSHA brought together scientists in the new field of nutrition. A key group in the international movement for the development and popularization of nutritional science, the SSHA sponsored research in nutrition and published a scholarly journal. It also hosted conferences and courses on rational cooking and eating, and published works on nutrition targeted at French consumers. Promoting rice and rice flour to French consumers was one of the first goals of the young SSHA during the war. The SSHA’s journal covered research on rice flour and encouraged the use of rice flour as well as other substitutes in bread.11 More significantly, both table rice and rice flour featured prominently in SSHA courses and publications on hygienic eating. Dr. Armand Hemmerdinger was the main spokesman for the cause within the SSHA. On February 25, 1917, he presented a course on rice at the SSHA that targeted housewives. The course was titled “A Neglected [méconnu] Food” and included an argument in favor of using rice flour and instructions for cooking rice.12 In promoting table rice, and focusing on teaching housewives how to cook it, Hemmerdinger and the SSHA were a decade ahead of the Indochinese lobby. These scientists, dedicated to promoting “rational” eating, saw the usefulness of table rice during the First World War while the Indochina lobby remained focused on rice flour in bread. Perhaps because of the centrality of bread to the French diet and the negative French view of rice, the first major efforts to promote the human consumption of rice in France were focused almost exclusively on using rice flour in French bread.

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Pain de riz The movement to use flour made from Indochinese rice in French bread began with two doctors interested in nutritional science and their experiences in colonial Indochina. In 1898, Abel Lahille was a pharmacy student under Dr. Maurel at the Faculté de Médicine of Toulouse. Maurel had been a marine doctor in Indochina and was interested in the nutritional properties of rice. According to Lahille’s account, they experimented with mixing rice flour with wheat flour in bread and were impressed by the results. When they made their results public, they received mostly hostile responses and did not continue their experiments.13 Lahille went on to focus his work on the study of the colonies and their natural and human resources. The cover of his 1910 work, Mes impressions sur l’Afrique Occidentale Française, celebrated what he saw as the patriotism of participating in the colonial project: “To strive to put to the service of one’s country truth and science, is this not to do an act of the most pure and most loyal patriotism?”14 Lahille’s commitment to the French colonial project intersected with his earlier experiments when he found himself, now a doctor, serving in the colonial forces in Indochina in September 1914. Concerned that the war might decrease French wheat supplies, Lahille returned to his experiments with rice flour, sending a report accompanied by small loaves of bread to the Governor of Cochinchina, the Governor General of French Indochina, and the Minister of Colonies. He experimented with the use of 10 percent, 15 percent, and 20 percent rice flour and determined them all to be perfectly acceptable. Because of the lack of gluten in rice, 20 percent was the maximum amount of rice flour that would consistently produce good bread.15 In his September 1914 report, Lahille established the main arguments in favor of the use of rice flour in bread, arguments that its promoters would use for over a decade. In the report, Lahille said the goal of his experiments was to fill “the deficit of one by the abundance of another.” He sent samples of the bread along with the report and claimed that the bread had “a very agreeable taste, more agreeable, in my opinion, than bread of pure wheat.”16 Lahille also offered economic arguments as to why the introduction of rice flour into bread would be beneficial. He argued that pain de riz would help France cope with the shortage of domestic wheat caused by the war, would decrease the amount of foreign wheat imported into France, and would help facilitate the economic development of Indochina.17 As a scientist who conducted experiments but also tested, tasted, and promoted colonial products, Lahille was similar to colonial scientists of the Societé d’acclimatation. In this way Lahille very much fit the

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model of the French colonial scientist who also functioned as a member of the colonial lobby, conducting research that promoted the idea that investment in colonial development would benefit the metropole. In France, local restrictions on flour use and limits on bread prices were some of the first civilian food controls of the war. In the first month of the conflict, Parisian bakers were forbidden from making croissants, under the argument that flour needed to be saved for bread, a more important necessity. Early in the war, bakeries were the only food producers subjected to official price ceilings. In 1915, the French wheat harvest was deficient, but the government held bread prices steady by providing subsidies to bakers and importing large amounts of expensive American wheat.18 As bread provisions became a growing concern, Lahille and his former professor, Maurel, continued to promote their idea of adding rice flour to French bread. They successfully gained the attention of the UCF, the Governor General’s office, and the Colonial Ministry. The UCF took the lead in advocating the use of rice and rice flour in France. In 1915, Lahille and Maurel, backed by their supporters in the Indochinese lobby, brought the question of rice-flour bread before the French academies for their approval. In this way they anticipated some of the resistance from metropolitan interest groups. In April 1915, Lahille argued before the Académie de médecine, and they unanimously approved his suggestion that bakers be allowed to use up to 20 percent rice flour in bread and encouraged the military bakeries and hospitals to start experimenting with rice flour.19 Attempts to appeal to the Académie d’agriculture were less successful. Lahille appeared before them to defend the idea on the 9th and 16th of June, 1915, emphasizing that this was to be only a wartime measure and only to replace the wheat now being imported from foreign countries, though he did point out that he thought it would be profitable in “normal times” to export the French wheat made available by the use of rice flour in bread. Over the course of the year, the Académie d’agriculture’s objections decreased slightly, and some members agreed with Lahille’s proposal that 20 percent or 25 percent rice flour be allowed only during the war, and that this limit be decreased to 5 percent when wheat production returned to normal levels. They also insisted that any bread containing rice flour be sold as “pain du riz.”20 The issue of naming the bread is significant. Promoters of rice flour used the name pain du riz (or pain de riz or pain au riz) even before this naming requirement was demanded by the Académie d’agriculture and they continued to use it throughout the 1920s. This seems to have been a clear mistake. The limits of rice flour allowed in French bread were never more than 10 percent, and the

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UCF never asked for allowing more than 20 percent rice flour. By naming bread that was 80 percent to 95 percent wheat flour “pain du riz,” Maurel, Lahille, and the UCF gave in to the fears and prejudices of the French public, seemingly admitting through the name that the addition of any rice flour made the bread something essentially different. This was no longer just bread, but a new product, defined by the incorporation of a colonial ingredient. While Lahille and Maurel were lobbying the scientific community for more support in 1915, the UCF became the primary champion of their idea. The UCF appealed to the Minister of War, suggesting he implement the use of riceflour bread for the army. The War Ministry responded that they would make a decision after conducting their own experiments.21 The UCF also appealed to the Commerce Ministry and the Parisian Bakers’ Federation (Syndicat patronal de la boulangerie de Paris & de la Seine). The Bakers’ Federation was most resistant, asserting its objections to the use of rice flour because it complicated the baking process.22 In 1905, a law against fraudulent food sales set legal standards for the ingredients in bread.23 Therefore, incorporating rice flour into French bread required legislative change. The legislative push for rice-flour bread came in 1915 from Ernest Outrey, the deputy for Cochinchina. He had lived in Indochina for thirty years and was a former governor of Cochinchina. He advocated in the Chamber and Senate on behalf of rice-flour bread, with the support of the UCF behind his efforts. On August 7, 1915, he distributed small loaves made with a mixture of 8 to 10 percent rice flour before addressing the Chamber of Deputies. He focused on the taste and nutritional qualities of the bread and on the conclusion of the Committee for Public Hygiene that the use of rice flour had “no public health consequences.”24 He also emphasized the economic advantages for France in purchasing rice from its own empire instead of foreign wheat. Outrey’s appeal had mixed results. The Chamber of Deputies adopted the Projet d’utilisation du riz, 408 to 12, which called for the use of only 5 percent rice flour in bread. But on September 25th, the Senate voted down the proposal, arguing that it was better for both France and Indochina if all Indochinese rice was sold in Asian markets. In October, Outrey went before the Chamber of Deputies again, rebutting the Senate’s arguments. The amendments concerning rice flour were taken out of the bill and sent to the budget commission, where they stalled, in part due to the increased difficulty and cost of shipping from Indochina.25 In addition to the UCF’s efforts, the Colonial Ministry in Paris continued to promote Indochinese rice as a solution for wartime wheat shortages, passing Lahille’s research around to different relevant ministries. In February 1917, the

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Minister of Colonies sent the Minister of Public Works and Supply (Ministre des travaux publics des transports et du ravitaillement) a letter explaining the many studies that had been performed on bread with rice flour, emphasizing the rigorous scientific process.26 This effort demonstrates the cooperative links between scientists, private business interests, and the colonial administration within the Indochinese lobby. When the French wheat shortage reached its peak in 1917, the government did enact laws allowing for substitute flours. The law of April 8, 1917, made it permissible to use up to 15 percent substitute flours in bread and gave the government the power to make the substitutes mandatory and to raise or lower the 15 percent by decree.27 The decree of May 3, 1917, made the use of 15 percent substitute flours mandatory, with an allowance of up to 30 percent for rye.28 Rice flour was one of the permitted substitutes, but by May 1917, shipping rice from Indochina had become so difficult that rice was no longer the most economical substitute. The war decreased the capacity of the French merchant navy, and by the end of 1916, French ships carried only a quarter of French imports. The problem was exacerbated by the start of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917.29 This loss of shipping capability came when an exceptional harvest had made more than 1.3 million metric tons of Indochinese rice available, so promoters of rice flour continued to work to keep the idea alive in Paris as well as in the colonies.30 Hemmerdinger was right in forecasting that French food shortages would not stop with the end of the war. The 1919 American “Report of the Agricultural Commission to Europe” documented war losses and anticipated that Europe would need increased food imports for years to come, especially wheat.31 Despite these shortages, as shipping costs decreased after the war, legal restrictions again kept rice flour out of bread. The law of August 9, 1920, phased out the first two articles of the law of April 8, 1917 (that allowed for substitutes) by August 1, 1921, when France returned grains to the free market.32 As a part of this phasing out process, a judgment by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry on May 30, 1921, eliminated rice from the authorized substitutes for bread making. The Director of Supply (Ravitaillement) within the Ministry of Commerce and Industry explained in a letter to the Director General of the UCF that the laws “must return to the vigor of the rules from before the war concerning the making of bread; therefore, according to the rules, pure wheat only can be used in the making of bread.”33 The French associated dark bread made of substitute flours with wartime suffering, so the government’s urgency in returning to the 100 percent wheat bread standard was in part a symbolic move toward postwar

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prosperity. Throughout the war, the French press had mercilessly mocked the Germans for eating “K-bread” (Kriegsbrot, or war bread), which included 5 to 10 percent potatoes.34 In a context where the enemy was derided for using substitutes in its bread flour, the French government was eager to keep the French eating wheat bread. By the 1920s, the French, especially Parisians, were fed up with the brown “war bread” and wanted white bread. As Kaplan has explained, this rejection of “war bread” led to France becoming “largely if not entirely a white bread country” by the Second World War.35 Postwar harvests remained low. In 1920, wheat production was still only back to 74 percent of prewar levels.36 The UCF saw in this deficiency the opportunity to increase rice sales to France by continuing their efforts to persuade the French government and the French public to accept rice flour in bread. They sent a draft of a bill calling for the inclusion of rice flour to their favored legislator Deputy Outrey in the summer of 1922. Outrey proposed the new bill and distributed more bread to his colleagues, but that bill was again unsuccessful. The UCF and various chambers of commerce from Indochina continued to appeal to the government.37 Meanwhile, propaganda efforts in the 1920s targeted French consumers directly, asking them to demand rice flour from the government. The Compagnie Franco-Indo-Chinoise used the occasion of the 1922 Colonial Exposition in Marseille to try to convince the public that using rice flour in bread was both in their personal interests and in the national interest by distributing a postcard making those arguments. The text of the card presented a contrast between two choices the nation had in the face of continuing insufficient harvests: buying American wheat or corn flour, or buying Indochinese rice flour. American wheat flour, the card argued, led to expensive bread, while American corn flour led to grey and indigestible bread. Importing either type of flour, the card pointed out, had the result of depreciating the franc. Indochinese rice flour, however, was less expensive than both American options and resulted in “white bread, pleasant bread, bread at a good price.” Buying colonial instead of foreign flour had the additional advantage of resulting in the “enhancement of our own wealth.” The card concluded by asking readers to “demand from the government le pain au riz.”38 This advertisement demonstrates how the colonial lobby used white bread as a symbol of French identity and attempted to include Indochina within the French nation. Drawing on anti-American sentiment, the card contrasts bread that has incorporated American flour with bread that incorporates rice flour. While American ingredients make bread either inedible or expensive, Indochinese

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rice flour elevates French bread to what it should be, white and affordable. Through pain au riz, Indochina is included in the postwar reconstruction of the French nation. The visual imagery on the card projects the same message of the incorporation of Indochina into France. At the center of the card is a distant photograph of Indochinese workers laboring in a rice field. Two large bountiful wheat stocks frame the entire card. The image of wheat envelops the distant Indochinese laborers. At the top of each wheat stock is a sketch of an Indochinese worker, literally surrounded by wheat. Rice flour is shown to be part of the French harvest, and its incorporation into bread helps return France to normalcy through whiteness. Indochina itself, represented by laborers working the harvest, is shown as more French than foreign. Rice flour seemed to its proponents to have a major advantage over other substitutes, especially rye, because it produced white bread. A 1928 magazine article promoting rice flour put it very simply, “The French want white bread: rice leaves white bread white.” Expanding on this point, the article contrasted “white rice and black rye,” pointing out that the Germans ate rye bread, “but the French do not like it; it is black and heavy.”39 Why should the French import German rye and have to eat heavy dark bread like the Germans when they could use “French” rice to make good white bread less expensive? Similar to the anti-American postcard, this article draws on anti-German sentiment to define dark bread as foreign and white bread (including rice) as French. In this case, the consumption of colonial foods and the incorporation of the distant parts of Greater France into the very substance of the nation’s most significant food serves to make the French diet whiter and in this sense, more French. In Paris and other French cities, affordable access to white bread was especially important. Yes, dark bread was associated with wartime austerity and the Germans, but it was also associated with peasants and laborers. In one of the clearest examples of “socially differentiated nutrition,” dark breads were seen as suited for those who perform hard labor and therefore associated with laborers and peasants. Since the Old Regime, even middling Parisians favored white bread as a sign of distinction from the laboring classes. Steven Kaplan has called the shift from dark bread to white wheat bread one of the “decisive moments in the apprenticeship of urban life” in France. The choice of wheat bread by Parisians “who were ‘objectively’ too poor for wheat,” shows how important white wheat bread was in marking the distinction between Parisian and provincial.40 By contrasting rice, which makes white wheat bread less expensive, with the lowly rye, the pro-rice article made rice flour a way to access one of the key symbols of urban French life. The weakness in the argument, and perhaps one of the key factors in the failure of

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pain du riz, was that bread was so important to national, racial, and class identity, and the issue of fraudulent bread therefore so heated, that the French could not be convinced that pain du riz was real white bread. The price of bread remained high in the middle of the 1920s, so despite resistance from French millers and bakers, and perhaps in part due to the promotional efforts of the Indochinese lobby, pain de riz became legal again with the decree of April 27, 1926, which permitted the use of up to 8 percent rice flour in bread. Yet, the decree remained inoperative due to opposition from the Ministry of Agriculture, which rejected any competition for French wheat. The price of bread continued to rise, and the government issued a new decree making the use of 10 percent substitute flours in bread compulsory as of June 20, 1926. This 10 percent could consist of rye, rice, barley, or manioc flour, or a mixture thereof.41 The legislative success of April 1926, however, was very brief. In August 1926, the Office des céréales panifiables was created to determine future regulations on bread content. Most of the thirty seats in the office represented the flour trade.42 Meanwhile, the Parisian Bakers’ Federation asked the Académie de médecine to again study the question of pain de riz, and this time they determined that “rice, corn, and manioc were not useful for bread making [non panifiable].” The Office des céréales panifiables accepted this opinion, again prohibiting the sale of pain de riz. This happened despite protests from the colonial lobby that this shift in the opinion of the Académie de médecine—fully reversing their conclusion of 1915—showed a clear bias toward metropolitan business interests over colonial concerns.43 The ultimate failure to legally open the French market to pain de riz demonstrates the dramatic effect of failing to persuade metropolitan interest groups to support this colonial product. Between July 15, 1922, and September 10, 1927, there were “thirteen décrets, often contradictory, that authorized, restricted, expanded, and prohibited the use of substitutes” for wheat flour in French bread. There were four separate decrees in five months in 1926.44 With all of this uncertainty, millers and bakers could not adjust their practices to effectively use substitutes; Indochinese producers and metropolitan refiners had no consistent metropolitan market for rice flour; and there was no sustained effort to inform French consumers about pain de riz. As French wheat harvests increased at the end of the 1920s, and global wheat prices plummeted in the 1930s, the supporters of Indochinese rice finally gave up on the idea of using rice flour in French bread. The Indochinese lobby’s message, that the whiteness of French bread could be restored through the incorporation of Indochinese rice flour, was ultimately not enough to overcome the resistance

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of bakers and wheat producers, especially as wheat harvests in France began to approach prewar output. The Indochina lobby did not, however, give up on the notion of increasing French rice consumption. They shifted their efforts toward white rice as a side dish and ingredient, focusing on promoting rice directly to the French consumer, and especially on teaching French housewives and cooks how to prepare it. In 1928, a couple of promotional works promoting rice-eating did, as a secondary issue, bring up the benefits of rice flour, but, in general, the issue faded in favor of promoting rice itself as a food. When seeking support for government propaganda for Indochinese rice in 1928, the UCF assured the National Confederation of Agricultural Associations that the question of using rice flour in bread would be kept out of future propaganda efforts.45 The failed effort to introduce pain de riz into the French diet reveals some of the problems that would continue to plague the Indochina lobby as they promoted table rice in the 1930s. Pain de riz seemed to the colonial lobby a perfectly logical solution that benefited both Indochina and the metropole. This bread was approved by scientists as just as healthy and tasty as 100 percent wheat bread, and it made sense to them to sell Indochina’s surplus rice in a form that would help ease France’s wheat shortage. But the introduction of new foods is more complex than the straightforward arguments of nutritionists and imperialists. Metropolitan grain producers were displeased to add any competition, even in a time of scarcity. Bakers did not want to complicate the baking process by adding rice flour. Consumers, and therefore the legislators who represented them, were wary of adding a foreign substance to the main staple of their diet, even if it did “keep white bread white.” The inability to accept the incorporation of Indochinese rice flour into bread reflected a broader resistance to the notion of including colonized people and cultures within the identity of the French nation. Further cultural barriers arose when the Indochinese lobby shifted to promoting rice as a food and ingredient instead of focusing on rice flour.

Cultural barriers to French rice consumption That the Indochinese lobby saw in the decline in French wheat production an opportunity to sell rice to France is not surprising. But during the war, this effort was focused almost entirely on the use of rice flour in bread, not on selling table rice to the French. The Indochinese lobby did not work to promote table rice to French consumers until after pain de riz faced its final legislative failure in the late 1920s. Why the initial focus on rice flour instead of rice itself? The centrality

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of bread to the French diet was certainly part of the reason, as was the fact that rice was not well known and was much maligned in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. While promoting table rice directly to French consumers, promoters of Indochinese rice faced a variety of new challenges. Introducing a new food product, especially a staple food associated with a colonized racial other, raised a variety of cultural issues. As Peter Coclanis has pointed out, “That we speak of breadwinners rather than ricewinners and pray for our daily bread rather than our daily rice tells us something about the hold of bread—primarily wheat bread—on the Western world.”46 This dominance of bread was even more the case in France, where culinary culture and the culture of everyday life were in many ways defined by bread. Pierre Mayol eloquently described the centrality of wine and bread to French cuisine thus: Let us suppose that Madame Marie had planned to cook a rabbit for a nice meal and that at the moment of buying it the poultry shop no longer had any available. She could fall back on a chicken or any other meat without a problem. She could substitute. This is impossible for both bread and wine: neither is replaceable by anything that might take its place. They are the concrete a prioris of every gastronomic practice, its unchangeable necessity: this is not up for debate; if they disappear, nothing has flavor anymore, everything falls apart.47

Because bread was so central to French identity, any food that was suggested as a bread substitute, or as a wheat substitute in bread, was seen as suspect. Rice was frequently described as the “bread” of colonized peoples seen as racial others.48 Since the French often saw diet, and especially staple foods like rice and bread, as a factor separating the races, introducing rice to the French diet was considered risky. The role of bread-eating in separating the French from colonized others was especially evident in the colonies. Dietary guides for French colonials in Africa encouraged daily bread-eating to fulfill “a pressing need created by education and training from childhood.”49 By the late nineteenth century, French and American wheat were regularly imported into Indochina to supply the bakeries producing French bread for European settlers. Those Frenchmen and women who traveled far from the bakeries of the main cities usually went to great lengths to bring a large supply of bread with them to avoid eating rice.50 Promoters of Indochinese rice in France consistently confronted the same problem: The French had a negative view of rice. First of all, rice was relatively unfamiliar to most French diners. By the First World War, there was still only very little rice grown in France. At the start of the twentieth century, rice was not well known to the French and had only a very limited presence in French cuisine.

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It had been used in desserts in Europe since the Middle Ages though it was somewhat rare and expensive before the early modern era. By the First World War, rice was a common ingredient in French desserts but was still not often used in savory dishes.51 An article in La presse médicale in 1926 encouraging more rice consumption lamented that rice was not a significant part of French cuisine. The article pointed out that Parisians had eaten rice salad with vinaigrette during the 1870 siege of Paris, but this practice did not continue.52 Rice did have a more significant place in Provençal cooking, where the pilau—a rice dish that involves sautéing long-grain rice before baking it with meat and seafood in a shallow dish—was present in Provençal cuisine from the seventeenth century.53 The dish, however, was not well known outside of Provence. Risotto, and to a lesser extent paella, were known in France, but they were still seen as foreign dishes and not French. In 1919 in a book on cooking under wartime restrictions, well-known home economics teacher and cookbook author Augusta Moll-Weiss recommended that cooks could replace the meat in a meal by adding butter and cheese to rice to make a risotto.54 Another element of the negative perception of rice in interwar France was that it was a dietary staple of nonwhite peoples, and therefore its appropriateness for European diners was suspect. The “rice eaters”—as Dr. Gauducheau of the Société d’acclimatation called the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indians in 1934— were alleged to be weak and nonchalant.55 One aspect of the aversion to rice was the common belief in the 1910s and 1920s that beriberi was caused by riceeating. Hemmerdinger, in one of his many lectures promoting rice consumption, said that rice had unfairly acquired a bad reputation because the “eaters of rice” get beriberi. He then went on to explain that beriberi came from a vitamin deficiency and assured his audience that the French had nothing to worry about even with processed white rice, as rice would never make up the majority of their diets.56 The names of recipes for rice demonstrate the association of rice with colonial cultures. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, nearly all recipes for basic rice preparation methods were referred to as either “riz à la créole,” or “riz à l’indienne.” These were not recipes for complex dishes, but simply instructions for cooking rice. These names were consistent throughout the cooking magazines Le Cordon bleu and Le Pot-au-feu and the course offerings of the Cordon Bleu cooking school. Both names were at times used to describe boiling the rice in plenty of water, then rinsing it in cold water, wrapping it in a towel, and baking it in a shallow dish in a low oven, topped with butter until it was dry.57 This was the definition embraced by the Cordon Bleu’s 1931 rice cookbook.58 While

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this was consistently the basic recipe for riz à l’indienne, the definition of riz à la créole sometimes differed, often calling for simply boiling rice on the stove top until dry. This was the definition accepted by Larousse gastronomique in 2000, where the method of boiling the rice and then wrapping it in a towel and finishing it in the oven is still called “riz à l’indienne” or “riz à l’orientale.”59 Hemmerdinger repeated these names and also referred to properly cooked rice as “riz a l’annamite.”60 These names demonstrate that rice itself, especially plain rice served as a side dish, was understood as foreign and colonial. Another aspect of rice’s bad reputation in interwar France was its association with military rations, boarding houses, and school lunches.61 The National Association of French Colonialists began their 1933 rice cookbook with an apologetic tone, recognizing that rice “evokes, within most of you, the idea of some revolting gelatinous dishful . . . . The very sight of the word ‘rice’ on a menu turns your stomach.”62 In their treatise on nutrition in the army on the eve of the First World War, Perrier and Guilhaumon lamented that rice had been neglected by the army and was not served often enough “for the good reason that the men do not eat it. The soldier does not like rice on the grounds that it is bad.” Army cooks did not know how to cook rice well, they argued, and often cooked it so long that they “reduced it to a state of glue” that was “absolutely repulsive.”63 Promoters of rice often claimed that the French did not like rice because they did not know how to prepare it well. In his 1902 medical treatise on the nutritional value of rice, a medical student from Madagascar lamented: In France, in the army as in civilian life, if we find amongst the masses a true hostility against this essentially refreshing food, if in the army we see officers themselves turn a blind eye when the men, because of their preconceptions, reject the rice when they are given a ration, it is because, in the army like in families, we have never known how to cook rice.64

Most promoters of colonial agriculture agreed that the problem lay with French cooks, not with rice itself, arguing that rice “deserves to have a larger place in French consumption, but the difficulty of cooking it too often transforms rice into a gluey mass.”65 In 1926, Achard was still hopeful that the French could embrace rice if “our housewives [ménageres]” learned to cook rice “à l’italienne ou à l’orientale” and to not make a gluey paste.66 Indochinese rice also suffered from its reputation for low quality. The homecooking magazines Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu consistently instructed their readers to purchase Carolina rice or Patna rice from India and warned them against rice of “inferior quality” from Saigon. Even after Le Cordon bleu

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started heavily promoting Indochinese rice in the 1930s, many of its recipes continued to instruct cooks to use rice from other sources.67 A report from the Syndicat du commerce de riz et dérivés de Marseille in the 1930s lamented that consumers in grocery stores tended to ask for “beau riz” and the grocer would sell them his most expensive American rice, especially “Blue Rose,” which, much to the Syndicate’s dismay, came to France from the United States already fully processed.68 The low opinion of Indochinese rice, however, was based on more than marketing and brand awareness. Different types of rice do cook differently and should be used in different types of preparations. Rice production and processing in Indochina were less mechanized than in other rice-producing regions, and the quality of the rice, measured by the percentage of full grains (as opposed to grain pieces and other parts of the plant), was indeed inferior to most of the other varieties available in France. The Comité technique d’alimenation rated Riz Saigon #1—the top quality rice coming out of Indochina—as “inferior.” It was white (considered a good quality), but consisted of up to 25 percent rice fragments known as “brisures de riz” or “broken rice.”69 In order to cook properly, this rice had to be reprocessed when it arrived in France to separate the full grains from the broken pieces. In a series of letters in 1931 and 1932, the Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés de Marseille and the UCF wrote to the Minister of War asking that the army stop serving Riz Saigon #1 in the underprocessed state in which it arrived in France. When the rice arrives, the Syndicate explained, it contains up to 25 percent broken rice, which causes it to cook poorly and unevenly, creating the infamous “gluey rice.” The rice was also contaminated with bugs, larvae, and fungus in transit from Indochina, which gave it a bad flavor. The Syndicate called it “non-edible” in one letter and in another pointed out that “everyone knows that Riz Saigon n°1, 25 percent broken, purchased by the army, is the same as that which is purchased by the commercial trade for the feeding of livestock.” Because of this, they argued, the soldier returns home thinking that rice is disgusting. In order to prevent this, and to feed the soldiers a food that is good enough that they will actually eat it, the army should purchase only Saigon rice that has been whitened and reprocessed in France and repackaged in new sacks. Even with this upgrade, they argued, rice was still inexpensive, offering a high calorie-to-price ratio.70 Although the Indochinese rice that was sold as table rice in France was usually reprocessed and whitened, the fact that Riz Saigon, as it arrived in France, was of such low quality, and that this low quality rice was fed to soldiers (and likely served in other institutions), caused serious damage to the reputation of Indochinese rice in France.

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Promoting table rice Efforts by the UCF to directly promote table rice to French consumers began in the late 1920s and intensified during and after the 1931 International Colonial Exposition (ECI). The Indochina lobby was not unified in its vision of this promotion, with some groups more concerned with the low quality of Indochinese rice while others focused on educating the French consumer. This disagreement hampered the attempt to organize a government-backed national pro-rice campaign. While efforts to promote rice-flour bread centered on government agencies, officials, and legislators, the promotion of table rice in the 1920s and 1930s was targeted directly at the French consumers, especially housewives and cooks. While the Indochina lobby focused its promotional efforts almost exclusively on rice flour until the late 1920s, the scientists of the SSHA and the Société d’acclimatation began promoting table rice in 1917 and 1919, respectively. At the Société d’acclimatation, the emphasis was on promoting rice to the educated elite who were to serve as a sort of culinary avant-garde. At the SSHA, Hemmerdinger taught courses on how to cook rice directly to middle-class housewives.71 His promotion of rice fit the SSHA’s mission of promoting “rational eating” and his own emphasis on feeding families well on a tight food budget. In the SSHA’s concept of rational eating, the body functioned as a machine fueled by the nutritional components in food, which went either toward growing the living matter of the body or toward fueling the body. The goal of rational eating was to serve the body well by choosing foods that are useful to the body and agreeable to the stomach.72 The primary nutritional elements of a rational diet were calories and nitrogenous substances (including proteins). The focus on nitrogen as the source of human and animal nutrition dates back to nineteenth-century French nutritional science, especially the work of Jean Baptiste Boussingault. Hemmerdinger’s dietary recommendations focused on “consuming just enough but not too much” nitrogenous foods from the most cost-effective plant and animal sources.73 Hemmerdinger ranked foods in the following categories, calling on his readers to choose the most nourishing foods at the best available prices: Very nourishing: animal fats, sugar, chocolate, legumes, cheese, rice, and pasta Nourishing: bread, lean meats, fromage blanc, onions, chestnuts, and dried fruits Slightly nourishing: poultry, fatty fish, milk, and potatoes Very slightly nourishing: wine, beer, lean fish, vegetables, and fresh fruits.74

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Housewives could save money and feed their family rationally by choosing foods that were both nourishing and affordable. The biggest nutritional and economic mistakes Hemmerdinger found in French cooking were the expenditures on meat and wine. His top recommendations for the ideal mix of nutrition and frugality were rice, pasta, and legumes. Even though rice was, in 1924, four times as expensive as it had been before the war, he argued that it still came at a good price.75 Hemmerdinger frequently included rice in his dietary recommendations for French families.76 The next big supporter of rice cooking in France was also not from the Indochina lobby, but was a famous chef. In 1927, Auguste Escoffier published Le riz, one of the most significant works to promote rice-eating to the French.77 By 1927 Escoffier was considered France’s premier chef and had been awarded the Legion of Honor. Escoffier was an haute cuisine chef, and his famous Le guide culinaire (1903)—the defining book of French haute cuisine for the twentieth century—came out in its fourth edition in 1921. In the late 1920s, Escoffier published two small books targeted at helping home cooks eat well but inexpensively. Both Le riz: L’aliment le meilleur, le plus nutritif and La vie bon marché: La morue, which came out two years later, provided many recipes using one inexpensive ingredient.78 Escoffier’s work was not direct colonial propaganda and does not seem to have been patronized by any colonial organizations. I have not found any evidence that Escoffier was inspired or sponsored by the Indochinese rice lobby. It is more likely that he was influenced by groups like the SSHA and saw rice as a modern, hygienic, and inexpensive food. Le riz was, however, certainly useful to the cause of promoting Indochinese rice in France. Le riz opened with an argument for the benefits of eating more rice, which set forth many of the themes that would become staples of table rice promotion for the next decade. The opening lines read: Rice, the best, most nutritious and undoubtedly the most widespread food on the surface of the globe. In making rice the base of your diet, you improve your health and are careful with your budget.79

Escoffier did not make many political statements about Indochinese rice imports, and did not call on his readers to choose Indochinese rice over other varieties. He did, however, acknowledge “our rice fields of Indochina, that France, today more than ever, has a great interest in developing by all possible means.” Although he did not specifically advise his readers to use Indochinese rice, he did hope that by offering these rice recipes, he could “be of some usefulness.”80 Promoters of

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Indochinese rice did think Escoffier’s work was useful, sometimes referring to it as evidence that rice was not only for the working classes, but could also be a luxury food for gourmets.81 Even though Escoffier targeted this book at those looking for less expensive food, the endorsement of the “king of chefs and chef of kings” was used to argue that rice should not be seen as low class. At least two texts promoting rice were published or sponsored by colonial groups in 1928, each repeating many of Escoffier’s arguments while also focusing on the national importance of choosing Indochinese rice. Pierre Cordemoy’s short pamphlet, L’alimentation nationale et les produits coloniaux: Le riz (The national diet and colonial products: Rice), was published in 1928 by the Agence économique de l’Indochine. In February of that year, L’Animateur des temps nouveau printed a special issue titled “Consommons le riz, c’est sagesse nationale” (Consume rice, it’s wise for the nation). L’Animateur was a weekly magazine whose stated goal was promoting “rational” solutions for social problems. This “special issue” was sponsored by the UCF, though this sponsorship is never mentioned in the magazine itself.82 Later in the year, the UCF highlighted the special edition of L’Animateur as its most successful promotional effort on behalf of rice, claiming that a number of newspapers in Paris and the provinces had taken extracts from it or written articles inspired by it.83 So, in these two works we have examples of both direct government propaganda and a magazine whose contents were sponsored by the UCF, which represented private companies. The L’Animateur issue and Cordemoy’s pamphlet repeated some key arguments from Escoffier. All three works emphasized rice as a way for housewives to make their food budget go further. The authors also celebrated rice’s nutritive and energy value compared to other foods and praised rice-eating as healthy and hygienic. All three works included charts or lists celebrating rice’s “nutritional power” as higher than potatoes, bread, and various fruits and vegetables.84 Escoffier ended his recipe book with a short piece titled “Le riz et la faculté de médecine,” which celebrated rice as easily digestible and helpful in curing the “relentless constipation suffered by so many people of our day.”85 Both of the promotional works made similar arguments, emphasizing that rice was easily digestible and that, contrary to popular myth, rice helped relieve constipation and did not cause beriberi. These articles also reveal the stigma of incorporation of this colonial product. The questions here revolved around the issues of ingestion and indigestion—whether the French body could properly consume and incorporate rice. They cited Professor Gley, vice president of the Académie de médecine, and Professor Hemmerdinger of the SSHA, highlighting

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the importance of trusting the science of nutrition over cultural myths.86 Here again, the discourse around the role of colonial products within the French diet was not reserved to “colonial scientists” but included the voices of metropolitan doctors and nutritionists. Accepting colonial ingredients into one’s home cooking was presented as a way to modernize the family’s diet and follow science over tradition. Where these two promotional works differed significantly from Escoffier’s work was in their emphasis on the national importance of purchasing Indochinese rice. Cordemoy’s pamphlet opened with the following set of directives: Français, consume agricultural products from the colonies. Français, prefer our colonial products to foreign ones. Learn to prepare them well and present them well. For Greater France: This will be a good act. For your stomach and your wallet: This will be a good deal. Thanks to colonial products our food will improve and our national fortune will increase.87

The pro-colonial and nationalist arguments were intertwined with arguments about the personal advantages of eating rice. By eating rice one could help the colonies, serve Greater France, improve one’s diet, and save money. Buying rice, these works argued, was not really about helping the colonies, but about aiding all of Greater France, because supporting colonial products meant improving the lives of French people and the “national fortune.” L’Animateur put forth this same message just as clearly: “A politique du riz would be useful not only to our colonies, but also for the Nation, for her purse, her stomach, and her health.”88 In a section speaking directly to grocers, Cordemoy emphasized the role they could play by selling Indochinese rice instead of foreign rice, arguing that “your patriotism and your interest engage you to distribute [diffuser] French rice.”89 Referring to Indochinese rice as “riz français” emphasized the point made increasingly by the colonial lobby in the interwar period, that these colonial food products were indeed French foods, and were therefore preferable to foreign imports. While much of the rhetoric about why the French should eat rice dealt with grand issues of national commitment to the colonies and the economic benefits to the country, the impetus to implement these changes fell mostly to the metropolitan housewife. She was presented as the essential agent of change, and as the one to blame for the continued weakness of Indochinese rice in the marketplace. Cordemoy’s pamphlet and L’Animateur, not themselves targeted

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primarily at women, blamed housewives and cooks for the French distaste of rice. L’Animateur told the story of a little girl who, when asked what rice was, said that it was the little grains that are sometimes in soup and that she sometimes ate it with meat but it was “gluey.” The story pointed out that this girl’s mother must have been either ignorant or negligent, because properly cooked rice is never gluey.90 Housewives became the target of advertising for rice when efforts to coordinate a national rice propaganda campaign began taking shape in 1928. Arguments about colonial and national economic interests remained, but the focus shifted to advertising directly to housewives, encouraging them to try Indochinese rice and teaching them how to prepare it. In a letter on April 14, 1928, the Minister of Colonies, Léon Perrier, asked the UCF to look into the idea of a national propaganda campaign to increase rice consumption. He was inspired by the successful “day of rice” in Italy.91 The UCF enthusiastically consulted a dozen associations and the agences économiques of Indochina and Madagascar before sending their plan to the Minister of Colonies.92 The ambitious plan called for propaganda efforts on many fronts including instruction for school and army cooks, propaganda tracts, free rice recipes, letters sent directly to the press from experts, and a “Day of Rice” with restaurants serving rice, rice cooking lessons, and free rice samples. The UCF envisioned this ambitious multi-pronged propaganda continuing nonstop until it climaxed at the Colonial Exposition in 1931, where they hoped to host a “restaurant du riz.”93 Coordinating all these efforts would be a complex and expensive job, so the UCF plan also called for an executive committee featuring all the organizations that wanted to participate.94 While this discussion was ongoing, A. Darles, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Saigon, arrived in Marseille in the end of May 1928 and toured France for three months in what he called a “crusade for rice.” He hoped to increase French rice consumption by demonstrating “to the great masses that this is our rice, and how one prepares it.”95 He emphasized the high cost of bread, suggesting rice dishes (though not rice flour) as a replacement. His trip received some positive press coverage in Echo de Paris along with coverage in the Saigon newspapers and colonial papers.96 While in France he was engaged in the conversation to try to organize a national promotional campaign and hoped to garner enthusiasm for the effort. The enthusiasm for a national propaganda campaign was not universal. Interest at the Colonial Ministry cooled significantly. They responded to the UCF’s proposal with mostly caution and concern, warning, “we must not ignore the current tastes of metropolitan consumers.” They were also concerned that

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metropolitan producers of other goods “could constitute serious obstacles and the propaganda campaign can not be assured to succeed.” Since rice was still unknown, they cautioned, a national propaganda campaign that is seen as a failure could “condemn it indefinitely.”97 Some of the inspiration for trying to start a national propaganda campaign came from the work of the Empire Marketing Board in Great Britain. In 1929, the UCF and the Compagnie franco indo-chinoise exchanged letters about the Empire Marketing Board’s campaigns for Indian rice, with enclosed examples. These ads focused on rice as an “imperial dish” and on Indian rice as being of high quality.98 No such centralized propaganda effort of the strength of the Empire Marketing Board existed in France. Efforts to improve rice consumption in France did lead to the creation of the Office indochinois du riz on April 10, 1930.99 Although its creation was partly spurred by the discourse over propaganda, the Office indochinois du riz had broader aims. It was intended to “ameliorate the cultivation, processing, and commerce of rice” through the coordination of “all the interested businesses.”100 Other single-product research institutes followed in the 1940s: the French Rubber Institute, the Institute of Colonial Fruits and Citrus, and the Institute of Research on Palm Oil and Oilseeds.101 The broad mission of the Office indochinois du riz led to conflict over how much of the office’s focus and resources would go to improving rice, and how much would go to propaganda. The Indochinese lobby was divided over whether to blame the low quality of Indochinese rice or the ignorance of French consumers for the low levels of French rice consumption. Governor General Pasquier determined that it would be preferable to wait until Indochinese rice was “ameliorated by the activity of the Office du riz” before undertaking any propaganda campaigns. In 1930, the Syndicat des exportateurs français de riz de Saïgon (Syndicate of French rice exporters of Saigon) agreed, declining to participate in propaganda efforts coordinated by the UCF, arguing that it was most important to first improve the quality of Indochinese rice.102 The UCF strongly disagreed with this caution, accepting that improving rice quality would help its sales in the metropole, but arguing that the colony already “exports quality rice, much appreciated for the table, and which is insufficiently known by the consumer.” The problem, from their point of view, was more with the consumer than with the product. The French did not appreciate rice because they did not know how to prepare it. The answer, the UCF argued, was advertisements that focused on the “culinary education” of the consumer.103 Faced with this hesitation from the Office du riz and Minister of Colonies, the UCF moved forward organizing its own propaganda efforts. A 1928 plan called

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for many of the same actions as the national plan the UCF had suggested to the Colonial Minister and included ads in Parisian and provincial cinemas, presentations at expositions and fairs, posters, stamps, informational tracts, and an increased presence in provincial newspapers and the Parisian dailies. The committee cited the success of the L’Animateur issue at “popularizing the value of rice.”104 The propaganda was to highlight rice as healthy and would be focused on teaching housewives how to prepare it. The suggested budgets included articles signed by medical professionals to appear in reputable publications, magazine and newspaper ads in women’s publications and journals for school administrators, courses at domestic schools (écoles ménagères), ads directed at housewives on the back of gas bills, matchbooks with ads on the exterior and recipes on the interior, and an advertisement to be hung in the Cordon Bleu classroom for six months.105 The records in the archives of the UCF do not clearly indicate if and to what extent this elaborate promotional plan was followed. It is clear, however, that from this point forward the UCF refocused its rice promotion on housewives, placing their hopes on changing French women’s purchasing habits and cooking practices. By focusing on housewives and cooking instruction, the colonial lobby made the discussion about how the metropolitan French could and should adjust to incorporate colonial products. This was a challenging conversation, as home-cooking practices and culinary traditions are not easily altered. The key event of this new promotional strategy was the 1931 ECI. Many of the themes from the late 1920s were carried into the rice promotion at the ECI where they were combined with an increased emphasis on cooking instruction as the primary vehicle to increase French rice consumption. The Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés (Trade syndicate of rice and rice products) of Marseille sent a thousand copies of a four-page pamphlet promoting rice to the UCF to distribute at the ECI. The Syndicate was convinced promotions that focused on cooking instruction would be the most effective. “It is because they do not know how to cook rice that the French do not eat it,” they told the UCF.106 The pamphlet opened by celebrating the low price and the nutritional value of Indochinese rice. The image on the next page showed in dramatic fashion the advantages of eating this nutrient-dense food (see Image 1). The sketch features side-by-side images of a French family “who does not know how to cook rice and misunderstands this food, consuming one kilogram per year per person,” and a “Hindu family . . . who eats rice, consuming 90 kilograms per year per person.” The French family is shorter and weaker looking, and has only two children. The Hindu family is taller and the men are dramatically more muscular. Most

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significantly, the Hindu family is shown as having seven children, five of them sons.107 The significance of this contrast would not have been lost on an interwar French audience. The small French population, in contrast to the larger German one, was a constant concern, and pronatalists argued that the French needed to have larger families. The manpower provided by the colonies to the war effort was considered their greatest contribution to the French nation. This image showed another way the colonies could increase French manpower: providing the food to grow larger and stronger families. In this sense, the acceptance of colonial foods could help France incorporate the health and strength that resulted from the colonial project. Yet, it is significant that the family used to portray the strength of rice eaters was not Indochinese but “Hindu,” a term often used by the French to describe all people from the Indian sub-continent. Although often portrayed, as they were at the Colonial Exposition, as industrious laborers, the Indochinese were also stereotyped as passive, compliant, and amenable to colonial rule.108 To portray strength, therefore, another group of rice eaters was needed. While the argument about rice’s value was clear and memorable, the cooking instruction that was the stated point of the pamphlet was complex and opaque. The authors instructed French cooks in a multi-step process for making “perfect” rice. Before even getting to the page with cooking instructions, a section on “essential observations” for cooking rice included paragraphs of small print recommendations. While some were simple (do not ever soak your rice in cold

Image 1  This sketch contrasting French and Indian families argued that rice-eating could help make French families—and therefore the French nation—larger and stronger. “Famille française/Famille hindoue,” Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés du Marseille, “Notice sur le riz, sa cuisson & sa valeur alimentaire” (Archives nationales d’outre-mer).

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water), others made rice preparation seem complex and intimidating. Cooking times differ depending on the rice, the pamphlet warned, so do not buy rice separately for each recipe, but store “a small supply,” so that you can become familiar with the cooking time for your rice. The pamphlet also warned that it was important to measure your ingredients precisely, so you might want to buy a small scale for your kitchen. The pamphlet’s “method to follow exactly for the cooking of rice” listed a seven-step process. The elaborate recipe called for weighing, boiling, straining, rinsing, simmering, and steaming the rice, all before serving it immediately after it reached perfection. The authors claimed this recipe to be the “most practical, the easiest to execute, and the most sure to give the right result.”109 It is hard to imagine that this technique appealed to many home cooks who encountered it, with its many warnings to be sure to do everything precisely. The Governor General of Indochina used interactive exhibits at the ECI to appeal to home cooks. The Indochina section of the 1931 Colonial Exposition was an opportunity to introduce millions of visitors to Indochinese rice. The reconstruction of the Temple of Angkor Wat, the highlight of the Indochinese section, was the most famous and celebrated structure at the exposition and ensured that most visitors toured the Indochinese section. The section featured a small functioning modern rice refinery positioned behind the Cochinchina pavilion. This small factory showed the hulling of rice, and over 40,000 packets of the rice were sold to visitors at a very low price.110 To help educate French women on how to prepare rice, the Cochinchina pavilion also featured a stand where the staff of the Cordon Bleu cooking school taught free cooking classes. As described in Le Cordon bleu, The Cordon Bleu cooking schools, wanting to make their contribution to the patriotic work that is to put to good use (mettre en valeur) and to appreciate all of the alimentary resources of our colonial empire, have organized at the very heart of the Exposition, in the pavilion of Cochinchina, a stand in which cooking and pastry courses are held daily using exclusively products that come from our great and prosperous colonies, and mainly rice which we identify multiple uses for in free public demonstrations.111

The Cordon Bleu cooking stand at the exposition seems to have been sponsored by the Governor General of Indochina, who in September asked the Cordon Bleu to continue the courses.112 The courses at the exposition were just the beginning of the efforts of the Cordon Bleu, through both its courses and cooking magazine, to promote

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Indochinese rice. In August of 1931, the magazine again told readers about their efforts at the Colonial Exposition to “perform practical demonstrations to teach all the ways to accommodate rice, in the goal of popularizing its consumption.” The article included some recipes for rice-based desserts, “to continue that propaganda mission.”113 The article also told readers to keep an eye out for their forthcoming L’Art d’accommoder le riz, a cookbook of rice recipes that was published at the end of 1931. Yet, even in this short article that highlighted the role of the Cordon Bleu in promoting Indochinese rice, two of the four recipes called for Carolina rice, and the other two did not specify a type. Throughout the 1930s, the Cordon Bleu promoted Indochinese rice with a cookbook, distribution of rice samples, and advertisements in the magazine featuring recipes. By 1935, some rice recipes featured in the Cordon Bleu called specifically for “Indochinese rice.” Occasionally, the Cordon Bleu cooking school even held courses on “Indochinese rice and its diverse preparations.”114 From 1935 to 1938, Le Cordon bleu ran half-page advertisements titled “Le riz d’Indochine.”115 These sections contained three or four short recipes featuring rice. Some of the recipes were clearly geared to readers who already had a basic knowledge of how to cook rice, calling, for example, for “rice cooked as pilaf,” without explaining this process.116 While some recipes integrated rice into the dish, others were simply meant to be served alongside rice. For example, a recipe for œufs à la Camargo detailed the process for topping poached artichoke hearts with mushrooms, béchamel, and a poached egg, but then simply instructed the cook to serve this “accompanied by a cheese risotto.”117 The name of this dish is significant, as it takes Indochinese rice and integrates it into a dish named for France’s only rice-producing region. The use of small cartoons of Indochinese men in these ads served to highlight the use of Indochinese rice over other varieties. Although I have found no documentary evidence that the UCF or another rice-promoting organization sponsored the Cordon Bleu’s interest in rice outside of their presence at the ECI, the rather sudden appearance of calls for using “Indochinese rice” suggests promotional sponsorship, and it certainly fits the promotional plan laid out by the UCF in 1928. The cartoon figure of the Indochinese man is similar to ones that appeared in many rice promotions throughout the 1930s, including newspaper ads sponsored by the General Government of Indochina.118 This image of the “Annamese” man became a “distinctive identifier” of Indochinese rice. In print ads, he often spoke in the first person, making claims such as “I’m less expensive.”119 The French Colonial Institute chose rice for the theme of its 1932 Colonial Week, which included a National Day of Rice. The Colonial Ministry created its first

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propaganda committee in 1931 to promote rice. It printed a million copies of a board game in which players followed the journey of rice from Indochina to France where rice claimed, “Being from the colonies, I arrive in France as I would arrive home.” The game was distributed widely, with half a million copies sent to elementary schools in 350 French towns.120 Some of the print ads carried on the themes of colonial solidarity and Greater France. One such ad showed a French flag stretching around the globe from France to Indochina and the “Annamese” man passing a box of rice back to France. The text claimed that “the riches of the French empire suffice to fulfill all the needs of the metropole.”121 In the 1930s efforts by the UCF, the General Government, the French Colonial Institute, and the Colonial Ministry combined to make the publicity campaign for Indochinese rice “one of the largest and longest lasting” for a colonial product in France.122 In this period, the promotion of rice centered on teaching the French, and especially housewives, how to prepare it, while highlighting its advantages for personal health and home economics as well as the benefits to the national economy of purchasing a colonial product. In this narrative, Indochina could be a great benefit to France, but only if the French were willing to change their cuisine and cooking techniques in order to incorporate Indochina’s bounty. Meanwhile, at the legislative level, Indochinese rice faced opposition from another group—metropolitan wheat producers. As the Great Depression began to take hold in France, the Indochinese lobby again found themselves fighting not only a promotional battle but a legislative one as well.

Tariffs on “French rice” While working to promote rice directly to French consumers, the Indochina lobby also fought against efforts by metropolitan agricultural interests to limit the importation of Indochinese rice into France.123 French imports of Indochinese rice increased dramatically in the early 1930s, from around 223,000 metric tons in 1929 to 523,000 metric tons in 1933, mostly as a result of tariff wars with Asian buyers.124 This increase in rice imports came while French wheat producers were facing overproduction and plummeting prices. Metropolitan agricultural interests wanted protection against Indochinese rice, which, they argued, competed with wheat as a grain for feeding people and animals. The debate over taxing and limiting Indochinese rice took place within the context of an assimilationist tariff regime that had been in place for Indochina since 1887. The law of January 11, 1892, set up a tariff system for the French empire

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that separated the colonies into two categories: assimilated and unassimilated. The most economically significant colonies—including Algeria, Indochina, and Madagascar—were all assimilated colonies. High tariffs were placed on foreign goods entering assimilated colonies while products from these colonies could enter France duty free.125 The tariff regime worked to the benefit of metropolitan exporters, but often at the expense of developing economies in the colonies. Consumers in the colonies were encouraged to buy French goods as they entered the colonies duty free. Colonial goods from assimilated colonies could also enter France duty free, but geographical, economic, and cultural realities kept this trade regime from being particularly beneficial to most assimilated colonies. Colonial interest groups fought this tariff structure throughout the early twentieth century, seeking relief from these barriers to trade with neighboring foreign countries and colonies.126 In the interwar period, the campaign to reform the colonial tariff system centered on Indochina. A large amount of Indochina’s trade was with its Asian neighbors, who were the geographically logical trading partners and had a market for Indochina’s primary export product, rice. At the same time that they were trying to promote rice in France, the Indochina lobby tried to reform the tariff structure to allow them to build better trade relationships with Indochina’s Asian neighbors. A new customs law finally passed on April 13, 1928. Although the Indochinese lobby did not achieve its primary goal of freeing Indochina from tariff assimilation, it did win certain concessions. The new law required that the Conseils généraux of the colonies be consulted on all new tariff regulations, but, overall, the reforms of 1928 relevant to Indochina were minor.127 Since the Governor General of Indochina could not conduct his own tariff negotiations with Asian neighbors, Indochinese exports were especially vulnerable in the Asian market when trade barriers increased around the globe in the 1930s. These increasing trade barriers were part of the reason for increased rice exports to France, as exporters looked to France to replace some of their losses in the Asian market. At the same time, wheat prices in France were plummeting. The Wall Street crash of 1929 did not immediately impact France as dramatically as it did Britain and Germany, but the “crisis” dramatically affected France a few years later, especially after 1933. In the five years after 1931, about 1.1 million to 1.4 million jobs were cut.128 As French and global wheat production increased in the first half of the 1930s, the prices of French wheat plummeted. French farmers responded by calling for even more protection tariffs against foreign wheat. With more wheat on the market than the French public was consuming, wheat producers were

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encouraged to sell more of their wheat as animal feed. The law of April 14, 1933, set aside 20 million francs as loans to pay for the denaturing of wheat to make fodder, and the Minister of Agriculture encouraged farmers to feed their animals as much wheat as possible. This put wheat in direct competition with rice.129 While less than 20 percent of rice imported into France was table rice for human consumption, the vast majority of it was used to feed animals. Rice imports increased dramatically in the 1930s, from 2,196,658 quintals in 1930 to 5,344,536 quintals in 1933, according to the Association générale des producteurs de blé. At the same time, the price of rice decreased dramatically, from 175 francs per quintal of Saigon Rice #1 in March 1928, to 61 francs per quintal in 1933, and 48 francs per quintal in 1934.130 Imports of animal feed from the colonies doubled in volume between 1929 and 1935.131 So, as protectionist tariffs eliminated some competition from foreign grains, the amount of colonial grains in the French marketplace increased.132 Even though colonial rice imports made up less than 1 percent of French grain consumption, French wheat producers demanded protection from cheap Indochinese rice in the marketplace.133 Rice and other grains were only one part of an overall trend in the 1930s imperial economy. At the start of the Great Depression, overall French imports dropped while the share of French imports from the colonies grew from 12.6 percent in 1928 to 33.6 percent in 1936. The percentage of French exports to the colonies increased more modestly, from 24.5 to 33.1 percent.134 Much of this increased percentage of colonial imports was due to the decline in trade with foreign countries. Yet, in some areas, especially in foodstuffs such as rice, the actual amount of colonial imports did increase. French imports of colonial food increased by 65 percent in volume between 1929 and 1925. Between the mid-1920s and the second half of the 1930s, the share of French food provided by the colonies increased from 8 percent to 15 percent.135 The Colonial Ministry estimated that food items, including fodder, represented 85 percent of colonial exports to the metropole.136 The Report of the Economic Commission of the Imperial Conference cited food products as “the essential element” of the economic activity of the overseas territories and claimed that their “role in the local economies undoubtedly justifies a politics of support; but this must be infinitely nuanced for the considered products, where concurrences appear between the Mère-Patrie and certain of her possessions.”137 Organizations representing colonial interests and those representing metropolitan agriculture understood the increased imports of colonial foodstuffs in very different ways and framed conflicting narratives of the role of the colonies in sustaining Greater France in the postwar years. Many

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imperialists praised this increase in Franco-colonial trade as evidence of the success of Greater France. They highlighted the fact that these increased imports coincided with increased exports to the colonies at a time when most of the world market was closed to French goods. In a piece defending Indochinese rice in 1934, the Comité de l’Indochine praised increased rice imports as an example of the “principle of collaboration and mutual aid” between the colonies and the metropole. This trade “strengthens the ties between the members of Greater France; it deepens the commercial exchanges at the very moment when the crisis made them everywhere all the more precarious.”138 From the point of view of French wheat producers, however, increased rice imports at lower prices were an assault on the French grain market. French farmers also complained about the “extremely active” publicity efforts in favor of increasing human and animal rice consumption since 1931.139 While certain French manufacturers surely benefited from the imperial trade union, French agriculturalists resented having to compete with untaxed imports of colonial food. These farmers and their representatives saw Greater France as a burden to France’s depression-era economy, not its saving grace. The increase of Indochinese rice imports coupled with the oversupply of domestic wheat led metropolitan grain producers to seek legislative solutions to the “rice problem.” Between October 1933 and January 1934, the Indochina lobby—including the UCF, the Comité de l’Indochine, the Syndicat des exportateurs français de riz de Saigon, and the Minister of Colonies—fought against and successfully defeated three separate proposals to tax or place a quota on imports of Indochinese rice.140 This legislative battle caused the Indochina lobby to change their arguments about tax assimilation, defending the imperial customs union they had once lobbied so strongly against and celebrating it as the glue holding together “100 million French people of every race and color spread throughout the surface of the globe.”141 The defeat of proposals to limit and tax colonial rice imports in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies did not end the “rice battle.”142 In an article in La dépêche coloniale in June 1934, in the heat of debates around proposed rice tariffs and quotas, commentator Jean Leune predicted that the “Indochinese rice quota will bring a fatal blow to the Inter-colonial Conference” by demonstrating that the “metropole only intends to respect her agreements when they are entirely in her favor.”143 This proved to be an overly dramatic prediction, as the fatal blow was not thrown. In fact, the Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer (Imperial Conference) resulted in a short-term agreement to limit rice imports.

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The Imperial Conference ran from December 1934 to April 1935. Ordered by Minister of Colonies, Pierre Laval, and run primarily by the Colonial Institute, it brought together metropolitan and colonial business interests to develop a plan for the imperial economy in the face of the Great Depression. The UCF was heavily involved, but representatives of metropolitan French business dominated the proceedings. The Imperial Conference was “the climax of the campaign for the planned, rational economic organization of the imperial economy” that dominated colonial policy from 1935 to 1940.144 The concept of an empire where France sold high-priced manufactured goods to the colonies while buying inexpensive colonial raw materials and agricultural goods was not new, but the Great Depression spurred a new emphasis on coordinating and planning the imperial economy so that Greater France could be self-sufficient in the protectionist global economy of the 1930s. In his opening speech, Minister of Colonies Louis Rollin called for the conference to “develop and strengthen the ties of the economic order that bind us to our overseas Empire. Not just by spirit, but by a necessary adaptation, imperatively demanded by the facts, of the new economic order which seems to be established on the planet.” He went on to praise the “complementary goods”—those that were not produced in the metropole—necessary for both alimentation and industry that could come from the colonies.145 As M. D. Serruys summarized in his introduction to the work of the General Economic Commission, as global protectionist tariffs made the outside world “impenetrable” to French goods, France and the colonies “strengthened their ties.”146 The increase in colonial rice imports into France was one of the key issues debated at the conference. The use of both rice and wheat as animal feed made them competing products instead of complementary ones on the French market, the type of situation leaders of the conference hoped to alleviate by coordinating colonial production with the needs of the metropole. Wheat producers, rice producers, and stakeholder businesses came to a short-term agreement early in the conference. It called for granting a fifteen-franc premium to the government of Indochina for each quintal of decrease in the amount of rice exported to France in the first four months of 1935 compared to the first four months of 1934.147 The Chamber and the Senate took up this agreement swiftly, passing it into law on December 24, 1934. The agreement and legislative action were praised in the official report of the Imperial Conference: “The agreement reached between grain farmers and rice farmers for the provisional settlement of their mutual difficulties unquestionably constituted one of the most encouraging manifestations of this spirit of imperial solidarity so happily affirmed throughout

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the work of the Commission.”148 The subsidy, which was amended to extend for a longer period and to pay producers up front in February 1935, caused a drop in Indochinese rice exports to France and the colonies, down to 475,000 tons in 1935, or 27 percent of Indochina’s rice exports. These effects, however, were short-lived. “Indochina exported 1,166,000 tons or 65% of its rice exports to France in 1936, a record amount.”149 During and immediately following the First World War, selling rice to France was a demonstration of the colonial politics of mise en valeur, of the products of the colony put to good use to improve the diets of the metropolitan French. During the severe shortages of the 1920s, the Indochina lobby presented cheaper rice and rice flour for cheaper bread as positive contributions of Indochina to Greater France. Although efforts at convincing French consumers to embrace these foodstuffs in many ways failed, overall imports of rice (mostly for animal feed) and other colonial food products did increase during this period, which was seen by the Indochinese lobby as a great success. But the Great Depression forced a change in the narrative of rice to fit the new colonial politics, whose focus was no longer solely on increasing colonial production but on organizing that production to avoid any overlap with metropolitan agriculture. The discourse around rice shifted from rice as helping to feed the metropole to metropolitan farmers burdened by the presence of colonial rice on the market. Although the Indochinese lobby succeeded in fighting any legislation that would limit or tax colonial rice imports, they were not successful—in the face of grain overproduction—in maintaining the narrative that Indochinese rice was needed to feed France. From wheat farmers and bakers to chefs and housewives, the efforts to increase Indochinese rice exports to France from the First World War through the 1930s pulled a diverse group of French voices into the public debate about the benefits and burdens of the colonial project in Indochina. Attempts to incorporate rice flour into French bread were an utter failure, and efforts to incorporate table rice into French cuisine found relatively little short-term success. And yet, French exposure to rice certainly did increase, in part due the efforts of the Indochinese lobby to promote rice directly to housewives and cooks. Increased colonial food imports in the 1930s helped the metropolitan French eat better during the Great Depression, even as the low price of these agricultural goods intensified the effects of the depression in Indochina and spurred fierce debate about the costs and benefits of Greater France in the metropole. The resistance to rice flour, table rice, and rice used for fodder highlights the complexity of introducing colonial foodstuffs into French cuisine. Although new foods may

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seem a nutritionally and economically logical addition, national culinary codes form powerful boundaries against foreign additions. Despite these barriers, in interwar France, the increased exposure to rice contributed to the formation of a new “colonial cuisine.” The following chapter examines the development of “colonial cuisine” in Paris, which grew as a response to the availability of new colonial food products.

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Between the 1890s and the late 1930s, the increased availability of ingredients and flavors from the colonized world led to the development of many colonialthemed dishes in France. Coconut cake named “Le Dakar,” chicken curry “à  l’indienne,” lobsters “à la créole,” langoustines “à l'orientale,” and eggplant “à l’algérienne” are just a few examples of the many colonial-inspired recipes that were published in the home-cooking magazines Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu between 1893 and 1939.1 These dishes reflect an increased interest in France in exotic dining, especially in the interwar period. Despite their popularity, the range of colonial-themed dishes was very limited, relying mostly on tropical fruits and curry powder and adding only a small exotic touch to the periphery of French meals. These magazines also featured articles describing the diets of the colonized and other non-Western others. These articles, which I name “gastronomic curiosity” pieces, exaggerated the alterity of non-Western peoples, often through the trope of disgust. The portrayal of exotic others as the eaters of disgusting foods marked the boundaries of French cuisine and limited culinary exploration. Tropical fruits and curry powders were accepted into French cuisine because they referenced a homogenized, generic, and nonthreatening colonial other and therefore did not transgress the boundaries of acceptable eating. The culinary exoticism found in these magazines further distanced the French from non-Western people, solidifying the borders between colonizer and colonized within metropolitan France. The experience of exotic cuisine I describe here is very different from that portrayed by Faustine Régnier for the second half of the twentieth century in L'exotisme culinaire: Essai sur les saveurs de l’autre. Régnier argues that “culinary exoticism can lead to the discovery of the Other.”2 I demonstrate here that from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, culinary exoticism as presented in these magazines consisted not of exploration and discovery but of the repetition of stereotypes and disgust tropes.

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My framing of French cuisine draws from the work of historical sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, who in Accounting for Taste chronicles the development of French national cuisine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ferguson argues that culinary practices became national cuisine through the writing and circulation of culinary literature. “The nationalization of French cuisine, in short, came through its textualization, and it depended on the readers of culinary texts as much as on the cooks or the consumers of the material preparation.”3 Cuisine itself is not only the written discourse around food and eating, but this textualization also standardizes and nationalizes cuisine. Cuisine “refers to the properly cultural construct that systematizes culinary practices and transmutes the spontaneous culinary gesture into a stable cultural code.”4 Taking cuisine as a cultural code, this chapter examines how colonial foods were assimilated into or kept at a distance from French cuisine as it was articulated in two home-cooking magazines. The introduction of the linotype press and new laws protecting the freedom of the press led to an explosion in newspapers and magazines in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s.5 Included in this expansion were a number of culinary publications. Before 1870 France had a couple of journals by gastronomes, but a new type of culinary publication, targeted at female home cooks and male professional chefs, took off at the end of the nineteenth century. Twelve new titles in this category were founded in France between 1870 and 1900.6 This chapter examines two of these journals, Le Pot-au-feu: Journal de la cuisine pratique et d’économie domestique (Beef stew: Journal of practical cooking and domestic economy), which ran from 1893 to 1956, and La Cuisinière cordon-bleu: Revue illustrée de cuisine bourgeoise, ménagère, économie domestique (The Blue Ribbon cook: Illustrated review of bourgeois cooking, housekeeping, and domestic economy), which ran from 1895 to 1962. As both of their titles make clear, these magazines targeted bourgeois housewives and their cooks. Their audience included lowermiddle-class women, petit bourgeois, who did their own cooking, often referred to as ménagères. They also included middle- and upper-class women, bourgeois and haute bourgeois, who employed either domestic servants who did most of the cooking or, in the cases of the wealthiest families, professionally trained cooks. These women were commonly referred to as maîtresses de maison. Even those women who employed domestic servants and cooks were usually still responsible for choosing menus and instructing servants on what to purchase and how to prepare dishes. They often made their own desserts.7 Echoing the concerns of the domestic science community, the first issue of Le Pot-au-feu opened by lamenting the lack of culinary education received by

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young women, who were “learning how to tap on the piano, but not to make an omelet or roast a chicken.” Le Pot-au-feu dedicated its contents to serving bourgeois and petit-bourgeois women, “equally for young girls (jeunes filles) who, their education finished, busy themselves in their homes, as for the numerous maîtresses de maison who do not employ true chefs, but train their cooks themselves or want to direct them with competence.”8 La Cuisinière cordon-bleu targeted both the maîtresse de maison and her cooks, as well as chefs (cordon bleus), and “modestes ménagères” who do their own cooking.9 In 1897, the name of La Cuisinière cordon-bleu changed to Le Cordon bleu: Journal illustré de cuisine pratique. Although this new title was decidedly more masculine and shifted attention away from the female cook (cuisinière), the magazine continued to address issues relevant to female cooks and household managers as well as chefs (male by contemporary definition). Despite the gendered hierarchy that elevated male chefs over female home cooks, French cuisine maintained a certain level of respect for women’s cooking.10 Although male chefs, gastronomes, and cooking instructors wrote most of the articles and recipes in both of these publications, they were both led, at least in part, by women and frequently featured women writers.11 Evelyn Ébrard Saint-Ange was married to the owner of Le Pot-au-feu and authored columns for twenty years under the pen name “la Veille Catherine.” She was most famous for her cookbook based on those years of column writing, La bonne cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange. Le Cordon bleu was founded by a woman, Marthe Distel.12 In 1896, she opened a cooking school where professional chefs taught courses to her subscribers. The Cordon Bleu cooking school eventually became more famous than the magazine it was designed to support. Henri-Paul Pellaprat was one of the main teachers at the Cordon Bleu school and also a prolific contributor to the magazine. A chef and pastry chef who worked at the famous Café de la Paix, Pellaprat was most well known for L’Art culinaire moderne, which covered haute cuisine, bourgeois cuisine, regional cuisine, and “cuisine impromptue” in 3,000 recipes.13 Curnonsky, the famous gastronome, praised L’Art culinaire moderne as a “textbook of good living” and called Pellaprat “a fervent feminist who has rendered homage to the finesse, the grace, and the simplicity which these women have contributed to French cookery.”14 The fact that these two magazines brought together the world of professional chefs—as writers in both magazines—with the world of bourgeois home cooking makes them an especially rich and revealing source. Culinary literature is both prescriptive and descriptive. The recipes in these magazines reflect an elite view of what French home cooking should be, mostly as determined by

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male chefs and women who were domestic educators. These authors intended to teach, improve upon, and correct home practice. Yet, the recipes were also reflective of the existing and shifting real practices of home cooks. The long run of both of these magazines suggests that they had a certain level of popularity. Both magazines reflected the concerns of housewives regarding cost, frequently printing stories about inexpensive meals, ways of using leftovers, and the prices of market goods. Each magazine contained sections of recipes submitted by readers and frequently ran recipes that were claimed to be in response to readers’ requests. While this study of home-cooking magazines cannot tell us exactly how colonial ingredients were actually used in home kitchens, it does reveal their role in this bourgeois ideal of home cooking. The ways in which colonial foods were discussed, integrated into dishes, included or excluded from menus, and at times mocked in these magazines show the limits of French acceptance of colonial foods into French cuisine. These magazines also demonstrate how regional cuisine was integrated into French national cuisine. Although French cuisine is constructed of a formalized set of techniques and draws on the global movement of ingredients, it is also tied to the products and dishes of the diverse regions of France. “The culinary capital associated every identifiable periphery in France with the center. A national discourse not only accepted but actively promoted regional difference but on the assumption that all were subsumed in the greater whole.”15 Le Potau-feu and Le Cordon bleu printed recipes for many regional dishes, especially in the interwar period when gastronomic tourism of France by automobile became popular and elevated interest in regional French cuisines. These national magazines “proposed a national culinary consciousness,” through “the publication of the regional.” Although these texts do not reveal how often French women cooked dishes from other regions, in the early twentieth century “increasingly, the models were there.”16 A Parisian or Breton subscriber to Le Potau-feu, for example, would have the recipe and ingredients necessary to make a quiche Lorraine or a ratatouille. As colonial ingredients also became available during this same period, these magazines articulated a separate colonial cuisine, distinct form French regional cooking. Algerian cuisine, for example, was never presented as a regional French cuisine. A few colonial-themed dishes gained acceptance in French cuisine between the 1890s and the 1930s, reaching a peak of popularity during the 1930s. As exoticism came into vogue around the Colonial Exposition of 1931, recipes more frequently included products and dishes from the colonies. These dishes relied on ingredients from the colonized world, fit these ingredients into the

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culinary code of French cuisine, and yet maintained an exotic flair and level of separateness. “Cuisine coloniale,” as it was called beginning in 1931, relied heavily on the most successfully integrated colonial foods: tropical fruits and curry powder, which were assimilable because they were connected to a disembodied generic colonial other and not to specific colonial peoples, which gastronomic literature painted as both different and disgusting.

Gastronomic curiosity While culinary writing generally discusses food preparation, gastronomic literature is about eating. Gastronomic writing took off in France in the nineteenth century.17 In the early twentieth century, most gastronomic writing—such as the popular work of Maurice Sailland (pen name Curnonsky)—focused primarily on dining well throughout France. Some gastronomic writing also defined the boundaries of French cuisine by describing the foodways of non-French others. In Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu, I identify a subset of gastronomic writing called “gastronomic curiosity.” I call pieces of gastronomic literature about exotic places “gastronomic curiosity,” because they consistently gaze upon the other with curiosity and from a distance. Gastronomic curiosity writing in both of these magazines tended to be of low quality. The authors repeated the expected tropes of exoticism and almost never made any claims to having visited the locations or eaten the food themselves. Occasionally, sections of these articles, or even entire articles, were reprinted verbatim years later under new titles and authors. These articles did not represent an honest effort to understand non-Western peoples, but instead emphasized their alterity, often through the trope of disgust. Gastronomic curiosity articles appeared from the beginning of these magazines in the 1890s through the interwar period. Le Pot-au-feu carried only a few of these articles, while Le Cordon bleu ran gastronomic literature pieces fairly often, sometimes as frequently as once a month, and often as longer articles of about five pages. From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, gastronomic curiosity pieces almost never contained recipes. This pattern shifted in the 1930s, however. In 1931, Le Cordon bleu started running articles that began with an introduction about a foreign cuisine and then presented a series of recipes from that cuisine. This structure dominated gastronomic curiosity pieces throughout the 1930s. These recipes, however, were still more about curiosity than cooking instruction. They were not intended to actually be prepared by readers and were not integrated into the French culinary code.

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This analysis of gastronomic curiosity writing is not limited to France’s colonies, or to colonies in general, but it will demonstrate that non-Western cultures (including those within the French empire) were presented as absolute others and as inferior to the French. Gastronomic curiosity articles often ran in response to what was happening in the news. When a people were in the news, readers might be curious as to their cuisine. This was the argument frequently made to justify the publication of gastronomic curiosity articles. During the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, F. Barthélemy’s article on Chinese cuisine opened with the following line: “At this time when the . . . [Chinese] are revolting against the apathy of the Manchu dynasty, it seems interesting to study the manner in which the Chinese feed themselves.”18 In 1912, Barthélemy wrote about Morocco because with the Treaty of Fez “in the political news, his readers were sure to be interested in Moroccan diets.”19 Barthélemy, who wrote many of the gastronomic curiosity articles, was a chef, an instructor at the Cordon Bleu school, and, for a time, editor-in-chief of Le Cordon bleu.20 He did not claim to be a world traveler or even to have eaten most of the foods he described. These gastronomic curiosity articles tend to set the examined culture apart as totally different. Disgust was a key component of this cultural distancing. Taste is a conservative sense. Societies and communities raise individuals with relatively fixed and stable understandings of what is edible. Food crosses the boundary between the outside world and the interior self and can not only nourish but also potentially poison the eater. Disgust evolved as a protective response to the physical danger involved in eating, but it is also a cultural product that maintains social boundaries. Despite this conservatism of taste, there is an appeal to adding variety to one’s diet, and this tension between the familiar and the unknown can cause anxiety. Claude Fischler calls this the “omnivores, paradox.” This anxiety comes from the cultural belief in incorporation, that food crosses the “frontier between the world and our bodies,” and becomes a part of ourselves.21 Disgust protects eaters from both the physical and social risks of inappropriate food choices. The reaction of disgust is less often a response to an actual taste as it is to the idea of what we are eating (or smelling, touching, seeing, or hearing). It is a fully embodied emotion that nearly requires sensory stimuli, but which also has important social and cultural consequences. As philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer chronicles, “Disgust is an affective response that can be mustered to patrol social boundaries and norms. . . . Disgust can also have some nasty applications insofar as it is used to categorize persons in unpopular minority groups as ‘disgusting.’ ”22 By emphasizing foods that would elicit disgust from French readers, gastronomic curiosity articles were distancing the colonial

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others from the French based on their diets. As Susan Miller has pointed out, “Disgust addresses the relations between what we consider self and what we count as Other, and it stirs, along with its neighbor emotions, as we negotiate the critical problem of how to invigorate and enrich the self through contact with ‘otherness’ without risking our sense of security.”23 Disgust, therefore, plays a key role in gastronomic curiosity as well as exotic cuisine by defining the borders between acceptable culinary exoticism and transgressive eating. It distinguishes the new and different from the threatening and dangerous. When the foodways of exotic others are described as disgusting, it limits—or even eliminates—the appeal of their cuisine.24 Animals and animal food products are central disgust elicitors. In most cultures, only a very small percentage of animals and animal parts are accepted as food.25 One of the tropes used frequently to elicit disgust in gastronomic curiosity pieces was to emphasize the eating of meats that carried strong eating taboos in France. The eating of dogs was frequently cited in gastronomic curiosity articles to elicit disgust and draw boundaries between peoples. As Marshall Sahlins pointed out, “the categorical distinctions of edibility” among animals depend in part on their differentiated statuses within a society.26 For the French, dogs were and are companion animals, and are therefore considered inedible. In the context of European imperialism, the value of different meats also separated the French from non-Western others. The authors of gastronomic curiosity pieces often presented others as eating meats that were totally outside of the French culinary code of meat eating. In a lengthy piece on Chinese cuisine in 1911, Barthélemy countered his own praise for Chinese cooking by focusing on elements French readers would find disgusting. He dedicated two pages of his nine-page article to the eating of dog meat in China, claiming that because dog meat is fairly expensive, it was especially likely to be served at higher end meals that Europeans might attend. This further distanced the Chinese from European civilization by pointing out that even their richest classes ate such taboo foods. He shared anecdotes of British people accidentally eating dog in one case and in another case gifting a prize dog to a Chinese family, only to have the dog be eaten.27 These stories emphasized the division between Europeans and Chinese, making the Chinese seem all the more primitive. Barthélemy emphasized dog eating again in a 1912 article on Moroccan cuisine. This time the inclusion appears even more meaningful because Barthélemy had to go far out of his way to fit dog meat into his discussion. He included a paragraph discussing strange foods including dog that Moroccans ate

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in the tenth century. He cited a tenth-century source as evidence that Moroccans of that time treasured dog meat and also ate black cats, grasshoppers, scorpions, and boiled horse head. This is the only section of the article that is historical. The inclusion of foods from the diets of tenth-century Moroccans, foods that would be considered disgusting by French readers, serves to dehumanize the Moroccans. Barthélemy pointed out disgusting aspects of twentieth-century Moroccan diets as well. In his description of couscous, he described the preserved butter that flavors Moroccan dishes as “very often rancid.”28 Rottenness, evidence of decay, is a central disgust elicitor, especially when connected with food.29 Describing an intentionally preserved and aged product as rancid and emphasizing taboo foods eaten a millennium ago painted a picture of Moroccan cultural inferiority. The section on the eating of dogs and other disgusting foods in tenth-century Morocco was repeated, uncited, in Distel’s 1914 piece on Arab cuisine.30 This repetition shows the recycling of these disgust tropes and their power to define Moroccan foodways for the readers of Le Cordon bleu. Related to the importance of disgust reactions was the belief that different races and nations have not only different cuisines, but also different palates and even different stomachs, and that certain foods are therefore appropriate for some groups of people but not for others. This topic was of great concern within the growing field of nutritional science, where scientists debated to what extent European colonialists living in tropical climates could and should eat local foods or maintain a French diet.31 The anxiety about eating the foods of others—of incorporating aspects of the colonized into one’s body—stemmed, at least in some part, from the understanding of diet as a key marker of racial difference. The idea of a primitive “goût” surfaced in a short article in 1913 about geophagy around the globe, including in the Congo, China, Java, South America, and the West Indies. These “eaters of the earth,” the article claimed, eat the earth because the soil in these places is salty and “pleases still the palates of these primitive people.”32 Geophagy exists in many cultures throughout the globe. What is interesting about this brief article is that it explains geophagy through “primitive” tastes and dismisses any possible cultural, nutritional, or economic reasons for the practice. This labeling of uncivilized tastes was not limited to the eaters of what the French saw as nonfoods like dogs and earth. The quality of foods was also a key factor in defining national cuisines and palates. E. Myrh’s 1905 piece in Le Cordon bleu describing the process of making couscous includes a discussion of how couscous, which he called the national dish of the Arabs, is eaten with the hands, and how Westerners will be given a large flat spoon to use. The use

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of utensils is not all that separated the French and Arabs, however. “The lack of freshness of the butter which generally coats the dishes, makes it so the French have difficulty growing accustomed to Arab cuisine.” Myhr concludes that “in summary, the Arab housewives (ménagères) do not know how to cook, and it is in vain that one searches among them for a cordon bleu worthy of that name. There is only one Arab dish that can be accepted by the French taste (le goût français); it is the roasted mutton that the Arabs call chi or méchi.” But the article does not discuss this one Arab dish that is acceptable to the “le gout français.” Couscous was worthy of curiosity, but Myhr did not deem it appropriate for the French to eat; it did not seem to him capable of integration into French cuisine.33 Myhr portrayed the Arabs, who eat with their hands, cover their food in spoiled butter, and whose ménagères don’t know how to cook, as absolute others. Myhr showed no interest in integrating couscous or other North African foods into French cuisine and did not suggest that his readers should try them. This article was repeated nearly verbatim under the name of a different author, L. Maury, in 1912.34 The idea that exotic dishes were not appropriate for French palates and stomachs was not limited to gastronomic curiosity but also accompanied some recipes. On very rare occasions before the 1930s, recipes for savory colonial dishes other than curries were presented. To avoid too close association with “primitive” palates, authors sometimes introduced their recipes by reassuring the reader that they had been adapted to be suitable for French diners. In 1896, the following reassurance accompanied a recipe for lamb pilaf à la turque: “Our readers understand that the recipe for the true preparation à la turque does not agree with our palates or our stomachs, it is for this reason that they will find it here modified and closer to French cuisine.”35 That a Turkish pilaf would not seem likely to agree with French palates is not surprising, but the use of the word “stomach” is again significant. It seems to imply that there is something physically different between Turkish and French people that limits what they are able to eat. The increased exposure in France to colonial foods in the 1920s and 1930s does not seem to have at all changed this idea that exotic foods needed to be mediated for French consumption. Some gastronomic curiosity authors also saw diet as a reflection of the character of different civilizations. In the 1911 piece on China, Barthélemy again highlighted his racialized view of diets by claiming that the elaborate Chinese banquet he describes would normally make the European stomach “sick to the point of death.”36 He then argued that the Chinese diet was a reflection of the qualities of the society:

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The manner with which a people feeds themselves is the reflection of their private life, their aspirations, of their genius and marks the tune (diapason) of their social state. So, Chinese cuisine, like her civilization, is several centuries behind; it is in perfect concordance with the character of this race, smart and patient but so stubbornly attached to their old customs that she has up to this point resisted the adoption of the progress of European civilization.37

Here Barthélemy explicitly connects cuisine with the level of civilization, so that to eat poorly, or even disgustingly, is a reflection of backwardness. Barthélemy was inconsistent on the issue of whether the diet was an unchangeable sign of otherness or a vehicle for assimilation. After citing the tenth-century Moroccan practice of eating dog meat and the current flaws in Moroccan culinary culture such as low quality bread, he concluded with this hope for the new French protectorate in Morocco: We hope that French civilization will bring to the Moroccans not only her benefits from economic and social points of view, but also from the culinary and alimentary points of view and that the modest couscous can soon be, transformed by the French culinary art, present on the table of our gourmets.38

It is significant here that Barthélemy was not interested in imposing a purely foreign French diet on the Moroccans, but in elevating “the modest couscous” through “the French culinary art.” Colonialism had the potential, according to Barthélemy, to advance not only Moroccan but also French cuisine. Barthélemy’s take on couscous, published in 1912, was quite different from the view of E.  Myhr, first published in 1905 and reprinted in 1912, though their articles also share many of the same disgust tropes. While Myhr dismissed couscous as simply not acceptable to “le goût français,” Barthélemy thought it had gourmet potential once transformed by “French culinary art.” But despite Barthélemy’s hopeful conclusion, the overall tone of his article highlighted the great distance of Morroccan foodways from French cuisine. Even as culinary exoticism gained in popularity and colonial foods became more available in the interwar period, the inferiority of the diets of colonized peoples remained the central theme of gastronomic curiosity pieces. The fulfillment of Barthélemy’s vision, that couscous would become a part of gourmet French cuisine, has to some extent taken place today, but this transition was a postcolonial reality, brought about by the growing population of people of North African origin in France in the second half of the twentieth century. In the interwar period, couscous recipes were nearly absent from these magazines, appearing almost exclusively in gastronomic curiosity pieces.39 It should come

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as no surprise that this dish, described in the gastronomic literature as “rancid,” and the creation of women who do not know how to cook, had little to no appeal to French cooks.

Tropical fruits as acceptable culinary exoticism The colonial-themed dishes that became more and more common in these magazines in the first forty years of the twentieth century relied on integrating the most approachable colonial foods—tropical fruits and curry powder— into the French culinary code. The names of these dishes and the discourse surrounding them, however, suggest that although they were integrated into French cuisine, they maintained an exotic colonial identity. In the first half of the twentieth century, tropical fruits became more available and affordable to the French, especially to Parisians. Le Pot-au-feu included bananas and mangos in its list of available seasonal produce from its founding in 1893 and added coconuts and pineapples in 1895.40 In 1908, Le Cordon bleu editor Barthélemy told his readers that fifteen years ago there were rarely bananas and pineapples at Les Halles market, and that the price had been about thirty or forty francs per bunch. By 1908 the price had decreased, “and the merchants sell them yearround in the streets of Paris just like oranges, apples, and pears.”41 Pineapples were also available canned, and as the French public came around to accepting canned food after the First World War, canned pineapple slices gave them easy access to a hint of the tropics.42 Parisians also had access to exotic ingredients at specialty stores such as Hédiard. International trader Ferdinand Hédiard opened his first shop in 1854, focusing on the alimentary products from the colonies, especially spices and fruits. In 1878, he opened the Hédiard boutique of colonial products at its current location at twenty-one place de la Madeleine.43 While bananas and pineapples had become commonplace in Parisian groceries by the 1920s, in 1929 Le Pot-au-feu still pointed out that you could get shredded coconut at stores that specialized in exotic products.44 Occasionally, most often in Le Cordon bleu, authors argued for colonial agricultural development to make certain colonial foods less expensive and more widely available. This included calls for increased availability and lower prices of bananas and banana flour, and more pineapples from Algeria and the AOF.45 The majority of colonial-themed recipes published in Le Cordon bleu and Le Pot-au-feu were desserts relying on these tropical fruits. These magazines almost always presented exotic desserts on their own, not as a part of exotic-themed

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menus. Although dessert was a part of the basic “proper meal,” it was somewhat peripheral to the success of dinner in comparison to the nourishing heart of the meal, the entrée. Dessert’s presence makes a meal more formal, but it is not a necessary part of the construction of a meal.46 For bourgeois housewives, desserts were a way to play with exoticism, to vary the menu, and to impress guests by presenting something new and modern but in a way that did not risk upsetting the structure of the meal. Not only did the structure of the meal not change, the structure of the dessert course itself hardly changed. Most of these tropical fruits simply changed the chosen fruit flavor of the dish, without affecting the form of the dish at all. A tart could be a strawberry tart, a fig tart, or a tarte créole with bananas. The dish remained familiar in its overall form. A clear answer to the omnivore’s paradox, exotic desserts offered a space for experimentation that was less risky than serving an exotic main course, where disgust or apprehension was more likely to cause a guest discomfort and ruin an entire meal. The most striking aspect of tropical fruits for home cooks was that they changed the seasonality of French desserts. Bananas and pineapples were frequently discussed as winter replacements for French fruits such as apples, pears, and strawberries.47 The freedom from seasonal restraints was even more significant with pineapple dishes, as many recipes offered directions for using either fresh or canned pineapple.48 Recipes for tropical fruit desserts were often printed from the late fall through early spring, when domestic fresh fruit options were the most limited.49 As the introduction to a recipe for vacherin à la créole stated, “Pineapples and bananas, these two excellent fruits from the tropical countries, are more precious to us in winter, as they allow us to make delicious frozen desserts which help us to wait patiently for the return of the fruits of our orchards.”50 The change in the seasonality of desserts through the availability of tropical fruits in the winter was one of the ways in which colonial cuisine changed French cuisine, both for home cooks and pastry chefs. “Exotic” and “colonial” do not mean exactly the same thing, but as with many of the terms used to describe non-Western food in Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu, their meanings are ambiguous and overlapping. As is demonstrated in the following explanation for presenting rahat lokum (Turkish delight) as a colonial candy in 1931, “cuisine coloniale” was more about exoticism than geography or politics: To conclude our chapter on exotic cuisine at the same time as the magnificent Colonial Exposition . . . we are going to give some recipes for the candies offered to the visitors as they make their promenades across our overseas empire. We are

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giving the recipe for rahat lokum, which is not especially colonial, because it is Turkish, but which has nevertheless an exotic character that resembles colonial products.51

By 1931, the height of Le Cordon bleu’s interest in cuisine coloniale, the author saw some need to justify placing a Turkish recipe in an article titled “Cuisine coloniale,” but this justification was simple—rahat lokum is exotic and therefore similar to colonial cuisine—and exemplified how the definition of colonial cuisine was based on exoticism, not on political borders. In my analysis of both these magazines from their founding in the 1890s until the Second World War, “exotique” was always used to refer to foods, recipes, or cuisines from outside of Europe. This finding corresponds with Régnier’s analysis of the use of “exotique” in recipes in women’s magazines in France and Germany.52 “Exotique” most often referred to “fruits exotiques” including pineapples, bananas, coconuts, mangos, and persimmons.53 “Exotique” was also used broadly to describe Creole dishes, vegetables like yams and okra, and nonWestern dishes.54 In addition, many dishes were exoticized through names that referenced exotic or colonized locations. The meanings of French dish names were not always straightforward, as sometimes the name “à la . . .” and a location was applied to dishes that did not reference that location. At other times, the geographical logic behind names was more evident, explained in the text or clearly linked to colonial ingredients.55 Desserts containing products from the tropics such as chocolate, coffee, rum, and exotic fruits could be named after any tropical location.56 As one would expect, the names of desserts featuring tropical fruits often invoked the Antilles,57 but they often also pointed to African colonies, especially when coconut was the featured ingredient such as in a coconut cake called “le Dakar,” a coconut and chocolate confection called “le sénégalais,” and coconut petits fours called “congolais.”58 Tropical fruit desserts were also named after other tropical countries, not necessarily exporters of tropical fruits to France. “Pineapples à l’indienne” featured ginger rice pudding in a fresh pineapple, “Hindu cake” and “le Singapoor” (sic) were pineapple desserts, and “strawberries à la Singapoore” (sic) was a strawberry rice pudding with pineapple.59 From the beginning of modern French cuisine, its founder, Carême, gave all sorts of geographical and historical names to variants of dishes, names that often did not describe the dish or reference its ingredients. Sometimes, regional and foreign names pointed to the ingredients—for example, “Provençal” generally implied the use of garlic and tomatoes—but often they did not. When Carême

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translated foreign dishes into French cuisine, he often named them after French towns or historical individuals.60 So, in a way, the fact that the names of these tropical fruit desserts are not always tied to specific locals is in itself evidence of the fitting of these dishes into the French culinary code. And yet, the fact that the names of these dishes reference exotic locations signifies that despite the working of tropical fruits into traditional French desserts, these dishes remained exoticized. Tropical fruit desserts were never named after French people or places. The imagery that often accompanied tropical fruit desserts further signaled their exoticization and identification with a homogenized colonial other. Le Potau-feu headed a collection of recipes for banana, pineapple, and coconut dishes in 1931 and for banana ice cream in 1932 with the same image of an African village of thatched huts, cited in the caption as from Togo-Cameroun magazine.61 The dishes themselves, such as soufflé and ice cream, were traditional French desserts, and the dishes did not always have colonial or exotic names. The placement of these recipes under an image of an African village emphasized the exotic origin of the key ingredient and demonstrates that dishes featuring bananas were still considered exotic and colonial in the 1930s, even though bananas had become rather common and easily available in Paris. A 1935 recipe for banana mousse with strawberries elegantly makes the point. The dish was titled “mousse de bananes à la métropole,” and the author pointed out that it was the inclusion of strawberries that made the dish “à la métropole.” So, banana mousse itself was presumed to be colonial, and strawberries made the dish metropolitan style, even though both dishes are based on the traditional French entremet of mousse. In this same recipe, the author mentions that bananas were no longer rare and were looked upon “with the same indifference as apples and pears,”62 and yet the title still connects bananas with the colonies. Rarity and novelty were not required elements of the most successful exotic dishes.

Curry and the homogenized “oriental” other “Oriental” seems in dessert recipes to refer broadly to the tropical colonial world, but this meaning was not at all consistent, and “oriental” carried a variety of geographical and cultural meanings when applied to savory dishes. A 1931 piece in Le Pot-au-feu demonstrates the complex meaning of “oriental” and the representation of a homogenized colonial other. This recipe for “eggplant or zucchini à l’oriental” was illustrated with a cartoon of a barefoot

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black woman with extreme racialized features, stirring a pot over a fire and a similar-looking black man blowing on the fire. The image was cited as having come from the magazine Togo-Cameroun. The recipe makes no references to Africans and mentions only the generic “orientals” who “very often use rice to accompany other vegetables.”63 The only thing that makes this recipe “oriental” is the stuffing of a vegetable with rice. There are no exotic spices or ingredients. The use of an image mocking the people of Togo and Cameroon to illustrate a vaguely “oriental” recipe for zucchini stuffed with rice and lamb demonstrates the imprecise culinary image of the colonial other. The success of dishes that referenced a generic, homogenized, colonial other is demonstrated in the use of the terms Indian, Creole, and curry. In Le Cordon bleu, no recipes were named “curry” until “Poulet au cary à  l’indienne” in 1908, but before then lobsters “à la créole,” braised carrots “à l’indienne,” squash stuffed with rice “à l’indienne,” and langoustine croquettes “à la indienne” all featured curry powder.64 Most of the curry dishes with any explicit geographical reference pointed toward India, but not always. Curries could also be “créole,” a term used in both magazines to refer both to the French colonies in the West Indies and to Louisiana. Sometimes, a single article or dish mixed Indian and Creole references. In 1922, a recipe in Le Cordon bleu called for serving “langoustines à la créole” with “sauce indienne” that contained curry powder and coconut milk.65 A 1931 article on Creole cuisine shows how curry was seen as both Indian and Creole. It featured a recipe for “poulet à l’indienne ou à la créole,” which was one dish that could fall under both names. It started by calling for making the “rice à la Créole” that accompanies all true “dishes à l ‘Indienne” and suggesting that cooks use rice from India. The chicken dish itself contained homemade coconut milk and curry powder, described as “powder of Cary (or currie) a sort of Indian spice absolutely characteristic of all Creole dishes.”66 At multiple times within this one recipe, Indian and Creole cuisine were presented as connected or even the same thing. There was some cultural reality behind the mixing of “créole” and “indienne” dishes. After the emancipation of slaves in all French territories in 1848, indentured workers came from India to Martinique and Guadeloupe and brought with them the spices and dishes of their homeland. These spices became influential in Martiniquais and Guadeloupian cuisine where curry is now called “columbo,” named after the former capital of Sri Lanka. Just as there is great regional variety in the Indian dishes know as curries, West Indian curries developed their own unique flavors using local ingredients, including allspice, which were unheard of in Indian curries.67 This culinary reality, that dishes

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known to the French and British as curries were created throughout the Indian subcontinent as well as the Antilles, contributed to an understanding of curry as a broadly colonial dish, one not tied to any specific region or peoples. The geographical and cultural vagueness of these curry recipes was further emphasized by recipes that were named simply “colonial” or “oriental.” For example, in 1914, a recipe for langoustines à l’oriental featured curry powder.68 Curry was in many ways the epitome of acceptable culinary exoticism and colonial-themed cooking. It was vaguely Indian, Creole, and “oriental,” based on a dish that was itself a colonial construction, a Western representation of various regional Indian and West Indian dishes. Although curry powder was exotic enough to be interesting, it could be easily integrated into the French culinary code. A pinch here or there could take a dish like sweetbreads with artichokes and make it “oriental.”69 This generic exoticism was occasionally combined with claims of authentic knowledge of the colonies. In 1934, Le Pot-au-feu ran an article titled “About Curry,” submitted by a “friendly subscriber, a fine gourmet, who has taken long trips to the colonies,” who sent in some information about curry. The author’s “long trips to the colonies” justify her legitimacy and the authenticity of her recipes, but these colonies are never specified. We do not know where in the vast colonial world the author has acquired her claimed curry expertise. The reader is not told if the author has spent time in Pondicherry or perhaps British India, or if her knowledge of curry comes from Martinique, Guadeloupe, or Reunion. The image above the article is a generic colonial image used a number of times in Le Pot-au-feu in the 1930s and features a black woman carrying a shallow bowl on top of her head, surrounded by produce including gourds and a pineapple. Because the image is used with many colonial-themed dishes throughout the 1930s, I do not think it necessarily implies that the author is drawing from Antillaise or African cuisine. The author’s initial curry recipe is a loose set of instructions in which one can use pork, beef, veal, mutton, or chicken, which she explains is “in reality just a sauce or tomato ragout, in which one has added curry powder very close to the end of cooking.”70 The author’s claim to authentic knowledge of colonial cuisine actually emphasizes the geographical vagueness of this type of cooking. What matters here is that she has spent time in the “colonies,” and can therefore claim expertise without even citing the colonies she is talking about. Her recipes themselves point to another aspect of curry that made it more easily integrated into French cuisine—its utter versatility. Basically, any stew or ragout containing curry powder was called a curry, and this made these dishes remarkably accessible to French home cooks.

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The frequency of curry dishes and their inclusion under the category of colonial food highlights the truly global nature of colonial-themed dishes. Pondicherry, the small French colony in India, is never mentioned in these magazines. All explicit references are to British India. Pondicherry did not play a large role in the French culinary imagination of the colonies. In contrast, the British had a more constant flow of people going to and coming from India and proved much more open to colonial culinary influences. Elizabeth Collingham has demonstrated that “whether it was for its taste, its practicality, or its nutritional values, curry was firmly established as a part of the British culinary landscape by the 1850s.”71 In 1912, Le Cordon bleu published two recipes side by side: one for mango chutney and another for imitation mango-chutney, which “they make in England to give the illusion of mango chutney.” It included green apples, onions, raisons, ginger root, and cayenne pepper.72 Of course, the French had significantly more culinary exchanges with the British than with Pondicherry, so it is likely that the growing popularity of curry in the twentieth century was in part due to British influence.73 The fact that curry had become an established part of British cuisine was surely a contributing factor to its fairly broad acceptance in France. Not only was its colonial reference vague, but it had already been accepted by other Europeans. Based on the frequency and type of curry recipes published in these two magazines, the incorporation of curry into French colonial cuisine seems to have occurred about fifty years later than in England, taking place from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1930s. In 1908, Pellaprat, writing in Le Cordon bleu, declared of Indian chicken curry, “This dish which belongs to foreign cuisine, thanks to the favor it enjoys amongst the gourmets, has obtained its naturalization papers and has been adopted long ago by French cuisine.”74 The images accompanying the article also reflected the idea that this was a French curry. They included no exotic visual tropes as colonial recipes so often did, but instead featured a French woman butchering a chicken, and a French chef. Another key aspect of curry that made it assimilable to French cuisine was that the French already had a repertoire of stews, ragouts, and sauced meat dishes to which curry powder could be added. In other words, this new ingredient fit into the established lexicon of techniques that defined French cuisine. In addition, the cook could easily control the level of heat and exotic flavors by limiting the amount of curry powder used. The way in which curry was adopted into French cuisine is demonstrated in a 1908 recipe for “chicken curry à l'indienne.” The only foreign element in the dish is a teaspoon of curry powder in the béchamel sauce. The dish included one teaspoon of curry powder in a rich sauce serving

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six to eight people. So, the amount of curry in this “chicken curry” was quite minimal. As culinary exoticism became more in vogue in the 1930s, the flavors of French curry dishes seem to have stayed the same. Le Cordon bleu published a very similar recipe in 1938, calling for only a teaspoon of curry powder in the béchamel sauce to cover one chicken’s worth of “chicken curry.”75 The spice mixture had been assimilated, integrated into French cooking, and the flavors of the dish adjusted for French palates. Similar to tropical fruit desserts, this type of mild chicken curry dish had a hint of exoticism but was not risky or threatening. Its preparation was familiar and its mild flavors were appealing to the palate of French cuisine. This dish of “chicken curry à l’indienne” containing béchamel sauce had nearly nothing in common with anything cooked in India, and yet— as demonstrated in the rhetoric surrounding these recipes—curry retained its vaguely colonial association and exotic allure.

Colonial cuisine in vogue in the 1930s Curry was by far the most popular savory colonial dish, and the only one to really be integrated into French cuisine as it was created and presented in these two magazines. On very rare occasions before the 1930s, other savory colonial dishes were presented. To avoid too close association with “primitive” palates, recipe authors sometimes introduced their recipes by reassuring the reader that they had been adapted to be suitable for French diners. A 1934 recipe for Algerian eggplant was introduced as follows: “This totally local preparation was asked of us insistently, and was found to be excellent. We prepare it with a bit more refinement than over there to make it more suitable for all stomachs.”76 This passage reveals an understanding not only that stomachs are different and capable of digesting different foods, but also that to refine a dish with French cooking methods was to make it available to “all stomachs.” French food here is assumed to be universally accepted, a global standard for good food. The increased exposure in France to colonial foods in the 1920s and 1930s does not seem to have at all changed this idea that foreign foods need to be significantly changed to cross the boundaries into French cuisine. Thanks to the International Colonial Exposition of 1931 (ECI), the “French media had a new infatuation” with empire as a great increase occurred in coverage of all things colonial in print and on radio from 1929 through 1932.77 This media trend also clearly influenced both Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu, as both magazines increased their coverage of colonial cuisine in 1931

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and cited the ECI as the motivation for their coverage. Both magazines were also involved on the ground at the ECI. The Cordon Bleu cooking school promoted rice consumption at a small cooking school in the Indochinese section of the exposition. Le Pot-au-feu also had a stand at the ECI along Lake Bercy, situated in the more purely recreational section of the exposition. Le Pot-au-feu opened its issue commemorating the ECI with an explanation that the regular column covering “regional cuisine” would be replaced for the rest of the year with “la cuisine coloniale” as “fashion demands.” The introduction went on to explain: Let us not be carried away by these extraordinary cuisines, our facilities are not made to roast a whole sheep, and a coconut tree will not take hold in the corner of a studio. But we adapt the products of colonial France, quite simply à la française: we will make every effort with these few chosen [products] so that you will find them delicious and always worthy of Pot-au-feu.78

The colonial issue of Le Pot-au-feu focused much of its attention on recipes for tropical fruits, containing separate sections on bananas, pineapples, and coconuts. It also included gastronomic curiosity pieces about fish sauce and couscous, and reviews of the year’s new colonial cookbooks. The few savory “colonial” recipes included Cuban pilaf, a rice salad called “Malagasy,” and an omelet and stuffed eggs “saïgonnais,” which included crab meat. The issue also repeated a curry recipe that had run a couple of years earlier and printed a short recipe for “Elkheleau,” which was a type of African beef jerky. The Elkheleau recipe was subtitled “amusing recipe,” setting it apart as a curiosity. The edition did live up to its promise to give recipes for products from the colonies, as tropical fruits and rice were included in most of these recipes. There were, however, very few dishes from the colonies, and some of those that were present were—even within this colonial cuisine edition—set apart as “amusing.” It is especially telling that there was no recipe for preparing couscous. Couscous remained—in 1931 and throughout the 1930s—an object of gastronomic curiosity and not a recipe that was promoted to Pot-au-feu readers.79 Overall, Le Pot-au-feu’s enthusiasm for the vogue of colonial cuisine passed with the end of 1931. After that year, very few colonial dishes outside of tropical fruit desserts and curries were printed. The 1931 index included the category “regional and colonial dishes,” which included all of the savory colonial dishes (though not the tropical fruit desserts) printed during the year. In 1932, that category in the index again became simply “regional dishes.” Through the rest of the 1930s, Le Pot-au-feu continued to print

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recipes for fruit desserts and curry dishes, but it only very rarely included other savory colonial-themed dishes.80 Le Cordon bleu opened its special section on “cuisine coloniale” by stating that it would dedicate a column to the “cuisine that can be made with colonial products. The cooking schools of the Cordon-Bleu want to make their contribution to the patriotic work of putting to use (mettre en valeur) and appreciating all the alimentary resources of our Colonial Empire.” The article included three rice recipes and two for chayote, a type of squash that had been imported into France from Algeria and the Antilles since at least 1913. The rice recipes called specifically for “riz de Saigon,” the first time a recipe in Le Cordon bleu directed users to use rice from Indochina.81 After this initial article in June, Le Cordon bleu ran four more articles in the “cuisine coloniale” series between July and November. The second article in the series was taken directly from Léon Isnard’s Gastronomie africaine. Isnard was a French chef who settled in Oran and then in Mascara, Algeria, running hotel restaurants.82 The sections reprinted in Le Cordon bleu describe the preparation of couscous (including the process of making couscous itself) and the roasted lamb dish mechoui. Neither one was a recipe one could follow in a Parisian kitchen, but they were more descriptive pieces that fall under the category of gastronomic curiosity.83 The third article in the series highlighted Creole and Indian dishes that had gained some acceptance in France, including a chicken curry that the author cited as quite popular and a recipe for okra cooked à l’antillaise. The author claimed that okra could be found fairly often in restaurants.84 The fourth piece discussed the use of manioc in the Antilles and of manioc flour in France during the war, followed by three recipes using manioc flour.85 The last “cuisine coloniale” article was the previously discussed recipe for Turkish delight, cited as appropriate for the theme because it had the requisite “exotic character akin to colonial products.”86 Throughout 1931, Le Cordon bleu continued to run recipes using tropical fruits and curry as well as more recipes for Indochinese rice. Their coverage—in this year of the vogue of colonial cuisine—of other dishes specifically inspired by the colonies was limited to curiosity pieces, a recipe for okra, three using manioc flour (a product that I have seen discussed nowhere else in the culinary literature of the period), and a detailed recipe for Turkish delight. In the 1931 Le Cordon bleu index, all these recipes were listed under a separate heading titled “cuisine coloniale,” and were not integrated into the rest of the index, which was organized by type of dish (desserts, poultry, hors d’oeuvres, etc.). They were clearly set apart as intriguing curiosities, not integrated into the part of the index a cook would use to find a recipe for a meal. The “cuisine coloniale” heading appeared only in 1931. While

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tropical fruit desserts continued to be listed in the desserts section, these savory colonial dishes were clearly not integrated into the culinary code of Le Cordon bleu. In addition to the spurt of coverage of colonial cuisine in these magazines, three colonial-themed cookbooks came out in 1931. Charlotte Rabette’s La cuisine exotique chez soi par Catherine, Anne Querillac’s Cuisine coloniale: Les bonnes recettes de Chloe Mondésir, and Raphaël de Noter’s La bonne cuisine aux colonies: Asie, Afrique, Amérique were all published in 1931.87 These three works, along with French-Algerian chef Leon Isnard’s Gastronomie africaine (1930), provided the sources for many of the new colonial cuisine recipes published in these magazines in the 1930s.88 After 1931, colonial-themed recipes outside of curry and fruit desserts appeared infrequently in Le Cordon bleu and Le Potau-feu.89 When other colonial cuisine recipes did appear, they were most often accompanied by introductions that shared many of the tropes of gastronomic curiosity articles, setting the colonial recipes apart as oddities. An interesting series of articles by Gaston Derys in 1937–38 combined interest in “cuisine coloniale” with the tropes of gastronomic curiosity in a way that continued to exaggerate the alterity of the colonial other. Three colonialthemed articles, “Cuisine antillaise,” “Cuisine algérienne,” and “La cuisine nègre,” appeared in Gaston Derys’s regular series on foreign cuisines.90 Other cuisines covered by Derys in 1936–38 included German, American, Chinese, Italian, and many others. Derys was a gastronomic writer who published books on the foods of France and signed all his articles citing his membership in the Académie des gastronomes. These articles contained quite a few recipes, but they first opened with a piece of commentary from Derys. This commentary followed many of the tropes of gastronomic curiosity articles from earlier in the twentieth century that sought disgust reactions from readers. These were especially evident in “La cuisine nègre,” where Derys pointed out that he had left out of the article recipes for “grilled grasshoppers, fly pâté, purée of termites with mint, serpents, rotten meat, [and] herbs lubricated in gastric juice and stomach extracts.” “We know,” Derys claimed, that the Zulus are fond of large caterpillars, and other tribes of fried ants. But we wanted to provide recipes that could be realized in France, so in transposing them, we have removed all those that offered a disgusting nature or are too vehemently distant from our culinary conceptions.91

In other words, he did not include recipes for the inedible things eaten by black Africans. In another context, Anthony Pagden has shown that since the early

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contacts of the Spanish with American Indians, the inability to determine what was edible—especially the eating of “lower” species of animals such as bugs— was considered a clear sign of barbarism by European colonizers.92 This trope clearly remained powerful in 1937, as Derys demonstrated African inferiority by listing foods Europeans would call inedible. The disgusting introduction surely served to limit if not eliminate any potential interest among readers in actually preparing any African recipes.93 Most of the fifteen short recipes included in “La Cuisine nègre” came from either Rabette’s La cuisine exotique chez soi par Catherine or Querillac’s Cuisine coloniale: Les bonnes recettes de Chloe Mondésir. Many of the dishes actually could not be made in France, because they called for esoteric ingredients not available in the metropole. The annual index of the magazine is revealing. Like the dishes from Derys’s other gastronomic curiosity articles, these recipes were not integrated into the annual index. The index listed the names of the articles under the category “miscellaneous,” but the recipes were not included in the rest of the index. These exotic dishes were clearly set apart as curiosities, not integrated into the part of the index a cook would use to prepare a meal. Derys’s articles were always accompanied by cartoon images. In the colonialthemed articles, these racist cartoons showed exoticized images of colonial others hunting, shopping, farming, cooking, dining, and sometimes just standing in exotic attire. The images included a woman in a burqa and a group roasting a whole animal on a spit in the article on Algerian cuisine; a smiling man with a bottle of rum and a woman with a large basket on her head in the Antilles article; and African men carrying a python, carving a giant living tortoise, and butchering an elephant in “La Cuisine nègre” (see Image 2). These cartoonish images further establish the alterity of the other being discussed, emphasizing their vast differences from the French reader. In the case of the portrayal of black Africans, the images are especially derogatory and mocking, portraying Africans as the “large children” Derys believed them to be.94 These images, though disturbing for their racist portrayals, are not particularly surprising inside these pieces of gastronomic curiosity. What is especially noteworthy is that they—along with the similar cartoons of Indochinese men that accompanied the Indochinese rice ads that ran during this same period— were placed alongside the more common recipes of established colonial cuisine later in the 1930s and 1940s. A 1939 recipe for Martiniquaise mousse (containing rum and bananas) featured three images of women and men with fruit from the “Cuisine antillaise” article.95 A short article for a Creole gratin (containing

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Image 2  In these racist cartoons that illustrate Gaston Derys’s article, “La Cuisine nègre,” black Africans are portrayed as eaters of the comically inedible. Gaston Derys, “La cuisine nègre,” Le Cordon bleu, February 1, 1938, 64–8. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

Indochinese rice, leftover fish, white sauce, onions, a “pinch” of curry powder, and shredded cheese) was headed with an image of an Asian man kneeling and presenting a bowl to an older Asian man.96 The image, repeated from earlier Indochinese rice ads, seems to accompany this Creole dish because it contains rice. This dish exemplifies the type of colonial cuisine that did become part of French cuisine by the late 1930s: It featured an ingredient from the colonies, was easy to prepare, and as a gratin, it fit the form of familiar French dishes. The pinch of curry powder made the dish vaguely Creole and therefore slightly exotic, but in a family-sized dish, a pinch of curry powder would have only very subtle effects on the flavor. The name of the dish, “gratin à la créole,” fit the French culinary code by vaguely referencing the ingredient—curry—which defined this variation’s distinction from a more classic gratin. This colonial cuisine lasted beyond the interwar period, as did its imagery. A 1946 recipe for Turkish moussaka featured an image of an Arab building but also a cartoon, first printed in “La Cuisine nègre” in 1937, of a barefoot black African man with exaggerated racial features blowing on a fire. The presence of the cartoon is not explained in the text, and it signals to the reader that this dish is from the exotic colonial world—ever so broadly defined (Image 3). The vogue of colonial cuisine in culinary literature that surrounded the 1931 Colonial Exposition proved to have a rather limited impact on French cuisine

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Image 3  An interwar image of the generic colonial other applied to Turkish cuisine in 1946. “La cuisine bourgeoise de saison: Le moussaka à la turque,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 998 (August 1946): 4. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

as it was produced and reproduced in these magazines. Dishes from the French colonies, like couscous, gained almost no traction, appearing nearly exclusively in gastronomic curiosity pieces. The deep alterity of the colonial other, repeatedly reinforced in gastronomic writing, made most colonial dishes inaccessible to French diners and cooks because they appeared utterly inassimilable to French cuisine. Colonial tropical fruits and curries were, however, integrated into French cuisine. These dishes tended to reference a geographically ambiguous and disembodied colonial world, one that did not elicit disgust or apprehension because it was associated more with vague exoticism than with actual colonial people. Significantly, fruits and curry could also be fit into the French culinary code—added as twists to French dishes that were then given names that referenced exotic locals. This colonial cuisine, a subset of French cuisine in which the dishes much more closely resembled well-known French dishes than anything actually from the colonies, developed over the beginning of the twentieth century and was already taking shape before the short-lived vogue of the so-named “cuisine coloniale” appeared in 1931. It was this vague exoticism, which lumped all the colonies together, that many colonial administrations tried to counter in their presentations at the 1931 Colonial Exposition. The following chapter examines the use of food by colonial administrations as they attempted to articulate their distinctive place within Greater France and within the overall culinary atmosphere of the exposition, which reflected the vague exoticism of colonial cuisine.

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In the spring of 1931, the International Colonial Exposition (ECI) welcomed over eight million visitors to the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern edge of Paris. A 272-acre section of the woods surrounding Lac Daumesnil was transformed into a miniature version of the world of the French empire.1 Elaborate pavilions in a variety of exotic architectural styles were constructed and filled with displays about the geography, administration, and economies of the various colonies in the French empire. This was an international exposition, and despite the glaring absence of Great Britain, a few other imperialist nations, including the United States, the Netherlands, and Belgium, also built pavilions paying tribute to their colonial endeavors.2 A small zoo showcased exotic wildlife, and children enjoyed an amusement park. Hundreds of persons from the colonies lived and performed in reconstructions of West African and Indochinese villages and North African urban neighborhoods. Some of these displays brought many of the nearly eight million visitors to the exposition into relatively close contact with colonized individuals for the first time.3 Visitors to the colonial exposition could watch women weave cloth in a Senegalese village and wander the winding streets of Tunis before pausing to watch the famed Cambodian dancers in front of a grand replica of the Temple of Angkor Wat. In ways somewhat similar to cuisine coloniale, the spectacle promoted “cultural contact in order, paradoxically, to reinforce the divisions among groups.”4 This illusion of intimacy was especially powerful at exotic dining experiences available throughout the exposition. Visiting the exposition was not just about watching; it was also an experience of sound, smell, touch, and taste. Food and drink were everywhere at the colonial exposition, and while it was claimed that visitors “traveled around the world in a day,” they ate and drank their way around the world as well. Visitors to the exposition drank Arabic coffee in a Tunisian café, ate almond cakes and drank mint tea in the Moroccan souk, dined on chicken with peanuts and tropical fruits at the West African restaurant, sipped rum punch in the Guadeloupe

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pavilion, tasted Algerian wines, and learned to prepare Indochinese rice. While most of the scholarship on the colonial exposition centers on the visual creations of planners, architects, and artists, the colonial exposition was more than visual.5 In this chapter, I attempt to analyze both the messages portrayed through food by the exposition organizers and the consumer experience of eating at the exposition. It is always difficult to study perception, and there is no source that polls exposition visitors on what they thought about what they ate. However, by analyzing the discussion of colonial food in the press, menus, advertisements, and descriptions of restaurants, in this chapter I am able to get a sense of the limits of acceptable culinary exoticism at the exposition and the muddling of the intended messages of the various parts of the colonial lobby. Historians and art historians have analyzed this visual spectacle primarily to better understand the colonial ideology expressed at the exposition. They generally see the exposition as an attempt to celebrate both exotic primitivism (mostly in the exterior of the pavilions) and the economic potential of the colonies (mostly in the interior).6 These works tend to lump all the colonies together, ignoring the differences in the ways in which each colonial administration chose to represent its colony. By focusing on food, this chapter shows clear distinctions in how each colony balanced exoticism and familiarity, and considers the multiple creative forces behind the exposition: the Commissaire général, individual colonial commissaires, and private concessionaires. The 1931 Colonial Exposition was unique in its grand scope, size, popularity, and commercial success, but not in its basic concept. The 1878, 1889, and 1900 Universal Expositions had colonial sections that included colonial-themed concessions and the presence of colonized peoples.7 The limited space given to the colonies in the 1900 Universal Exposition spurred colonial supporters to call for a special exposition devoted to France’s colonies. The 1906 colonial exposition in Marseille was such a success that Marseille planned to repeat it every ten years, but the success also meant that Paris now wanted to play host.8 A compromise was made that Marseille would host a national colonial exposition in 1916, and Paris would follow with an international colonial exposition in 1920. The First World War delayed the plans. Marseille held its colonial exposition in 1922, and for a myriad of reasons, the Paris International Colonial Exposition was pushed back from 1925 to 1931.9 The ECI opened on May 6, 1931 and ran for five months.10 Despite a cold and rainy spring, over eight million visitors came, including an estimated four million from Paris and the suburbs, another three million from the provinces, and a million foreigners. The exposition made a profit of between thirty and thirty-five million francs, which was a rarity for expositions.11

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Like the French empire itself, the leadership and organization of the colonial exposition was centered in Paris at the Ministry of Colonies, but it relied on the partly autonomous administrations of each colony. The task of funding the exposition fell to the French state, the City of Paris, and the participating colonies, both French and foreign.12 The organization and governance of the exposition was shared between the national government (through the Colonial Ministry) and the various colonial administrations. The central organization, overall design, and full responsibility for the metropolitan section fell to the Commissaire général, led by the military hero of Fashoda, Maréchal Hubert Lyautey.13 Within the parameters set by this central governing agency, the commissaires (commissions in charge of each colony’s participation at the exposition) came from within each colonial administration and had control over the contents of their own section.14 Within the structure of the exposition, where visitors could move quickly from one colony to the next, each colonial administration struggled to distinguish itself from the others. With all of the French empire and pieces of other empires represented in such a small space, each colony attempted to demonstrate why it was a unique and crucial part of Greater France. Food and taste were key elements of this persuasive demonstration. Various colonies used food and drink to distinguish themselves and their products from others, but the general exoticism of the exposition confused these messages. This chapter analyzes the use of food and taste at the colonial exposition to better understand the messages given by colonial administrations and explores the reception of these messages by visitors participating in a whirlwind tour of the colonial world. It demonstrates the centrality of food and drink to the colonial lobby’s articulation of Greater France at the exposition, and the limits to the acceptance of this message. I will first look at how food was used in the official central message of the exposition by analyzing those visual sources of the Musée permanent des colonies that still remain today at the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, housed in the building of the former colonial museum. This official synthesis, however, was not simply repeated throughout the exposition, and I will next look at how food and taste were used in the exhibits and restaurants hosted by various colonial administrations and the distinct portrayals of colonialism given by different colonies. I will also examine the significance of the presence of privately run restaurants and food concessions at the ECI. Although these concessionaries were regulated, their menus and advertisements were generally outside the control of the Commissaire général, and their use of generic exoticism further muddled the message of the exposition. Eating is a complex social and

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cultural activity and many factors affect how food is consumed and experienced, including dining settings, racial stereotypes, and possible reactions of disgust. These conditions reveal some real limitations on how the broader French public dining at the exposition consumed the food and the ideas presented to them by the colonial administration.

Food imagery at the Musée permanent des colonies The Musée permanent des colonies was the one building at the ECI built to last beyond the exhibition, and the only one “that represented both France and the colonies.”15 Many of the visual representations from the Musée permanent remain on view at the current Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, which is housed in the building of the former Musée permanent.16 The central role of food in the images displayed at the Musée permanent des colonies illuminates the centrality of food to the official view of the colonies displayed at the ECI. Unlike the other pavilions at the exposition, the Musée permanent was not built in an exotic architectural style, but was “simple, noble, very calm, very neutral.”17 This neutrality, perhaps the only approach acceptable for a building that was to represent France and the colonies, left the task of depicting the colonies to the artists who decorated the exterior and interior of the building. The exterior of the building is covered by an immense Beaux-Arts style bas-relief by Albert Janniot, a prominent Art Deco sculptor of the classical school.18 Janniot’s basrelief portrays the material contributions of the colonies to metropolitan France. At the center of the bas-relief, over the front entrance, metropolitan France is symbolized by an allegorical figure of Abundance, flanked by those of Peace and Prosperity, and surrounded by the grand ports of France.19 To her right are representatives of Asia, to her left those of Africa, on the west side of the building the Antilles, and on the east side, Oceania. All the principal figures “converge towards the center and therefore towards the metropole.”20 While inside the building, frescoes by Pierre Ducos de la Haille portray France’s contributions to the colonies as justice, peace, and liberty, Janniot’s bas-relief portrays the colonies as contributors of raw materials, the majority of which are foods.21 Although some aspects of the exposition emphasized how France had improved upon the colonies, food was most often used to demonstrate how the colonies provided and could provide goods to France. This reflects the key role food played in the colonial lobby’s ambitions for Greater France by 1931. The one exception to the stark materiality in Janniot’s work is

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Image 4  In Alfred Janniot’s bas-relief at the Permanent Museum of the Colonies, these Gabonese women seem to have an easy task of gathering food among the abundant fruit and fish. Jean Charbonneaux, Le bas-relief du Musée des colonies, 1931, photographer Jean Gilbret, sculpture Alfred Janniot (Paris: Librairie d’art Louis Reynaud, 1931), Plate 19. (Photo by David Almeida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.  Collection, The Wolfsonian– Florida International University.)

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the inclusion of art as an Indochinese contribution. For each colony portrayed, stereotypical figures with exaggerated racial features gather natural resources for France. While some pavilions at the exposition highlighted the work of the French in bringing forth the potential bounty of the colonies, Janniot’s bas-relief shows the colonies as naturally bountiful, as if France’s blessing is enough to keep the empire producing. The names of these products are printed in the scenes. This lexification objectifies the natural bounty shown, presenting these foods as commodities to be consumed by France. Janniot’s colonial figures are at work gathering this bounty. The image, however, is not of the intense labor of agricultural production, but of the easy gathering of naturally abundant food. The natural abundance of the colonies and the ease of gathering is clearly displayed in the portrayal of Gabon (Image 4). Two Gabonese women, scantily clad in a sarong that covers only the waist and adorned in jewelry, happily and peacefully gather fish, berries, and bananas. The fish cluster around a woman’s feet, peeking up as if waiting to be grasped, so anxious to be caught that they might simply jump into the basket. Above her, another woman gathers fruit from a tree flush with berries while a large bunch of bananas are ready to be picked and easily within her reach. A friendly tropical bird and playful monkey adorn the trees, emphasizing the natural and exotic setting. Gathering this food seems to be a pleasant activity. The women are not portrayed as skilled laborers, but as simple people who do not use tools, catching fish with their hands. In another image of African women, nature literally lends a hand, as a monkey hands the women an opened pod of cacao beans (Image 5). The clear message here is that the colonies are so bountiful that gathering excess food is hardly even labor, and that there is plenty to feed everyone. Higher up the wall, African men carry boxes to ships, presumably sending this bounty to France. As one follows the image up the wall from bottom to top, one sees a gendered division of labor, where women gather the food into baskets while the men above carry boxes of packaged goods to French ships. This journey upward also follows an evolutionary chain. At the bottom of the wall, monkeys, a symbol of the evolutionary state of nature, assist in the gathering process. Higher up the wall, packaged goods are carried to ships. Further along the wall, Indochinese fishermen are portrayed as more skilled than African gatherers, working together in an organized fashion to pull in a net full of fish (Image 6). Here again, fish are a key symbol of the natural abundance of the colonies. The net is so full with the catch that it stretches from one pillar to the next. The challenge portrayed here is not finding enough food to feed everyone, but simply of gathering enough strength to pull in the huge catch. In other scenes, the Indochinese are shown

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Image 5  In this section of Janniot’s bas-relief, a monkey helps collect cacao. Jean Charbonneaux, Le bas-relief du Musée des colonies, 1931, photographer Jean Gilbret, sculpture Alfred Janniot (Paris: Librairie d’art Louis Reynaud, 1931), Plate 4. (Photo by David Almeida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection, The Wolfsonian–Florida International University.)

catching fish in underwater baskets, sorting tea leaves, and picking peppercorns. The colonial body is always at work, but the work is of gathering, not of organized agriculture. Food as the symbol of colonial abundance is consistent throughout the bas-relief. Tunisian men pick grapes and Tunisian women gracefully carry jugs of wine. Kola nuts are gathered from the Ivory Coast, and sugar cane is cut and carried in images of Tahiti, Martinique, and Reunion. Greater France is portrayed as Abundance because her colonies are so fruitful. The message of the colonies as abundant suppliers of food to France continued inside the museum. The Section de synthèse of the museum included Michel Géo’s

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Image 6  In the Indochinese section of Janniot’s bas-relief, fishermen work together to bring in the plentiful catch. Jean Charbonneaux, Le bas-relief du Musée des colonies, 1931, photographer Jean Gilbret, sculpture Alfred Janniot (Paris: Librairie d’art Louis Reynaud, 1931), Plate 64. (Photo by David Almeida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.  Collection, The Wolfsonian– Florida International University.)

series of three oil paintings, “Principal Export Items of Plantbased Products.” Similar to Janniot’s bas-relief, Geo’s paintings show colonized peoples gathering abundant natural resources, with the names of these resources labeled on the painting. Again, this lexification commoditizes the natural materials. These include both food and non-food items, but the majority of the resources shown actively being gathered in the paintings are food. Unlike Janniot, Geo pictured different colonial peoples together, all gathering from the same abundant forest that miraculously produces manioc, bananas, coffee, rubber, and rice in one painting;22 oranges, wheat, olives, wine, cacao, dates, henna, tobacco, and cotton in another (Image 7);23 and tea, sugar, pineapples, cacao, lemongrass, rubber, and wood in a third (Image 8).24 Geo’s paintings reflect a vision of colonial food production that reflects the generic colonial other of cuisine coloniale. The

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Image 7  In Michel Géo’s series of paintings, diverse peoples of the French empire inhabit one lush forest full of commodities. Michel Géo, “Principal Export Items of Plant-based Products, panel 3.” (Photo by Daniel Arnaudet, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.)

paintings are specific about resources, but not about locations. The labor in the paintings is of gathering from the wild (though a fictional composite wild), not of agriculture. It is as if these lush colonies have so much food, they need France to help eat it and put it to good use. The few Musée permanent des colonies dioramas preserved at the current Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration also portray colonized peoples primarily as gatherers of food. The dioramas do not portray the overwhelming lushness of Janniot’s or Géo’s works, but they do use food as a symbol of abundance. In the “Vegetable and Fruits” diorama, flat images of Africans hold bowls of fruits and bunches of bananas in front of thatch huts. In front of them, three-dimensional bowls of fruit seem to leap out of the enclosed space toward the viewer. There is plenty to share. In the center of the image, a small child curls up in a man’s lap, hugging a large pineapple. Other dioramas highlight more food products. In one scene, a child gathers vanilla beans, evoking a pastoral day in the woods rather than child labor. In the “Coffee and Sugarcane” diorama, a three-dimensional Antillais man lifts a bundle of sugar cane, while behind him lie a long row of cane

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Image 8  In Michel Géo’s series of paintings, diverse peoples of the French empire inhabit one lush forest full of commodities. Michel Géo, “Principal Export Items of Plant-based Products: oranges, tobacco, peanuts, henna, carob, dates, olives, cocoa, cork.” (Photo by Daniel Arnaudet, © RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY.)

fields and a churning factory. This diorama shows food production as modern agriculture instead of the work of hunters and gatherers, showing the “civilizing” effects of France in converting commodities from raw to processed goods. Throughout the artwork of the Musée permanent, food was the central image of colonial contributions to metropolitan France, and gathering food was the main activity of colonized peoples. The overall message of these images was that the colonies were a bountiful source of easily accessible food and that more colonial development would help put these resources to good use for France. This Edenic portrayal of the colonies as simple abundant paradises was not universal throughout the exposition. The interiors of the individual colonial pavilions and private concessions were not controlled by the Commissaire général and they wavered from this narrative. In addition, the experience of eating carries much more complex cultural and social meanings than does the image of food. Exoticism, racism, and disgust all affected how food was presented and consumed and how exposition visitors experienced the colonies.

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Image 9  The Algerian pavilion at the 1931 Colonial Exposition was a replica of the Sidi-Abderrahmane Mosque of Algiers. Postcard, Algérie—Pavillon coté sud Algérien, Charles Montaland, architect (Paris: Braun & Cie, 1931). (Photo by David Almeida, The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca.)

North Africa: Near and far Perhaps nowhere in the exposition were food and drink more central than in the Algerian pavilion. The pavilion appeared from the outside as a replica of the Sidi-Abderrahmane Mosque of Algiers with a minaret dominating the landscape (Image 9), but the tribute to Muslim religion and culture was limited to the exterior of the building.25 The Algerian pavilion is a clear example of the division analyzed by Patricia Morton as architecture that “represented the colonies on the exterior as if unchanged and still savage, and on the interior displayed the didactic exhibits of civilization’s progress.”26 In the Algerian pavilion, this progress was represented predominately by food and wine. The grand entryway of the pavilion was “consecrated to the glorification of Algerian agriculture.”27 The Algerian administration’s goal was to attract crowds to their pavilion by striking “the imagination with symbolic and decorative spectacle and with the agricultural richness” of Algeria.28 The central piece of this spectacle was a luminous fountain with “sheets of liquid alternating colors between amber and crimson” flowing among massive columns covered in golden grape vines welcoming the visitor to the “royaume du vin.” Flanking the giant wine fountain on all four sides of the pavilion were representations of dates, olives, figs, pomegranates, and oranges intermixed with gold and cornucopias, demonstrating that “these delicious things were also the source of wealth.”29 This symbolic spectacle was one that attempted to convince French visitors of the

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success of the mise en valeur of Algeria. It asserted that as a result of French investment and the hard work of the settler population, modern Algeria had become “an immense vineyard.” The visitor was to see that “wine, it is the future of Algeria, it is the great work which France has given this land of sun, which is also the land of thirst.”30 Colonial novelist Louis Bertrand, in his description and critique, summarized the whole pavilion as the “triumph of Bacchus.”31 Moving past this sumptuous foyer, visitors entered the great hall dedicated to Algeria’s agriculture where the theme of abundance continued with idyllic scenes of farm life followed by a large display containing various products exported from Algeria: “flour, semolina—the semolina used to make the savory couscous—food spreads, fruit and vegetable preserves, a variety of olive oils, scented plants, geraniums and roses of Boufarik, medicinal plants,” and cotton.32 The order of Bertrand’s description, with all the food items listed first, suggests that food dominated the display. Facing these products were five dioramas portraying the harvest of dates, a village market, a collage with a white bull and reddish lambs, the picking of olives, and a farm in the Haute-plateaux.33 The Algerian government clearly wanted not only to demonstrate the bounty of the land and the quality of the food products, but also to highlight an image of Algerian agriculture as a “bucolic” paradise.34 The Algerian pavilion presented not colonial oppression or the extraction of resources, but happy workers on beautiful farms. By presenting Algeria as fruitful farmland, they were not only celebrating the work of the settlers of the past hundred years, but also trying to attract new ones. The bounty shown in these displays is quite different from that shown at the Musée permanent, because the Algerian bounty shown in the pavilion was the product of French farming. It did not spring effortlessly from the earth just waiting to be gathered. In the Algerian pavilion as well as in others, visual imagery of food and drink preceded tasting experiences. Off the great hall devoted to food was another room dedicated to “the great divinity of the place: wine omnipresent and omnipotent.”35 In the front of the room was another diorama demonstrating the wine-making process from the picking of grapes to the aging of wine. Next to the viticulture display was the most popular part of the Algerian exhibit, the wine-tasting room. The tasting bar was organized by the Confederations of Winemakers of the three Algerian departments in collaboration with the chambers of commerce, at the request of the Algerian commissaire. Vintages were selected by a committee of representatives from the agriculture and commerce commissions, and 300 hectoliters were shipped to Paris for tasting at the exposition.36 A large inscription called on visitors to “ask for Algerian wines at your wine merchant or your grocer, here you can taste them for free.”37 These

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promoters recognized that Algeria’s first wines had earned their reputation for “too high alcohol content, a lack of bouquet and, finally, a slightly bitter taste.” They hoped, however, that by tasting the best wines Algeria now had to offer, exposition visitors would recognize the progress made and consider Algerian wine on par with the best of Bourgogne and Bordeaux.38 While the chambers of commerce and the Confederation of Winemakers clearly intended first and foremost to raise the exchange value of Algerian wine in Europe, tasting quality Algerian wine also played into the broader message of the pavilion. Tasting is an internal experience of the senses that is unique to each taster. While the visual images of food and wine in the Algerian pavilion conveyed a clear message of abundance, success, and progress, the experience of tasting the wine provided a physical connection to Algeria. The act of tasting also “directs attention outward to the object tasted,” which can be analyzed or judged by the taster.39 Tasting has an objective element, and the wine-tasting bar provided the French an opportunity to judge for themselves the quality of Algerian wine. Whether or not many visitors actually started buying more Algerian wine, the tasting of quality wine from Algeria was a significant symbolic experience that may have impacted their view of Algeria’s place within Greater France. In her work on champagne and the development of Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) regulations, Kolleen Guy has demonstrated how winemakers in Champagne and other French regions shaped French national identity to include regional traditions and products. Central to Guy’s study is the concept of terroir, “the holistic combination in a vineyard environment of soil, climate, topography, and ‘the soul’ of the wine producer,” which is often “seen as the source of the distinctive wine-style characteristics at the heart of fine champagne.”40 By the First World War, “wines (and later other agricultural specialties) could claim a sacred place, rooted in one of the most sacred of all French possessions—the soil.”41 Algeria was unique among the French colonies: It was near France, politically integrated as three departments, and home to a European settler population with French citizenship. Yet, its place in the French national image was complicated. It was also exoticized, deeply foreign, and a place where French citizens remained the minority. Algerian soil, therefore, had an ambiguous place in French terroir. By filling the pavilion with images of vineyards and wheat fields, and featuring the highest quality Algerian wines, the Algerian commissaire was making an argument that Algeria was French soil and, therefore, deserved inclusion in the French nation. If wine-producing soil was such a deep part of French national identity, then quality Algerian wine was a strong argument for French Algeria’s inclusion in the nation.

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The colonial exposition took place during a particularly challenging time for winegrowers, both Algerian and metropolitan French. During the 1920s, Algerian winegrowers profited from “a long growing season, lower labor costs, and favorable freight rates,” and the French purchased most of the 8 million hectoliters produced annually in Algeria throughout the 1920s. In 1928, both France and Algeria produced above-average harvests, causing the price of wine to fall 33 percent in 1931. Algerian wine production went from an annual average of 8.5 million hectoliters between 1920 and 1927 to 18 million hectoliters in 1932.42 This overproduction and price decline led to stiff competition for the French wine market at the same time that a period of global protectionist tariffs decreased French exports dramatically. Exports of French wine dropped from 1,382,000 hectoliters to 703,000 hectoliters between 1929 and 1932. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, French winegrowers lobbied for tariffs and quotas on Algerian wine and were consistently denied them. Finally in March 1931, just two months before the exposition opened, the government began to regulate the quality of wines. Many of the targeted poor-quality wines were Algerian. On July  4, 1931, the Chamber of Deputies passed the Statut de viticulture, which among other measures imposed a ten-year ban on new plantings. This prohibition disproportionately affected Algeria, where most vineyards were young and winegrowers wanted to expand.43 So the image of Algeria as French soil was not only a portrayal of colonial ideology to the general public, but also a specific political argument about tariffs and restrictions on Algeria’s winegrowers. While French winegrowers argued that Algeria was foreign, the Algerian administration, the Algerian chambers of commerce, and the federations of winemakers had an economic interest in French politicians (and therefore their constituents) believing that Algerian wine was French wine. While there is no way to measure the exact effectiveness of the wine-tasting room and the Algerian pavilion in convincing the public of the French identity of Algerian wine, legislative history demonstrates that it was at least not a clear failure. Despite persistent calls from French winegrowers for a cap on Algerian wine imports, the Chamber of Deputies never supported the proposal.44 Those visitors who chose to continue their “tour of Algeria” after the winetasting climax next saw a small room where Algerian tobacco products were sold, and entered the forest room where they learned about the many products made from Algerian wood. Visitors then moved on to the livestock section, which emphasized cattle and sheep and contained window displays of wools, leathers, and skins. Another room highlighted Algeria’s mining industries. Before reaching the very end of the pavilion, most visitors probably at least gave

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a glance to the hand-painted earthen pottery and tiles that were presented as the specialty of native Algerian artisans. Upon leaving the pavilion, they passed the central patio dedicated to “archeology and Muslim arts.” There they found native Algerian women weaving rugs, and plaster reproductions of antique statues in the corners.45 This patio served as a sort of transition back to the exterior of the pavilion and its exotic environs. The Algerian pavilion was situated in the North African section, near the Tunisian and Moroccan souks (markets) and exotic restaurants. These weaving women, producers of craft products on a small scale, moved the visitor from the masculine abundant farms and vineyards promoted in the interior of the pavilion to a feminized and orientalized view of the Maghreb on the exterior.

Image 10 This poster from the Algerian centennial celebration sends the same message as the interior of the Algerian pavilion, that Algeria is a land of abundant harvest ready to feed France. Henri Dormoy, “1830–1930, Algeria, a country of great agricultural production,” poster, 1930. (Kharbine-Tapabor/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)

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Inside the pavilion, visitors saw an image of what Algerian administrators hoped modern Algeria would become: a land of the abundant harvest, where wine flowed and grains, olives, fruit, and livestock were plentiful. This harvest was portrayed as a “living testimony of the French success in French North Africa.”46 This message was not unique to the exposition; it had also been highlighted in the centennial celebrations of French Algeria the previous year.47 This poster (Image 10) from the centennial celebration sends the same message as the interior of the Algerian pavilion, that Algeria is a land of abundant harvest ready to feed France. Note that in the poster, just as in the interior of the pavilion, the farmer who brings forth the harvest is a white European settler. The bounty here is expressed through agricultural fields as far as the eye can see. The European farmer stands proudly over his land. The native Algerian man, presumably a worker on the European man’s farm, is mostly obstructed from view. The scene looks like it could be a French farm. The native Algerian and the white farmer’s hat are the only visual clues that the scene is of Algeria and not of France. Through imagery such as this, the Algerian administration was clear in its message that Algeria’s abundance was only possible under French colonial dominance. While other colonial administrators used food as a way of portraying the alluring exoticism of their colonies, the Algerian pavilion used food to demonstrate that Algeria, under French rule for over a century, had become French. In his official guide to the exposition, André Demaison noted this connection at the conclusion of his summary of the Algerian pavilion: When the Germans say of a man that he is as happy “as God in France,” they wish to make an allusion to good white bread and to good wine that we don’t find there [in Germany]. If Algeria, with its three departments, is not directly a part of France, then one must add to that adage from across the Rhine: “Happy as God in Algeria!”48

For Demaison, good wine and bread proved that Algeria had become French. Demaison’s adage points to the cultural belief in the “you are what you eat” principle as it applies not just to individuals but to nationality and citizenship. Wine and white bread make the French people French, and these products are the best in the world because they stem from French soil. Portraying Algeria as a fruitful farmland producing good wine and wheat was an argument about its inherent French identity. While the interior of the Algerian pavilion had the greatest focus on familiar food staples, wine and wheat, compared with anywhere in the exposition, the rest of the North African section also featured many food and tasting opportunities.

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The striking difference was that throughout the rest of the section, most of the food highlighted North Africa’s difference from France and intensified the visitor’s experience of exoticism. The North African section featured Tunisian and Moroccan restaurants and cafés hosted by their respective governments. In addition, Tunisia and Morocco each constructed a souk, or North African marketplace. The souks were a popular attraction and the biggest draw to the North African section. By 1931, souks had become an anticipated part of North African exhibits, reoccurring at colonial expositions since the 1900 Universal Exposition.49 These replicas of markets featured North Africans brought to France to act out roles as artisans, merchants, and food vendors. Food, the spectacle of its creation, the smell of spices, and the taste of something new were central to the exotic illusion created in the souks. Although both souks attracted crowds, the Tunisian souk seems to have received the most praise for creating the illusion of having left France and entered Tunisia. It featured forty-five boutiques including serpent charmers, perfume merchants, leather crafts, ceramics, rugs, pastries, and candies.50 In L’Illustration, Paul-Emile Cadilhac described the Tunisian souk as giving “the illusion of a piece of an indigenous village transported miraculously from there to here.” He suggested going at night when one could enjoy the smells “of cuisine soaked in the oil of nostalgia of the old Orient.”51 The official report on Tunisia’s participation at the exposition also highlighted the central role of food in the Tunisian souk. Inside the stalls of the souks were “Tunisians in national costume who make ‘ftairi’ or beignets, ‘briques’ (poached eggs in pastry), all sorts of confections, from rahat loukoum to baked dates and all the types of nougat.” “The pans were in full activity, and the smells of cooking and of hot olive oil added to the picturesque effect.”52 Even the Tunisian administration’s description of the foods in the final report emphasized their exotic nature by using Tunisian names for some of the items. This was not the case in their description of other items for sale. The perceived authenticity of these exotic tastes was significant. In both of these descriptions, food, its taste, and smells are central in creating a more intense, authentic, and travel-like experience. In stark contrast to the Algerian pavilion, where food images and wine tastings were used to emphasize Algeria’s similarities with rural France, in the Tunisian souk, food was used to add to the exoticism and foreignness of the experience. Unfamiliar tastes, and the smells associated with them, made Tunisia distinct from France. While many of the exotic aspects of the exposition such as dance performances could be watched from a physical and psychological distance, walking through the Tunisian souk was a multisensory embodied experience.

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Image 11  At the Tunisian restaurant, guests sat on low wooden stools. Pierre Paraf, “L’Afrique du Nord,” L’Illustration, May 23, 1931, 49. (PixPlanete.)

The exoticism of the souks was carried over into the Tunisian and Moroccan restaurants and cafés. At the Tunisian restaurant, one could taste Tunisian foods, similar to those offered in the souk while seated on a terrace, often while watching performances by singers, dancers, and serpent charmers.53 As demonstrated in this photo (Image 11) from L’Illustration, the Tunisian restaurant attempted to make the experience more participatory by having the guests sit on low wooden stools constructed as boxes. The visitors in the photo sit on these low seats, watching a performance. The photo reveals only one item from the restaurant, which appears to be a cup of North African tea or coffee. The waiter looking back at the camera wears a fez and Tunisian attire.54 Although this seating may seem a small detail, it helped to connect the restaurant to the souk, as the patrons, in even the small way of sitting on a crate, took part in playing as if they were in another place. Through these aspects of physical immersion, the

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apparatus of the exposition took control of the visitors’ bodies, taking visitors out of their normal embodied dining practice. Eating is always an embodied act, but these restaurants that changed the dining experience by involving the body in different ways engaged the visitor more fully than those that maintained the normal dining structure. The Moroccan commissaire took special attention to make sure that their Café maure and Restaurant marocain served authentic Moroccan food. They brought to Paris Ahmed el Hadj, who ran a similar garden restaurant in Morocco and was one of the very few “indigenous” restaurateurs to run a restaurant at the colonial exposition.55 He brought with him a Moroccan staff including two men to work the café, two to work at the restaurant, a singer, three musicians, a “water carrier” in Arab costume to wander around caring for the gardens, and, most significantly, “three women in charge of the kitchen (because in Morocco, the preparation of meals is reserved exclusively for women).” The restaurant claimed to serve “all the recipes of Moroccan cuisine, the most well known and most sought after of all of North Africa.”56 These dishes included couscous, stuffed meats, and olive tagines.57 The drink menu featured “only beverages permitted by the Muslim religion; that is to say, coffee, strongly scented mint tea, lemonades, and natural and mineral water. No champagne, nor wine of any sort.”58 This absence of alcohol contributed to the level of authenticity of the restaurant, and likely meant that the restaurant lost some proceeds in favor of adherence to the dictates of Islam. This acknowledgment of Muslim prohibitions was in stark contrast to the wine tasting in the Algerian pavilion. Tunisia and Morocco hosted pavilions alongside the souks, restaurants, and cafes. The pavilions followed the normal exotic exterior/didactic interior pattern and promoted the mise en valeur of these colonies, highlighting the natural resources they sent to the metropole.59 The Tunisian pavilion had sections on agriculture, public works, education, finances, and interior services.60 The Moroccan administration was explicit about having two concepts side by side in its presentation. The first, and most dominant, was the “picturesque and touristic,” highlighting that despite European intervention, Morocco had maintained her “original allure.” The second aspect, in the interior of the pavilion, showed “modern Morocco,” demonstrating the “work of colonization.”61 For both Tunisia and Morocco, exoticism worked together with the economic benefits of the empire to portray these colonies as essential to Greater France. Unlike Algeria, which was portrayed as a natural extension of France, Morocco and Tunisia strove to be essential because they were so different from metropolitan France. They offered an orientalized exotic experience popular among the

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French public while still providing an economic benefit. These two approaches also worked together to sell the products of the colonies. Orientalized images of North Africans were popular in selling colonial and metropolitan products, so combining a living version of these images with the promotion of the products of their land was a compelling way to advertise them to the exposition visitors.62 Moroccan and Tunisian administrations were also capitalizing on popular interest in North African cuisine. Although the vast majority of private exotic restaurants made no attempt at authenticity, three concessionaires sold North African cuisine at the exposition.63 These were the only private concessions at the exposition that claimed any sort of authentic colonial cuisine. In fact, they were the only ones whose cuisine was limited to one colonial region. This presence of North African cuisine among private concessions shows that there was a market for this food at the exposition. In addition, the owner of the restaurant at the mosquée de Paris attempted to open an Algerian restaurant in the North African section of the exposition, but his requests were blocked by the Tunisian and Moroccan administrations that did not want to face more competition for their own restaurants and cafés.64 Maurice Esper, who applied to open a kiosk selling Moroccan sweets and beverages, was also blocked by the Moroccan administration.65 The desire of these vendors to sell North African food and the efforts of the Moroccan and Tunisian administrations to block them show an awareness that there was commercial potential for the sale of North African cuisine at the exposition. The greater marketability of authentic North African food was likely due in part to the increased French exposure to North African food through the many European settlers who came and went from this area. Michelin’s 1930 guide to North Africa generally suggested avoiding natives, except in Fez, Morocco. In Fez, tourists were encouraged to visit the souks of the old town and try various Arab pastries.66 As the previous chapter’s analysis demonstrates, however, this interest in North African cuisine seems to have been limited to dining out in exotic restaurants, as it was not included in the recipe collections of home-cooking magazines. The idea of authentic Moroccan and Tunisian food was interesting to the French as an exotic experience that mimicked the allure of travel, but the flavors, dishes, and ingredients of North Africa were not integrated into French cuisine or even into the category of popular cuisine coloniale dishes. The Tunisian and Moroccan administrations used food—its tastes and smells—to emphasize the great cultural distance of their colonies from France. In their recreations of souks and exotic restaurants, they hoped to attract tourists to come and see the real thing. In contrast, the Algerian administration

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chose wine tastings and scenes of wheat farms to make Algeria appear close to France—nearly on French soil. While most analysis of the colonial exposition tends to lump all the North African colonies together,67 looking closely at the use of food and drink and the experience of taste in the North African section reveals clear distinctions between the messages of the Algerian section and those of its more recently colonized North African neighbors.

Tropical tasting bars The Guadeloupian and Martiniquais commissaires, like their Algerian counterparts, used tasting rooms to sell their products to European consumers, but these tasting rooms were quite different. The atmosphere of the Antillean tasting rooms was more like that of the souks and the Tunisian restaurant, using native servers and an exotic atmosphere to create the illusion of being far from France. The interiors of the Martiniquais and Guadeloupian pavilions, although smaller than the Algerian one, were structured in much the same way. They focused on displaying food from the islands and ended in tasting bars. On their way through the Guadeloupe pavilion toward its tasting bar, visitors toured one room tracing Guadeloupian history, followed by two exposition rooms dedicated to food products including sugar, rum, cocoa, coffee, and fruits.68 Instead of fake fruit in dioramas as was used in the Musée permanent des colonies, fresh Guadeloupian fruit, imported periodically, was the focal point of these displays. The rooms were designed so that visitors would experience the fruits through sight and smell before having an opportunity to taste them. The planners of the pavilion intended to create this multisensory experience, claiming in the Rapport général that “the pineapples mixed their somber shade with the vibrant colors of the juicy mangoes” as they lay alongside “bananas, oranges, limes, grapefruits, sapodilla, and coconuts” in wicker baskets. The fruits “imbued the air with their varied scents.”69 After this sensory tour, visitors had probably built up quite a craving for Guadeloupe’s tropical foods and drinks. Most commentators described a tasting bar experience that included not only the taste of rum, coffee, and bananas but also the allure of tropical cocktails and Creole women. Demaison described the tasting bar as the highlight of the Guadeloupian pavilion: “Approach the counters where the soft-spoken Creole women with bright and amusing smile, dressed in the local style . . . serve you chocolate, remarkable coffee, the liquors and the rum of their island, and her bananas which are to American

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bananas what a Bordeaux is to a Californian wine.”70 These were not just any Creole women. The Bulletin d’informations claimed that the Guadeloupian commissaire held a beauty contest to find the “most charming personnel” for its tasting bar. Visitors were encouraged to visit the pavilion and be served a real Guadeloupian “punch” by an “ambassadrice de la beauté antillaise.”71 L’lllustration commentator Maurice Larrouy described “incomparable cocktails of the Antilles” mixed by Mlle Elodie and Mlle Hortense thus: “They were made with a fine flower, with the most pure flavor of sugar cane, a rum more clear than crystal, lighter than spring water.”72 The presence of actual Guadeloupian women as servers contributed to the perceived authenticity of the tasting experience, and therefore heightened the emphasis on the value of purchasing an authentic Guadeloupian product. The emphasis on purity speaks not only to the quality of the product, but also to an image of Guadeloupe as an innocent tropical paradise. The exoticism of the Guadeloupian tasting bar served a dual purpose. It contributed to the allure of Guadeloupe itself, drawing visitors into the pavilion and sending them out having experienced the fantasy of the islands. It worked as an interactive advertisement for Guadeloupe as a tourism destination and the unique role of Guadeloupe as a part of Greater France. The exotic allure was also a way of promoting Guadeloupe’s food products being imported into France. The Guadeloupian commissaires wanted the experience of tasting these products in the pavilion to lead consumers to attempt to return to this experience by choosing Guadeloupian products. Guadeloupe’s banana industry was in competition with that of the Americas. Guadeloupian coffee was in direct competition with that of other French colonies as well as with international imports, and Guadeloupian rum was most directly in competition with that from Martinique.73 Having tasted these products, visitors could purchase them in the recreated village just outside the pavilion. The Guadeloupian tasting bar was in many ways a multisensory and interactive version of popular images used in French advertising. Hale has described how French entrepreneurs depicted colonized peoples in their advertisements in the roles they wanted them to fulfill, as soldiers, “agricultural laborers, craftsmen, household servants, and entertainers.”74 These were the same roles played by the colonized peoples at the colonial exposition. The number of images of African and Caribbean peoples used to market French and colonial products increased after the First World War, partly because of the popularity of the Senegalese riflemen. The most famous of these images is the Banania breakfast drink’s trademark image of a West African soldier, but other popular images of blacks in

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advertising in the interwar period included domestic servants and entertainers. For example, in 1923, the label for Café Négrita “showed a black showgirl seated on a crescent moon, holding out a cup of steaming coffee. Pierrot the clown was climbing a ladder, hoping to reach her.”75 Being served Guadeloupian food and drink products by beautiful Caribbean women in colorful local costume fused the popular images of blacks as domestic servants and entertainers into a multisensory experience. In this way, Guadeloupian administrators distinguished Guadeloupian products from their competition while connecting their products to a popular tradition of exotic images of Caribbean peoples in French advertising.76 Other colonies also used the exotic experience of their tasting bars as a way of promoting their products. The pavilion for French Polynesia included a three-story tasting bar with a terrace built in a style to replicate a Tahitian hut where one could taste and buy vanilla, pineapples, and coffee.77 Here the promotion was not only of Tahitian products, but of Tahiti itself. In the 1920s, the Oceania tourism committee was formed, which worked to build a network to bring French tourists to Polynesia.78 The creators of the pavilion for French Somaliland also emphasized the exoticism of tasting its coffee by decorating the tasting bar in a “completely oriental style.” Behind the bar was a large mural of the procession of the Queen of Sheba, and the room was decorated with oriental carpets, prayer rugs, and a metal hookah.79 There were multiple opportunities to taste coffee from various French and foreign colonies at the exposition.80 The French Somaliland pavilion’s oriental décor was a way of distinguishing Somali coffee from other types of coffee available in France, and also from the other coffees at the exposition. By tasting the products of these colonies in exotic settings, visitors to the Guadeloupe, Martinique, Tahiti, and French Somaliland exhibits not only experienced the exoticism of these far-off lands through taste, but also connected this exotic experience to specific products to be purchased at the exposition and in the future.

Racial hierarchy and cannibalistic dining in black Africa In addition to the Tunisian and Moroccan restaurants already discussed, there were many other “restaurants exotiques” at the exposition. These colonialthemed restaurants were sponsored by various administrations and located in their respective sections. Colonial administrations hosting restaurants included Indochina, French West Africa (AOF), Madagascar, Cameroon and Togo,

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French Equatorial Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.81 At the exposition, many other dining options competed with these colonial restaurants, including a variety of privately run restaurants and concession stands. Most of these private restaurants served typical French foods and street vendor fare. There were popular and upscale restaurants, bars, cafés, and many kiosks serving beverages, sandwiches, crepes, waffles, and other meals and snacks.82 Despite the press and promotional attention given to the exotic restaurants, most exposition visitors ate at these more familiar concessions. Commentator André Dahl complained that most of the French at the exposition were eating such low-class foods as sauerkraut, sausages, and sandwiches. “I am not close to forgetting the odor of acidic cabbage and grease,” he lamented to Paris-Soir readers. “I had thought that in France we ate well; that we talked about cuisine. This is not true.”83 Some of the foreign powers, including Italy and Holland, also hosted restaurants, some featuring both the cuisine of the imperial power and that of its colonies. For example, the Guide officiel suggested dining at the Netherlands exhibit where one could choose between a Dutch and an “Indian” restaurant. The Dutch restaurant served French cuisine and a few Dutch national dishes. In the restaurant indien, visitors could taste the “spicy dishes and aromatic drinks of the indigènes,” including the restaurant’s specialty, “table of rice”—composed of ten dishes from the “eastern world.”84 Dining on this generically “eastern” meal featuring ten different dishes seems to mirror the accelerated travel theme that was the spirit of the exposition. Just as the visitors could walk from section to section traveling around the world in a day, they could order an assortment of dishes and eat their way around the world as well. The meal also reflects the vaguely defined “oriental” other that was referenced in the most popular dishes of cuisine coloniale. With so many other dining options present and quite popular, eating at one of the official French colonial restaurants was a choice that reflected a desire to experience tastes from the colonies. Colonial administrations took advantage of this opportunity to present select aspects of their colonies to the French public. The West African restaurant was one of the most popular, especially for banquets and meetings.85 It offered limited “indigenous dishes” including chicken and peanuts in palm oil, fruits from Guinea, and chocolate and coffee from the Ivory Coast among other choices.86 It advertised prix fixe meals, an “American bar,” a grand terrace under the trees, and African dancers.87 The general report of the West African commissaire highlighted the exotic ambiance of the restaurant and credited it as contributing to the restaurant’s success (Image 12).88

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Image 12  The French West African restaurant at the Colonial Exposition had an exotic exterior. Postcard, “Palais de l’A. O. F.—Le restaurant et sa pièce d’eau” (Paris: Braun & Cie, 1931). (Photo by David Almeida, The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Gift of Francis Xavier Luca and Clara Helena Palacio Luca.)

A common theme among journalists who wrote about dining at the exposition was that eating in the colonial restaurants created a more travel-like experience than did the rest of the exposition. “To eat that, it’s to forget one’s homeland in order to profit from another,” one commentator pronounced after dining at the Dutch Indian restaurant. She explained that seeing the exposition just makes one feel like one is in an illusion, but eating makes it seem like one has really been there.89 Andre Geiger, writing for L’lllustration, described how a multisensory experience, including “savoring” Arab dishes and coffee while listening to the “guttural sounds” of Arab songs, made him feel like he was no longer in Paris.90 While walking through the exposition, one could still see the Parisian trees surrounding the occasional potted palm, and even if the Paris skyline was hidden, the next pavilion could almost always be seen. There was always the sight, sound, and smell of the European crowds. In this setting of so many colonies so close together, where visitors quickly passed from one to another, colonial administrations took advantage of the opportunity of offering a meal to hold visitors still within their colony. While sitting in a restaurant with exotic décor, listening to the colonized perform music, and tasting and smelling new foods, visitors could imagine that they were actually in a faraway land. The experience and the food was most often not even remotely authentic, but that hardly mattered to someone who had never visited the location in question or previously tasted the cuisine. Even if these and other reporters were exaggerating their actual experience, their expectation that taste should take them to another place remains significant.

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Image 13  From the interior, this “restaurant nègre” looked similar to a typical French restaurant, except for the waiter. “Un déjeuner au restaurant nègre,” in Paul-Emile Cadilhac, “Promenade à travers les cinq continents,” L’Illustration, May 23, 1931, 73. (PixPlanete.)

This far-off exotic land conjured in restaurants was one of stark racial hierarchy, where white Frenchmen governed over indigenous populations. This hierarchy was reflected throughout the exposition as indigenous workers and performers entertained European visitors, and it was starkly on display in the exotic restaurants. In some restaurants, such as the Tunisian restaurant and café discussed above, visitors played at participating in the foreign culture by sitting on low stools in the atmosphere of the souk. Most of the other exotic restaurants, especially those representing France’s Sub-Saharan African colonies, had guests play the role of well-off, aloof, colonial lords. French diners at these restaurants sat at formal tables, were served by an indigenous wait staff, and sometimes watched indigenous performers. This vision of empire is shown in a sketch from L’lllustration, captioned “a lunch at the black restaurant,” showing a welldressed couple sitting at a table draped in the typical checkered tablecloth of a French café and being served by a black waiter wearing a fez (Image 13). It is unclear which restaurant this scene depicts, as it is titled “restaurant nègre” in the caption. It could be referring to the restaurant of AOF, or to one of the cafés hosted by various AOF members such as Cameroon or Senegal.91 At this “restaurant nègre,” although “natives” served the food, the kitchen, dining atmosphere, and table manners were European. These distinctions made the experience familiar and provided a feeling of trust and safety, displacing

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potential disgust reactions, despite the exotic décor, indigenous servers, and new food. Exposition guidebook author, Demaison, guided his readers to eat at the Indochinese restaurant, citing an African proverb that “ ‘men who eat the same dishes finish with the same saliva.’ We don’t know the men of a country well unless we sit at their table.”92 But, of course, it was not really their table at which visitors would sit. Demaison was not calling for visitors to actually sit at the tables of the Indochinese, but instead at the tables of restaurants under the control of French administrators where they could be served by Indochinese cooks and waiters. Most French diners tried exotic foods out of curiosity, not out of any desire to “finish with the same saliva.” The exotic restaurants at the colonial exposition provided an experience where visitors could imagine themselves traveling to the colonies not as equals being hosted by indigenes, but as privileged colonizers being served by indigenes in restaurants. They could feel they had a close and intimate experience of the culture because they had eaten the food, but without the necessity of getting too close to the colonized peoples. The trope of cannibalism came up often, usually in passing, in articles discussing the indigenous presence or eating at the exposition. The Bulletin d’information excitedly announced that “authentic cannibals” from Africa were expected at the exposition.93 Discussion of cannibalism at the exposition points to a hierarchy among the colonized peoples on display. While many, especially Algerians, were shown as peoples on their way to assimilation, the presence of “authentic cannibals” suggests that there were some indigenous peoples, in this case a group of black Africans, who were too savage for assimilation. The Western stereotype of the African cannibal served to further distance the French from culinary association with black Africans.94 This connection of black Africans with cannibalism is part of the reason why exposition visitors had a higher sensitivity toward—and more disgust reactions against—Sub-Saharan African food. The black African restaurants served very few African dishes, and even then they favored those with recognizable ingredients such as the ubiquitous chicken in peanut sauce. The mention of cannibalism in discussions of dining in Sub-Saharan African–themed restaurants often mocked not only Africans but also French diners who sought some level of exoticism in a meal. During the exposition, Paris-soir published a short comic story about a French couple from the southwest who were disappointed that their meal at the Madagascar restaurant was not very exotic, as they were served pâté like that made in their hometown of Périgueux. They had hoped perhaps, the author speculates, for “a premium man-chop with pineapple.”95 Here the exotic desires of the couple are ridiculed

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by the combination of the symbolic fruit of the tropics with the assumption that African cuisine should include a “man-chop.” The food that bears similarity to a regional French dish is rejected as inauthentic and disappointing, while the couple is portrayed, instead, as seeking only confirmation of their conception of the stereotypical African cannibal. The joke mocks both the notion that Madagascar could have a cuisine worth sharing and the expected cannibalistic nature of the exotic spectacle of the exposition. In another satirical article in Paris-soir, Raymond Baudouin, a gastronomic journalist, also drew on the image of the cannibal by focusing on the butchery and sale of human flesh in the context of the exposition. Baudouin’s article, “The anthropophagist table and its supply,” appeared under the heading “Gastronomy at the Colonial Exposition.” In it Baudouin describes his clearly fictional wanderings from the West African restaurant to the menagerie of the exposition, which Baudouin claimed was like the La Villette market (Paris’s famous slaughter house and meat market) where the exotic restaurants came to get their meat. He then tells of an encounter with a hunter seeking meat for the exotic restaurants, who asked him where an anthropophagic butcher could be found. Later in his tale, Baudouin flees the scene of the menagerie when he hears the chef yell for “a white for the evening’s soup.”96 The scene is typical of the “colonial carnivalesque” as the hunting cannibal interrupts only briefly the European-dominant order of the exposition.97 Through the ridiculous notion of an African hunter seeking wild game and human flesh in Paris to supply the exotic restaurants, the story makes a mockery of the idea that there could be such a thing as African cuisine worth tasting. For Baudouin, African cuisine can be conjured only in stereotypes, not actually sampled and critiqued, as a gastronomic writer would do of regional or even foreign cuisines. More than just mocking and dismissing African cuisine, Baudouin’s article portrayed French diners at the colonial exposition as willing and even eager participants in the fantastical cannibalistic restaurant scene. The black hunter who asked Baudouin for the recommendation of a cannibalistic butcher described the following supply problem thus: We will arrive, perhaps, at supplying ourselves, for according to what I saw in Paris, young and pretty white girls are not in shortage. But our clientele, those that we count on having, the whites of “the bad cults,” they prefer blacks, if I judge by the success of Josephine Baker. But it is impossible to bring now nègres and négresses who would consent to being eaten, because by the time “the herd” arrived, the Exposition would be finished.98

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Just as the African cannibals are feared for their desire to consume the whites, so the French consumption of the spectacle of the exotic other is portrayed as cannibalistic. In this piece, the racial boundaries between the French and the Africans are solidified through the use of the racial terms “white” and “black” to define the eater and the food in each version of the imagined parallel cannibalistic acts. Playing on the fear of black male sexual aggression, “beautiful white girls” are presented as the ideal food of blacks. In a reversal of that fear, Baudouin portrays whites as also lusting to consume the black body. In this case, the white male desire is epitomized in the popularity of Josephine Baker, so often pictured wearing a skirt of bananas—a metonym for the black female body as exotic fruit ready to be devoured. So while the divisions between black and white are solidified in the text as separate categories who consume the other, the moralistic distinction between the two is erased as the cannibalistic nature of the French consumption of exotic spectacle is exposed. The trope of the African cannibal maintains racial boundaries within culinary exoticism, while the metaphor of French cannibalism describes the consuming nature of the empire. The appeal of exotic food was not at all universal. Disgust, cultural discomfort, and racial stereotypes were real boundaries. These boundaries were sometimes breached through the familiar setting of the restaurant, through clear racial hierarchies, and through mediating and simplifying exotic foods to fit French-style meals. The broader rejection of truly dining together with colonial peoples—revealed in the reoccurring references to cannibalism—shows the limitations of the concept of Greater France.

Private concessionaires and the generic exotic colonial Despite the attempts of some colonial administrators to use food to distinguish themselves from other colonies—whether through emphasis on production, assimilation, culinary authenticity, exoticism, or acting out a racial hierarchy— this message of distinction and difference was undermined by other elements of the exposition that were experienced as a celebration of a generically exotic colonial other. The overall space of the exposition itself contributed to this mixing of colonial messages. Lyautey and his colleagues tried to make this exposition more authentic and educational than colonial expositions of the past, but as Morton has argued, despite Lyautey’s “sober, edifying goals, the colonial exposition was popularly understood in the tradition of fairs and carnivals,

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transgressive sites where visitors could jettison their normative social roles and indulge in ordinarily taboo activity.”99 The Colonial Ministry and colonial administrations did not have total control over the experience of visiting the exposition. One key element they had only very limited control over was the role of concessionaires. These private vendors, unaffiliated with the colonial administrations, sold a variety of concessions including the majority of food and drink at the exposition, and their use of a generic form of exoticism was in many ways harmful to the Colonial Ministry’s attempt to present a sober and didactic message of colonial achievement and potential as well as to the individual colonial administrations’ attempts to use food to distinguish their colonies from one another. The concessions included everything from large restaurants to tiny kiosks. In contrast to the specificity of the architecture representing each colony throughout the exposition, the concessions were a mixture of modern architecture and exotic style that represented no specific place. Architect Albert Laprade lamented their visual effect on the exposition: At Vincennes, in these admirable surroundings, it is likely that, despite the efforts of the chief architect, all will be spoiled at the last minute by abominable little kiosks that will wipe out any colonial ambiance. Already like mushrooms, ultramodern vulgarities appear, so-called colonial kiosks that begin to disgust one with all colonial art! They submit us to these abominable pear-shaped or sugarloaf domes, to those pseudo-Algero-Tunisian keyhole arches! This congenital indiscipline is a very great subject of sadness for our enterprise.100

The “indiscipline” was not limited to the architecture. It was evident in the food and drink sold by concessionaires. While most of the privately run concessions at the exposition were not exoticized beyond their buildings, some did take on colonial themes. Their treatment of the colonies in their naming, advertising, and menus shows a distinct difference from the official colonial restaurants. Private food concessions sought immediate profit and did not have the didactic goals of the colonial administrations. With the exception of the North African–themed concessions discussed above, concessionaires combined various colonial cultures and even non-colonial exotic locations into a generic colonial cuisine. This undermined the specificity portrayed through food and taste in the official colonial sections. Putting a different spin on “exotic dining,” some of these privately run restaurants mixed exotic décor and entertainment with very normal French fare. Of the 137 preserved dossiers of accepted applications to sell food and

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beverage concessions at the colonial exposition, only sixteen had colonial or exotic themes.101 The Oana-Moana restaurant featured a “bal doudou” with Martiniquais dancers and “Brazzaville music,” but this exotic atmosphere was paired with standard French food.102 Similarly, the Donogoo-Congo restaurant advertised its “well known French cuisine.”103 Some restaurants played on the exoticism of the exposition without even referencing French colonies. The Auberge Hawaïenne served all French food and drink except one specialty drink called the raki maison.104 Two of the largest restaurants, Restaurant Bagdad and La jungle brasserie de la presse, served French standards and were especially popular for banquets for dignitaries and other visiting groups.105 When these exotic-themed restaurants did venture into colonial tastes, it was only on the edges of the meal. Like home-cooking magazines that favored exotic desserts, these restaurants also surrounded traditional main dishes with some peripheral exotic tastes. Les anthropophages (cannibals) restaurant paired normal French lunch fare with “specialty colonial cocktails” and “exotic hors d’oeuvres.”106 Uncle Tom’s Cabin served Alsatian brasserie standards and “colonial beverages” in a room filled with “colonial music.”107 The very names of these restaurants, referencing various racial others from inside and outside of the French empire, played on the same generic orientalizing as did cuisine coloniale. Exoticism was for these concessionaires flair added to the meal, a way to attract exposition visitors interested in participating in the carnivalesque aspects of the exposition. While the souks, tasting bars, and official colonial restaurants were celebrated by journalists as a way to have a more full experience of having visited the colonies, these private restaurants were not attempting to replicate any colonial setting.

Sausage and garlic When Paul-Emile Cadilhac described his experience at the colonial exposition for the readers of L’lllustration, he structured his description around the day’s meals. As the article begins, Cadilhac is seated at the “Café de Cameroon,” presumably enjoying a morning coffee, watching the exposition come to life. He later lunched at the West African restaurant, enjoying the “toothy smiles” of the African waiters as they delivered “Conakry style” lamb with rice and Guinean fruits. He professes to be grateful that there were not any restaurants dedicated to “ragout of man-eaters.” By referencing the cultural fear of cannibalism, he points out to his readers that he has not gone too “native” in

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his dining experiments. By the end of the day, Cadilhac claims to be confused. His head is spinning and his eyes burning from visiting so many places in just one day. “I can no longer distinguish where I am, China, Tonkin, Africa?” Here he shows his own experience of a generic colonial other that lumps all exotic peoples and regions together, citing a country not represented at the exposition, a region of Indochina, and a diverse continent. He then smells the aroma of “sausage and garlic” and spots a French family picnicking, passing the charcuteries as papers rustle under the trees. Now, Cadilhac feels he has returned to France, he knows “it is Paris, it is Vincennes.”108 Food is central to Cadilhac’s sense of identity and place, and it is the smell of French food that he highlights as confirming the identity of this complex space as French. The colonial foods of the exposition could not, for Cadilhac, be incorporated into French cuisine, just as the colonies remained outside of his understanding of French identity. The colonial exposition was a space of hybridity and mixing where people traveled “around the world in a day” by moving nearly instantly from one colony and culture to the next. The opportunity to try foods from so many places in a short period of time played a key role in this surreal journey. The presence of exotic private concessions added to a sense of cultural confusion. Yet, food and drink were perhaps the best tools colonial administrations had to slow down the rapid journey of the visitor and provide a unique experience of their colonies. Convincing visitors to pause and have a taste or even a meal was a way to make a visit to that particular colony more memorable. It was often when discussing eating experiences that commentators claimed to have felt that they had actually visited another place. Of course, this place was not the real colony but a representation crafted by each colonial administration, and each representation was different. As the Commissaire general, the administrations of each colony, and private concessionaires all competed for visitors’ attention, the overall message and experience of the colonial exposition was mixed and muddled. Although much colonial food was displayed, served, and eaten at the colonial exposition, this does not reflect a general embrace of colonial culinary contributions to Greater France. The mediation of colonial foods, the limits to how they could be presented to French diners, and the rhetoric of savagery and cannibalism that often accompanied exotic dining experiences point to serious limitations in the French public’s interest in colonial foods. The colonial exposition, therefore, demonstrates both the colonial lobby’s enthusiasm for

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colonial food as a key component of hopes for Greater France and the French public’s very limited acceptance of that idea. Food was too central to national and cultural identity—bread and wine making one a Frenchman and a manchop making one a savage—for the French public to fully share the colonial lobby’s hopeful embrace of colonial food.

Conclusion

Colonial policy has ceased to be the monopoly of a few technicians; it expresses itself and it diffuses; it becomes a national idea and the creator of a new spirit that perceives more clearly the inevitable incorporation into French life of this immense colonial being with all of its contributions . . . that enhances the existence of the Patrie and enriches all with the new force that the overseas French now pour into this arterial circulation. —Albert Sarraut, 19231 We are all pig eaters! We are all pig eaters! —Members of the Identity Block, 20062 Sarraut’s assertion certainly exaggerated enthusiasm for Greater France in interwar Paris. Still, his claim points to several significant changes after the First World War. Hunger was a central aspect of the experience of the First World War. Tragically, in many of the French colonies, the demands placed on the colonized to contribute to the French war effort exacerbated famines during the war and led to more famines in its immediate aftermath. For the metropolitan French, the destruction of many of the means of agricultural production made the war a time of hunger and scarcity. The colonial lobby worked during the war to transfer food from the colonies to the metropole. At times, this was in response to immediate metropolitan demands, such as the requisitioning of sugar from the Antilles and of grain and peanuts from French West Africa. In other cases, the colonial lobby promoted colonial foods to the metropolitan government in an attempt to open up the postwar French market to their goods, such as in the promotion of Indochinese rice flour. By the end of the war, the actual amount of colonial food that reached France was rather limited. Those colonial foods that did reach France, however, proved a powerful symbol, as in Sarraut’s vivid imagery, of all that the colonies could “pour into this arterial circulation” of Greater France. It was the bungled attempt to bring colonial food to wartime France that motivated the colonial lobby to focus on agricultural development

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in the empire, and food was a central aspect of their promotion of mise en valeur and Greater France to the broader French public. To what extent Greater France “ceased to be the monopoly of a few technicians” and became “a national idea” is a complicated question. Colonial foods, their promotion, consumption, and cultural integration, provide a new lens for gauging the incorporation of the colonies into French life. Colonial foods were of central importance to the colonial lobby. The UCF and the Indochinese administration worked to promote rice flour and rice to a suspicious French public. Meanwhile, the Société d’acclimatation, which had been interested in colonial foods since the Second Empire, shifted its focus after the First World War from testing and tasting rare foods to promoting colonial foods that were “ready” for public consumption, hoping their example would lead to a broader culinary change. The efforts of the SSHA to promote rice show that there was some interest in colonial foods outside of the colonial lobby. At the 1931 International Colonial Exposition, colonial administrations used food as a vehicle to garner popular enthusiasm for their colonies’ contributions to Greater France. For the Algerian administration, this meant highlighting what made Algeria French, wine and wheat, while most other colonial administrations used food and dining experiences to highlight the exotic allure of their colonies and their food products. In some ways, these promotions were effective. In the interwar period, imports of colonial sugar, cocoa, coffee, rice, bananas, and pineapples all increased. This increase in colonial imports, however, was spurred mostly by the lack of foreign food imports during the Great Depression. In 1933, Le Monde Colonial Illustré published this hope for the role of colonial foods and the propaganda that publicized them: We eat rice, our very own Indochina produces it; we drink chocolate, our Ivory Coast provides the necessary cacao; coffee, oils, are all found in our colonies. When every French person understands these simple facts, national unity, that of the Empire of 100 million inhabitants, shall be realized.3

The rather limited incorporation of colonial foods, however, shows that this vision of national unity based on the knowledgeable consumption of colonial foods was not realized. Sugar, cocoa, and coffee had already been integrated into French cuisine before the twentieth century, and before they were really colonial products. Colonial imports of these goods, however, did contribute to their increased French consumption after the First World War, especially of sugar. Rice imports continued to increase from the early 1920s through the

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1930s, but most of the rice in France was used for animal feed, and it is therefore difficult to measure increases in human rice consumption. The popularity of some cuisine coloniale dishes, like curries and rice puddings with tropical fruits, and the wartime promotion of rice dishes as cheap meals likely contributed to the increased consumption of table rice. Culinary periodicals from the period reveal that the integration of colonial foods into French cuisine was very limited. With the exception of curries, savory dishes inspired by the colonies were only very rarely included in Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu. Curry, a truly colonial dish that vaguely referenced both the West Indies and South East Asia, was assimilable because it was associated with a vague disembodied colonial other. Curry, therefore, did not elicit the reactions of disgust and anxieties over incorporation that were associated with many other colonial foods. The same was true of tropical fruits, especially pineapples and bananas, which were popular ingredients in French desserts. The most successfully integrated colonial dishes added exotic touches to more common French fare. Even these dishes, like chicken curry made with béchamel sauce and banana tarts, were still considered cuisine coloniale and represented a homogenized exotic image of the colonies. This generic exoticism, which made all colonial people seem the same in their universal otherness, was also present at the International Colonial Exposition, especially in the themed restaurants run by private concessionaires. Metropolitan agricultural interests fought against imports of competing foodstuffs, and hesitations against eating foods closely associated with colonized subjects inhibited the integration of more colonial foods into French cuisine. These barriers to the acceptance of colonial foods reveal a significant French discomfort with the colonial lobby’s hopes for the incorporation of the empire into Greater France. These obstacles are apparent in a story told by French colonial writer Ferri-Pisani in 1940 in Equatorial Africa. He claims to have been told the following by a French hotelier in the region when he suggested that the hotel could save money by purchasing local meat and produce at the African market: We are facing the black equator, that is, we face a humanity which is the most primitive in the world. Isn’t it enough to sleep sometimes with the black? What would we do if we would also live like her, eat like her, sacrifice our bread for her bowl of manioc, our olive oil for her palm oil, our European beefsteak for goat meat? Under the threat of sinking into brutality, we must build between Congolese Africa and our civilization a wall, many walls, a wall of habit, a wall of clothing, a wall of nourishment above all else.4

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As Deborah Neill points out, the author likely “greatly exaggerated this encounter,” but regardless of whether the hotelier is real or fictional, the idea that food choices construct barriers between “us” and “them” is true.5 The social contexts of Paris and Equatorial Africa were remarkably different, and most Parisians were more accepting of colonial foods, even from black Africa, than was this hotelier. The hotelier even asked in exasperation, “Where would we be if a hotelier in Duala served to his clients a compote of apples made with mangos?”6 This type of substitution—using exotic fruits in traditional French dishes—was exactly the type of colonial cuisine that became more common in Paris in the interwar period. In the metropolitan context, where the colonial other was distant and less threatening, the culinary wall of separation was more permeable than in the colonies, but it still existed.7 As illustrated by the French West African restaurant at the Colonial Exposition, by the banquets of the Société d’acclimatation, by the recipes published by Le Pot-au-feu and Le Cordon bleu, and by the courses of the SSHA, colonial foods were most acceptable in France when they were mediated to approximate familiar French dishes and when they were served in a familiar setting. In the metropole, even with all the exposure to colonial foods, French food choices were still limited by the perceived need to construct “a wall of nourishment.” The interwar period was a unique period in the Parisian culinary landscape. Diners, chefs, shoppers, and cooks tried a variety of new foods, many from the French colonies. Yet, this newfound diversity did not offer nearly the plethora of options that became available to Parisians when immigrants from the colonies and former colonies opened a myriad of restaurants and grocery stores in the postwar and post-colonial periods. Today, the culinary landscape of contemporary Paris is in many ways defined by the city’s ethnic neighborhoods and their diverse offerings. By the start of the twenty-first century, French chefs were packing restaurants offering high-end versions of the foods of the former colonies, “and scores of slick, brightly illustrated bibles” of immigrant cuisines lined the shelves of Parisian bookstores.8 This embrace by culinary elites of exotic cuisine follows many of the same patterns as colonial cuisine from the interwar period. As a New York Times review described a new restaurant in 2005, “The flavors of Occident and Orient merge first in a pastilla [Moroccan pastry] filled with Gallic goat cheese.”9 This enthusiasm for upscale North African fusion cuisine only thinly veils the continued role of foodways in dividing “us” and “them” in contemporary France. In 2002, journalist Maurice Maschino chronicled how “dinner can lead to deportation,” as immigrants applying for French naturalization were

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routinely asked, “How many times a week do you eat couscous?” Despite the growing popularity of North African cuisine in restaurants and take-out spots during the same period, regularly eating couscous still remained a sign of “foreignness” (“étrangeté”).10 Another remarkable example of foodways as a tool of xenophobia occurred in 2003 when a small far-right nationalist movement called the “Identity Block” began serving soup to the homeless. Originally, they used pork in their soup because it was an inexpensive and traditional ingredient, but the group soon claimed the soup as a political statement, intentionally excluding those who do not eat pork, mostly Muslims and Jews. Most of their hostility was directed against Muslims. The Identity Block required that visitors to their mobile soup kitchen eat the pork soup in order to receive their other offerings. Their website proclaimed, “Cheese, dessert, coffee, clothing and candy go with the pork soup. No soup, no dessert.” In 2006, the group’s distributions of “identity soup” were broken up by police who cited the “the discriminatory nature of the soup.” In February 2006, defying a police ban on their demonstrations, more than two hundred rightwing activists distributed the soup while raucously chanting, “We are all pig eaters! We are all pig eaters!” in the Place Maubert.11 In their view, French identity was defined by diet. The definition of French citizens as pork eaters entered mainstream political debate in March of 2015 when the mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône ended the town’s thirty-year-old practice of offering Muslim and Jewish students an alternative main dish on days when pork was served in school lunchrooms. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke out in a television interview in support of the mayor: “It’s the education of the Republic, the Republic is secular, and we refuse absolutely—it’s our tradition, our way of life, our ideal—to differentiate between people, in the public service, according to their religious affiliation or origin,” adding, “If you want your children to have faith-based diet, you can go to a denominational private school.”12 In the present political climate in France, the issue is surely meant to appeal to anti-Muslim fears among the French public. Although the political contexts are very different, the underlying idea that to be a unified nation the French must eat the same foods bears many similarities to discussions of rice eaters and bread eaters in the interwar period. In the 1930s, Gauducheau thought that eating more “bread, meat, dairy, and wine” would help French colonial subjects evolve to become more like Frenchmen.13 In 2015, Sarkozy claimed that pork eating was a value of the Republic that needed to be taught in French schools. To offer an alternative meal seemed, perhaps, to offer an option between French and Muslim identities, as if the two must be

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in opposition to each other. As France struggles to cope with the reality of its multi-ethnic and multi-cultural citizenry, food continues to serve as a powerful marker of difference and division. Eating culture—food choices and discourse about those choices—continues to reveal anxiety about the incorporation of the colonial other into the modern French nation.

Notes

Introduction 1 Kyla Wanza Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 2. 2 Kyla Wanza Tompkins, “ ‘Everything ‘cept eat us’: The antebellum black body portrayed as edible body,” Callaloo 30, no. 1 (2007): 206. 3 Claude Fischler, “Food Selection and Risk Perception,” in Food Selection: From Genes to Culture, ed. Harvey Anderson, John Blundell, and Matty Chiva (Belgium: Chauveheid, 2002), 141–2. 4 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food & Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 101. 5 Ibid., 142–3. See also Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin, “ ‘You are What you Eat’: Applying the Demand-Free ‘Impressions’ Technique to an Unacknowledged Belief,” Ethos 17, no. 1 (1989): 50–69. 6 Warren Belasco, Food: The Key Concepts (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 19. 7 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 175. See also, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Senses of Taste,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (April 2011): 372. 8 Tompkins, “ ‘Everything ‘cept eat us,’ ” 206–7. 9 Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidit, Clark McCauley, and Sumio Imada, “Disgust: Preadaptation and the cultural evolution of food-based emotion,” in Food Preferences and Taste: Continuity and Change, ed. Helen McBeth (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), 65. 10 Caroline Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics, Kindle Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9. 11 Wynne Wright and Alexis Annes, “Halal on the menu? Contested food politics and French identity in fast-food,” Journal of Rural Studies 32 (2013): 390. 12 Maeaa De la Baum, “Halal food stirs French emotions: Rising demand for goods permitted by Islam puts some politicians on edge,” International Herald Tribune, September 10, 2010, Infotrac Newsstand, accessed November 26, 2013. 13 Wright and Annes, “Halal on the menu,” 388.

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Notes to pages 4–8

14 “Sarkozy singles out the meaty issue that will define France’s election: Halal,” Independent [London], March 7, 2012, 30, General OneFile, accessed November 26, 2013. 15 Tom Heneghan, “Predominance of halal meat in Paris sparks political storm; Farright, animal advocates aghast,” The Gazette [Montreal], February 21, 2012, A17, LexisNexis. 16 “Sarkozy singles out the meaty issue,” 30. 17 Wright and Annes, “Halal on the menu,” 394. 18 Martin Bruegel, “Workers’ Lunch Away from Home in the Paris of the Belle Epoque: The French Model of Meals as Norm and Practice.” French Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 253–4. 19 “Menus,” Le Pot-au-feu, October 7, 1911, 296. 20 Bruegel, “Workers’ Lunch Away from Home,” 265. 21 Ibid., 276. 22 Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1986), 16; as quoted in Nancy Jocelyn Edwards, “Patriotism à Table: Cookbooks, Textbooks and National Identity in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 24 (1997): 246. 23 See Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 225–68; Kyri Claflin, “Consumers, Cookbooks, and Adaptation in Paris, 1914– 1929” (paper presented at the Food & the City conference, Boston University, February 24–25, 2012); and Rachel Rich, Bourgeois consumption: Food, space and identity in London and Paris, 1850–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 13. 24 Nancy Jocelyn Edwards, “The Science of Domesticity: Women, Education and National Identity in Third Republic France, 1880–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 8, 22, 33, 41. 25 Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 205; Rich, Bourgeois consumption, 82. 26 “Consommations, sucres, tableau I: Consommation, importation et exportation des sucres,” Annuaire statistique de la France 41(1925), 369; “Consommations, sucres, tableau I: Consommation, importation et exportation des sucres,” Annuaire statistique de la France 49(1933): 261. 27 Ministry of Colonies, Direction of Economic Affairs, “Les productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” 8, Archives nationales d’outre mer (hereafter ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, Fonds ministérielle (hereafter FM) 1 Affaires économiques (hereafter affeco) 118; Conseil supérieur des colonies,

Notes to pages 8–10

28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37

38 39 40 41

42

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Conseil économique, Section des transports maritimes, “Rapport sur les services de navigation, sous pavillon français, desservant les diverses colonies françaises,” 2, Archives nationales, Paris, France (hereafter AN) Série F, Agriculture (hereafter F10), 2018. Julia Landweber, “This Marvelous Bean”: Adopting Coffee into Old Regime French Culture and Diet,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 223. Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, décembre 1934—avril 1935: Rapports généreaux et conclusions d’ensemble, II vols., vol. I (Paris: Larose Éditeurs, 1935), 104. Albert Sarraut, La mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923), 193. “Séance du 6 juin 1905, banane,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 53 (1906): 103–4. Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 1:89. C. Rivière, “L’entremets de cuisine,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 919 (1935): 332–3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French are my own. Thomas Adrian Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby in the 1930’s: The Economic Foundations of Imperialism” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971), 143, 271–2. Gary Y. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 84–6. By 1935 French Guinea and Guadeloupe produced about 16 percent of the metropolitan demand for fresh pineapple, while Martinique and French West Africa supplied about 17 percent (400 metric tons annually) of the metropolitan consumption of canned pineapple. Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 1:92. Ministry of Colonies, Direction of Economic Affairs, “Les productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” 2, ANOM FM 1affeco 118. Ibid., 2–4. “Ministère des finances,” Journal official de la République Française (January 20, 1937): 845, AN F10 1958. “Ministère des finances,” Journal official de la République Française (January 8, 1939): 538, ibid. Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 91. Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 101–2; Christopher M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, “The French ‘Colonial Party’: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1850–1914,” The Historical Journal 14, no. 1 (1971): 107.

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Notes to pages 10–12

43 Take for example, Charles Robert Ageron, France coloniale ou parti colonial? (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1978); Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français: Histoire d’un divorce (Paris: A. Michel, 1984); Christophe Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire: La structuration des rechereches scientifiques coloniales au temps de “la mise en valeur des colonies françaises”: 1917–1945 (Paris: ORSTROM, 1991): 21–3. 44 Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 6. In an exception to this linguistic divide, Sandrine Lemaire uses “colonial lobby.” Sandrine Lemaire, “Manipulation: Conquering Taste (1931–1939)” in Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas, trans. Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 76. 45 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 82. 46 Ibid. 47 Sarraut, La mise en valeur, 62. 48 Ibid., 17. 49 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 29. 50 Ibid. 51 See for example: Ageron, France coloniale ou parti colonial; Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972). 52 Eric Jennings, “Visions and Representations of French Empire,” The Journal of Modern History 77, no. 3 (2005): 701–2. Jennings’ review provides an introduction to some of this work. Some of the significant works on the influence of the empire on French life in the past decade include, in order of publication date, Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representations at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (London: Palgrave, 2002); Ellen Furlough, “Une leçon des choses: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 441–73; Tyler Edward Stovall and Georges Van den Abbeele, eds., French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003); Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Caroline Ford, “Nature, Culture and Conservation in France and her

Notes to pages 12–15

53

54 55 56 57

58

59

60 61

62 63 64 65 66

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Colonies 1840–1940,” Past & Present, no. 183 (2004): 173–98; Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized People, 1886–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Susan Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Heath, Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Nicolas Bancel, “The Colonial Bath: Colonial Culture in Everyday Life (1918–1931),” in Colonial culture in France since the revolution, ed. Pascal Blanchard et al., trans. Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 200; Lemaire, “Manipulation,” 285. Berenson, Heroes of Empire, 4–5. Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane, Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 32. Mintz, Sweetness and Power. Okihiro has shown how the same was also true in the formation of large pineapple plantations and canning factories in Hawaii in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture, 126–75. For a compelling analysis of how the politics of the Third Republic reduced sugar laborers in Martinique and Guadeloupe to second-class citizens, see Elizabeth Heath, Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “French Black Africa,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, ed. A. D. Roberts, R. D. Fage, and Roland Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 355–6. Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 23. Coquery-Vidrovitch, “French Black Africa,” 357; Christopher Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, c. 1850–1940 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 157–8. Benjamin Stora, Jane Marie Todd, and William B. Quandt, Algeria, 1830–2000: A Short History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 7. Susanne Freidberg, French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 56–7. Kolleen Guy, “Culinary Connections and Colonial Memories in France and Algeria,” Food & History 8, no.1 (2010): 227. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 116. Friedberg, French Beans and Food Scares, 56.

172

Notes to pages 21–25

Chapter 1 1 Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 22. 2 Aldrich, Greater France, 10; Centre des archives d’outre-mer (France), “Archives du comité central français pour l’outre-mer, 100 APOM: Union coloniale française, Comité de l’Indochine, Institut colonial français, Comité de l’Empire français; répertoire numérique” (Aix-en-Provence: Centre des archives d’outremer, 1999), 8–14. 3 Michel Augé-Laribé and Pierre Pinot, Agriculture and Food Supply in France during the War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), 37. 4 Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, “Was the Great War a Watershed? The Economics of World War I in France,” in The Economics of World War I, ed. Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 174. 5 Ibid., 175. 6 Ibid., 173; Kyri Watson Claflin, “Culture, Politics, and Modernization in Paris Provisioning 1880–1920” (PhD. diss, Boston University, 2006), 301. 7 Ibid., 171. 8 John F. Godfrey, Capitalism at War: Industrial Policy and Bureaucracy in France, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa, UK: Berg, 1987), 84; Hautcoeur, “Was the Great War a Watershed?,” 171; Claflin, “Culture, Politics, and Modernization in Paris Provisioning 1880–1920,” 211. 9 Claflin, “Consumers, Cookbooks, and Adaptation in Paris, 1914–1929,” 10. 10 Steven L. Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 23. 11 Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), xxv. 12 Ibid., 188–200. 13 Hans Jürgen Teuteberg and Jean-Louis Flandrin, “The Transformation of the European Diet,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Massimo Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 446. 14 Reay Tannahill, Food in History (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1988), 319. 15 For an analysis of British sugar consumption during this period, see Mintz, Sweetness and Power. 16 Teuteberg and Flandrin, “The Transformation of the European Diet,” 446. 17 “Résumé retrospectif, Tableau II: Consommation des pommes de terre et du sucre,” Annuaire statistique de la France 49(1933): 178. 18 Ministère des colonies, “Note sur la rôle du Service de l’utilisation des produits coloniaux pour la défense nationale,” ANOM FM 10affeco 11.

Notes to pages 25–29

173

19 “Consommations, sucres, Tableau I: Consommation, importation et exportation des sucres,” Annuaire statistique de la France 49(1933): 261; “Consommations, sucres, Tableau I: Consommation, importation et exportation des sucres,” Annuaire statistique de la France 41(1925): 369. 20 A. Hemmerdinger, “Apprenons à nous defender contre la vie chère,” Bulletin de la Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 13 (1924): 6. 21 Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, décembre 1934—avril 1935: Rapports généreaux et conclusions d’ensemble (Paris: Larouse Éditeurs, 1935), 1:86. 22 Augé-Laribé and Pinot, Agriculture and Food Supply, 32; W. O. Thompson, “Report of W. O. Thompson, Chairman,” in Report of Agricultural Commission to Europe (Washington, DC, 1919), 13. 23 W. O. Thompson, “Report of W. O. Thompson, Chairman,” 13. 24 The most visible colonial contribution to the war effort was the presence of colonial troops and workers in France. By November 1917, the colonies had supplied 330,000 wartime recruits, including 90,000 West Africans and 85,000 Algerians: “In all, the Empire enlisted more than 600,000 of its subjects, of which two-thirds were put on the front lines.” Éric Deroo, “Dying: The Call of the Empire (1913–1918),” in Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, ed. Pascal Blanchard et al., trans. Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 132–9; Christopher M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 1914–1924 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 134. 25 Journal officiel de l’Afrique Occidentale Française, no. 653 (June 9, 1917), ANOM FM 9affeco 10. 26 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 132; Thomas August, The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 15. 27 Ministère des colonies, “Note sur la rôle du Service de l’utilisation des produits coloniaux pour la défense nationale,” ANOM FM 10affeco 11. 28 Ibid.; Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 33. 29 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 132; C. M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, “France, Africa, and the First World War,” Journal of African History 19, no. 1 (1978): 18. 30 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 133. 31 Ibid., 132–3. 32 Ibid.; Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 35–6. 33 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 134. 34 Ibid., 142. 35 Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 35–6.

174

Notes to pages 29–35

36 Carroué, Les mutations de l’économie, 131. 37 Godfrey, Capitalism at War, 61. 38 Carol F. Helstosky, “The State, Health, and Nutrition,” in The Cambridge World History of Food, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1577. 39 Claflin, “Culture, Politics, and Modernization in Paris Provisioning 1880–1920.” 40 Vollenhoven to Minister of Colonies, May 1917, ANOM FM 9affeco 10. 41 Ibid. 42 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 141. 43 Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa, 154. 44 Coquery-Vidrovitch, “French Black Africa,” 355–6. 45 Ibid., 354. 46 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 133. 47 Revel to Minister of Colonies, n.d., ANOM FM 8affeco 19. 48 Ibid. 49 Coquery-Vidrovitch, “French Black Africa,” 355–6. 50 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 142. 51 Contract between the Governor General of Indochina and the Ministry of War, n.d., ANOM FM 8affeco 30; Ministre de la marine chargé de l’intérim du Ministère des colonies to Ministre du commerce, de l’industrie, de l’agriculture, du travail, des postes et des télégraphes, February 28, 1917, ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 52 Union coloniale française to Ministre des colonies, February 20, 1917, ANOM FM 8affeco 30; Ministre de la marine chargé de l’intérim du Ministère des colonies to Ministre du commerce, de l’industrie, de l’agriculture, du travail, des postes et des télégraphes, February 28, 1917, ibid. 53 ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 54 Sarraut to Doumergue, telegram, February 5, 1917, ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 55 Sarraut to Ministre des colonies, telegram, June 3, 1917, ibid. 56 Service de l’Indochine to Ministre des colonies, July 10, 1917, ANOM FP 100 APOM 691; Ministre des colonies to Directeur général de l’Union coloniale française, August 30, 1917, ibid.; Rizéries indochinoises to Ministre des colonies, telegram, December 19, 1917, ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 57 ANOM FP 100 APOM 691. 58 Union coloniale française to Ministre de l’agriculture et du ravitaillement, January 28, 1919, ANOM FP 100 APOM 691. 59 Sarraut to Colonial Ministry, telegram, March 30, 1917, ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 60 Minister of Colonies to Directeur général de l’Union coloniale française, August 30, 1917, ANOM FP 100 APOM 691. 61 Sarrraut to the Ministry of Colonies, telegram, February 19, 1917, ANOM FM 8affeco 30.

Notes to pages 35–40

175

62 Colonial Ministry to M. Rheinhart, telegram, February 5, 1917, ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 63 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 142. 64 Direction troupes coloniales to the Minister and Inspector General of the Colonies, telegram, n.d., ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 65 ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 66 Sarraut to Ministre de ravitaillement, telegram, June 11, 1917, ANOM FM 9affeco 10; Minister of Colonies to Outrey, July 1, 1918, ANOM FM 9affeco 10; “Indochine, grasse et huile de poisson,” ANOM FM 9affeco 10. 67 Nitrogen was a key measurement of nutritional value during the period. See Deborah Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet,’ ”4. 68 ANOM FM 8affeco 30. 69 Claflin, “Culture, Politics, and Modernization in Paris Provisioning 1880–1920,” 299–300. 70 Hunt, “The Agricultural Needs of the Allies during 1920,” 64–5. 71 Claflin, “Culture, Politics, and Modernization in Paris Provisioning 1880–1920,” 246–7, 312. 72 Friedberg, Fresh: A Perishable History, 29. 73 Decugis brought fruit from his native southern France to Paris on express trains. Susan Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History, 27–31. 74 Ibid., 68. The first successful transatlantic chilled beef delivery was made by TC Eastman from New York to London in 1875. He used melting ice instead of Tellier’s ammonia-based system. 75 Ibid., 57–61. 76 Ibid., 62–4. 77 James Thoubridge Critchell and Joseph Raymond, A History of the Frozen Meat Trade, 1969 reprint ed. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1912), 228. 78 Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History, 64. 79 “Viandes frigorifies, participation des colonies françaises à la fourniture prévue,” October 10, 1915, ANOM FP 100 APOM 691. 80 UCF, “Note,” January 20, 1916, ANOM FP 100 APOM 691. 81 Under Secretary of State to M. Chailley, February 9, 1916, ANOM FP 100 APOM 691. 82 Claflin, “Culture, Politics, and Modernization in Paris Provisioning 1880–1920,” 331. 83 Ministry of Colonies, Direction of Economic Affairs, “Les productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” ANOM FM 1affeco 118. 84 Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History, 31, 88. 85 Ibid., 82–3. 86 Ibid., 31.

176

Notes to pages 40–49

87 Ibid. 88 Ministry of Colonies, Direction of Economic Affairs, “Les productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” ANOM FM 1affeco 118. 89 Albert Lebrun, The French Colonies’ Effort (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1917), 22–4. 90 Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 34. 91 Ibid., 41. 92 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 142–3. 93 Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 35. 94 August, The Selling of the Empire, 15. 95 Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 40. 96 Sarraut, La mise en valeur des colonies françaises, 37. 97 Ibid., 38. Italics added for emphasis.

Chapter 2 1 “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la société d’acclimatation de France 68 (1921): 176–86. 2 What began as the Société zoologique d’acclimatation changed names many times during its 150 years of existence and is currently known as the Société national de protection de la nature. For the sake of simplicity, in this chapter, I refer to it as the Société d’acclimatation and the Société or Society for short. 3 E. C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 128–30. 4 Ibid., 2–3. 5 Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3–5. 6 Ibid., 1. 7 Lemoine, “Discours de M. le Professeur Lemoine,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation 79 (1932): 318. 8 Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism, 1–2. 9 Ibid., 41, 59, 158; Lemoine, “Discours de M. le Professeur Lemoine,” 318–19. 10 Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism, 175. 11 Ibid., xiv. 12 Ibid.; “Liste des membres de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 71 (1924): xiii–xlvi. 13 Maurice Loyer, “Déjeuner amical annuel du 18 janvier 1912,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 59 (1912): 185; “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 78 (1931): 393. 14 Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism, 47–61, 155.

Notes to pages 49–52

177

15 Ibid., 59. 16 Rebecca L. Spang, “ ‘And They Ate the Zoo’: Relating Gastronomic Exoticism to the Siege of Paris,” Modern Language Notes 107 (1992): 757. 17 “Les déjeuners de la Société d’acclimatation,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 76 (1929): 2. 18 Augustin A. Delondre, “Notes sur l’alimentation,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 8 (1871): 395. For more on taboos and the totemic ordering of food preferences, see Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 166–79. 19 Delondre, “Notes sur l’alimentation,” 395. 20 Ibid., 396. 21 A widely grown crop in the Andes, ulluco is also commonly called papa lisa. Both the leaves and roots are edible. The roots are shaped like potatoes but have a texture similar to jicama. Oca is very similar to ulluco but is a part of the woodsorrel family. Aracacha is a garden root vegetable from the Andes; its starchy taproot is popular in South America and is now a major commercial crop in Brazil. 22 Delondre, “Notes sur l’alimentation,” 396–9. 23 “Les déjeuners de la société d’acclimatation,” 2. 24 Ibid. 25 In 1904, Perrier wrote, “The Museum has never ceased to revolve its efforts around the exact determination of the riches of our colonies, around the search for the means to augment these riches and to put them to the profit of the metropole.” Edmond Perrier, “Le Muséum d’histoire naturelle et les colonies françaises en 1903,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 51 (1904): 38. Perrier remained interested and involved in the déjeuners menus. His personal archives reveal handwritten notes on the 1913 déjeuner menu. Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Archives et manuscrit, Ms 2227. 26 “Les déjeuners de la société d’acclimatation,” 2; “Déjeuner amical du 21 mai 1906,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 54 (1907): 129–30. 27 “Séance du 6 Juin 1905, Banane,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 53 (1906): 104. 28 H. Courtet, “Déjeuner amical du 17 mai 1909,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 56 (1909): 435–7. 29 M. L. Hollier, “La Culture des bananes en Guinée française,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 51 (1904): 135–7; O. Labroy, “Séance du 15 mars 1909,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 56 (1909): 357–8; J. Robin, “Notes sur l’agriculture au Cambodge,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 55 (1908): 433–8; C. Debreuil, “La consommation de la banane,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de

178

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41

42

Notes to pages 52–55 France 55 (1908): 70–1; “La culture du cocotier en Indo-Chine,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 54 (1907): 37–40; Henry Fillot, “La noix de kola,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 53 (1906): 253–9; H. Courtet, “Compte-rendu des séances d’agronomie coloniale,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 53 (1906): 12–17, 91–105; L.-G. Seurat, “Flore économique de la Polynésie française,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 52 (1905): 310–26, 55–9. “Séance du 6 Juin 1905, Banane,” 104. The number of attendees is not specified for 1910, but Loyer claims there was a significant increase in attendance. Maurice Loyer, “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 57 (1910): 559–63. Ibid., 559–60. Ibid. Maurice Loyer, “Déjeuner amical annuel de la Société d’acclimatation,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 58 (1911): 765. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 176. Loyer, “Déjeuner amical annuel de la Société d’acclimatation,” 767. Loyer, “Déjeuner amical annuel du 18 janvier 1912,” 188. “Déjeuner amical annuel du 16 Janvier 1913,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 60 (1913): 174–6. J. Gérôme, “Ve section, botanique: Séance du 22 novembre 1909,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 57 (1910): 31–2. This practice continued throughout the interwar period. For example, in 1926, the botany group suggested that Loyer should perhaps try cooking the new type of Chinese lettuce that he found too bitter when eaten raw. Pierre Crepin, “Extraits des procès-verbaux des séances de la société, Séance générale du 9 novembre 1925,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 73 (1926): 10. “Conseil d’administration pour 1910,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 57 (1910): I–III. See, for example, G. Capus and D. Bois, Les Produits coloniaux: Origine, production, commerce (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1912); Désiré Bois, Les plantes alimentaires chez tous les peuples à travers les âges, ed. Paul Lechevalier, Encyclopédie Biologique (Paris: Lechevalier, 1927). Désiré Bois, “Ansérine amarante (Chenopodium Amaranticolor) expériences de culture faites en 1909,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 57 (1910): 126–9. Gérôme, “Ve Section botanique: Séance du 22 novembre 1909,” 31; Rouyer, “Extraits des procès-verbaux des séances des sections, colonisation: Séance du 20 mars 1911,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 57 (1911): 383; J. Gérôme, “Extraits des procès-verbaux des séances des sections, botanique: Séance du 22 janvier 1912,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation

Notes to pages 55–57

43

44

45 46

47 48 49

179

59 (1912): 327; Bret, “Extraits des procès-verbaux des séances des sections, colonisation: Séance du 18 mars 1912,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 59 (1912): 455–6; L. Capitaine, “Extraits des procès-verbaux des séances des sections, colonisation: Séance du 21 mai 1913,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 60 (1913): 529. H. Courtet, “Le cocotier,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 57 (1910); Auguste Chevalier, “Sur une nouvelle plante a tubercules alimentaires du moyen Congo,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 60 (1913): 421–6; M. Lemaié, “Les plantes alimentaires du Tonkin,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 60 (1913): 290–6, 318–23, 67–76; Auguste Chevalier, “Enumération des plantes cultivées par les indigènes en Afrique tropicale et des espèces naturalisées dans le même pays et ayant probablement été cultivées à une époque plus ou moins reculée,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 59 (1912): 104–10, 133–8, 239–42, 312–8, 341–6; H. Courtet, “La vanille et la vanilline artificielle,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 58 (1911): 19–24, 59–64, 73–7; H. Courtet, “L’arachide dans nos colonies,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 59 (1912): 698–707; L. Hollier, “L’importation de la banane,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 58 (1911): 542–4. For more on substitution foods, see Claude Fischler, L’Homnivore (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1990), 155–8; Faustine Régnier, L’exotisme culinaire: Essai sur les saveurs de l’autre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 86. A. Gauducheau, “Remarques sur l’économie de notre alimentation (suite),” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 88, no. 1 (1941). “Séance du 6 Juin 1905, banane,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 53 (1906): 103–4; C. Debreuil, “La consommation de la banane,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 55 (1908): 70–1; Pierre Crepin, “Colonisation,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 72 (1925): 110; Bois, Les plantes alimentaires chez tous les peuples à travers les âges; Capus and Bois, Les Produits coloniaux: Origine, production, commerce; M. Lemarié, “Les Plantes alimentaires du Tonkin,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 60 (1913): 67–76, 290–6, 318–23. Take for example Chevalier’s trip to the AOF: O. Labroy, “Séance du 15 mars 1909,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 56 (1909): 358. “Discours de M. Albert Sarraut,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 80 (1933): 308–10. “Déjeuner amical annuel de 26 février 1920,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 67 (1920): 91. C. Debreuil, “Extraits des procès-verbaux des séances générales de la société: Séance générale du 2 décembre 1918,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 66 (1919): 87–8.

180

Notes to pages 57–62

50 A. Fauchère, “Etat actuel de la colonisation française: Les facteurs qui influencent et conditionnent son développement,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 64 (1917): 328. 51 “Déjeuner amical annuel de 22 Mai 1919,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 66 (1919): 198. 52 “Actes de la Société d’acclimatation pendant la guerre,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 66 (1919): 129–30. 53 “Déjeuner amical annuel de 22 mai 1919,” 198–223. 54 Ibid., 215–21. 55 C. Debreuil, “Généralités,” Bulletin de la Société zoologique d’acclimatation 66 (1919): 56. 56 “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 69 (1922): 168. 57 “Déjeuner amical annuel de 26 février 1920,” 84; “Déjeuner amical annuel 1921,” 175; “Déjeuner amical annuel” (1922), 157. 58 “Déjeuner amical annuel” (1922), 167. 59 In Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz examines how sugar moved from a luxury known mostly to the upper classes to a more common good, ritualized into the daily lives of the working class. 60 Bourdieu, Distinction, 177–9. 61 Ibid., 181. 62 “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 74 (1927): 184. 63 “Déjeuner amical annuel de 26 février 1920,” 90. 64 “Déjeuner amical annuel 1921,” 176–86; “Déjeuner amical annuel 1924,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 71 (1924): 273–82; “Déjeuner amical,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 70 (1923): 160–9. 65 “Déjeuner amical annuel 1921,” 183–5. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 177, 83–4; “Déjeuner amical,” (1923): 166. 68 “Déjeuner amical,” (1923), 166. 69 “Déjeuner amical annuel 1924,” 276. 70 Ibid., 279–80. 71 “Déjeuner amical annuel,” (1927), 175–6. 72 “Déjeuner amical du lundi 4 juin 1928,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 76 (1929): 36–7; “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 76 (1929): 181; “XXXe Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 82 (1935): 248; “XXXIII Déjeuner annuel,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 85 (1938): 286.

Notes to pages 62–66

181

73 A. Gauducheau, “Remarques sur l’économie de notre alimentation,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 87 (1940): 153–7; A. Gauducheau, “Les intrasauces,” Presse médicale 38, no. 31 (1930): 532; A. Gauducheau, “Les intrasauces,” Journal des Praticiens 41, no. 46 (1928): 2171. 74 Gauducheau, “Remarques sur l’économie de notre alimentation,” 156–7. 75 “27me Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 79 (1932): 522–3. 76 Nemeroff and Rozin, “ ‘You are What you Eat,’ ” 50–69. 77 A. Gauducheau, “L’alimentation et l’hygiène facteurs de l’évolution,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation 85 (1938): 301. 78 Ibid., 304. 79 A. Gauducheau, “Acclimatation humaine et transformation des races par l’hygiène et l’alimentation,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 84 (1937): 116. 80 A. Gauducheau, “Evolution de l’alimentation publique,” Le mouvement sanitaire 11, no. 127 (1934): 636. Selections reprinted in Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire et d’alimentation rationnelle de l’homme 23, no. 3–4 (1935): 166–75. 81 Gauducheau, “Remarques sur l’économie de notre alimentation” 153–7; Gouducheau, “Remarques sur l’économie de notre alimentation (suite),” 1–15. 82 Sarraut, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises, 118. 83 Ibid., 113–18; Martin Thomas, “Albert Sarraut, French Colonial Development, and the Communist Threat,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 4 (2005): 926–9. 84 Tyler Edward Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 49–56; on interwar exoticism, see also Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 85 An “Indian Meal” was also served at another 1919 Society meeting. “Déjeuner amical annuel de 22 Mai 1919,” 201; “Généralités,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation 66 (1919): 56–7; “Déjeuner amical annuel de 26 février 1920,” 84–96; “Déjeuner amical annuel 1922,” 160. 86 La Vielle Catherine [pseud.], “Poulet au Kari,” Le Pot-au-feu 4, no. 56 (1895): 53–4. 87 “Déjeuner amical annuel de 26 février 1920,” 87. 88 Ibid., 95–6. 89 Elizabeth Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 115. 90 Ibid., 115–16. For more on curry and its relationship to British colonialism, see Panikos Panayi, Spicing up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 91 “Déjeuner amical annuel de 26 février 1920,” 84–96.

182

Notes to pages 66–73

92 “Déjeuner amical annuel 1924,” 275. 93 “29me Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 81 (1934): 420. 94 “Déjeuner amical du lundi 4 juin 1928,” 23–40. 95 “XXXe Déjeuner amical annuel,” 247; “XXXIIe Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 84 (1937): 305. 96 “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la Société d’acclimatation de France 73 (1926): 158. 97 See, Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious, 152. 98 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th Anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 21. 99 Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, 4.

Chapter 3 1 “Déjeuner amical annuel de 22 mai 1919,” 198. 2 Colonial Ministry, Direction of Economic Affairs, “Les productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” ANOM FM 1affeco 118. 3 L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 8; “Commission chargée de l’examen de la balance commerciale en ce qui concerne la production agricole: Projet de conclusions,” October 1938, 24, ANOM FM 1affecco 14; Syndicat du commerce de riz et dérivés de Marseille, “Réponse a deux questions,” ANOM FM 100 APOM 592. 4 Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 120–1, 170. 5 Ibid., 122. 6 Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 109. 7 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 177. 8 Thomas August, The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890-1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 84–5. 9 Lemaire, “Manipulation,” 286. 10 Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 134–6. 11 J. Alquier, “Sur l’utilisation de la farine de riz dans la fabrication du pain: Rapport de M. Meillère,” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 5, no. 7 (1917): 432; J. Alquier, “La question du pain,” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 5, no. 8 (1917): 497–9. 12 Armand Hemmerdinger, “Un aliment méconnu,” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 5, no. 2 (1917): 115–28. 13 Abel Lahille, Projet d’utilisation du riz indochinois dans la métropole (Saigon: Albert Portail, 1916), 3.

Notes to pages 73–77

183

14 Abel Lahille, Mes impressions sur l’Afrique Occidentales Française: Étude documentaire au pays du Tam-Tam (Paris: A. Picard, 1910). 15 Lahille, Projet d’utilisation du riz, 3–5. 16 Ibid., 4–5. 17 Ibid. 18 Claflin, “Culture, Politics, and Modernization in Paris Provisioning,” 364–8. 19 Ibid., 18–19. 20 Ibid., 50–4, 65. 21 Under Secretary of State for the Ministère de la guerre, Direction de l’intendance militaire to the President of the UCF, July 26, 1915, ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 22 President of the Syndicat patronal de la boulangerie de Paris & de la Seine to the President of the UCF, August 5, 1915, ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 23 A vente des marchandises, et des falsifications des denrées alimentaires et des produits agricoles: Loi du 1er août 1905, décret et arrêté des 31 juillet, 1er août 1906, (Paris: Chevalier et Rivière, 1906), 4. The changing bread laws of the 1920s all fell under this original law against fraudulent foods. The law of 1905 stood until it was integrated into the European food safety code in 1993. 24 Lahille, Projet d’utilisation du riz, 90–2. 25 Ibid., 97–100, 114. 26 Minister of Colonies to Ministre des travaux publics des transports et du ravitaillement, February 1917, ANOM 8affeco 30. 27 “L’Addition de farines de succédanés a la farine de froment,” ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 28 Alquier, “La question du pain,” 497. 29 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 133. 30 Albert Sarraut to Doumergue, telegram, February 5, 1917, ANOM FM 8 affeco 30. 31 Thompson, “Report of W. O. Thompson, Chairman,” 13. 32 “L’addition de farines de succédanés a la farine de froment,” ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 33 Directeur du ravitaillement to the Director General of the UCF, July 19, 1921, ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 34 Kyri Claflin, “Trench Fare: Cooking under Fire, France 1914–1918,” in Food and Material Culture: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2013, ed. Mark McWilliams (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2014), 100. 35 Kaplan, Good Bread is Back, 105. 36 Hautcoeur, “Was the Great War a Watershed?” 171. 37 Meeting Minutes, Section de l’Indochine, Union coloniale française, June 2, 1922, ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 38 “Le Pain au riz,” Postcard by the Compagnie Franco-indo-chinoise, 1922, ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590.

184

Notes to pages 78–83

39 L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 16–7. 40 Kaplan, Good Bread is Back, 101; Kaplan and Tonnac, La France et son pain, 242. See also Mennell, All Manners of Food, 303. 41 “Le nouveau pain,” Figaro, June 13, 1926, 2. 42 Le Syndicat des exportateurs français de riz de Saigon to M. Le President de UCF, August 28, 1926, ANOM FP 100 APOM 794. 43 Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 562. 44 L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 16. 45 Director General of UCF to Secretary General of the Confédération national des associations agricoles, June 1, 1928, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 46 Peter A. Coclanis, “Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought,” The American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (1993): 1050. 47 Pierre Mayol, “Bread and Wine,” in The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. II Living and Cooking, ed. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 85. 48 Erica J. Peters, Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century (Lanham: Alta Mira, 2012), 161. 49 George Treille, Principes d’hygiène coloniale (Paris: George Carré et Naud, 1899), 202–3; as cited in Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet,’: Nutrition, Culture, and Dietary Practices in France and French Equatorial Africa, c. 1890s to 1920s,” Food and Foodways 17, no. 1 (2009): 10. 50 Peters, Appetites and Aspirations, 156–61. 51 Kenneth Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), 26. This is also based on my analysis of recipes from two cooking magazines, Le Pot-au-Feu (1893–1957) and Le Cordon bleu (1895–1959). 52 Ch. Achard, “Un peu de cuisine patriotique,” La Presse medicale 34, no. 73 (1926). 53 Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 55–8. 54 Claflin, “Consumers, Cookbooks, and Adaptation in Paris, 1914–1929,” 12. 55 Gauducheau, “Evolution de l’alimentation publique,” 636. 56 Armand Hemmerdinger, “Un richesse nationale à faire fructifier: Le riz,” in Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire (Amphithéâtre de l’Institut océanographique: Imprimerie Lafolye Frères, 1920), 6–7. This represented an embrace of the very recent science of vitamins and deficiency. For more on beriberi, vitamin science, and colonial nutrition, see Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet,’ ” 4. 57 H. Pellaprat, “Cuisine orientale,” Le Cordon bleu, 1909, 653. 58 L’art d’accommoder le riz (Paris: Les Ecoles de cuisine du cordon bleu, 1931), 8. 59 “Riz,” in Larousse gastronomique, ed. Patrice Maubourguet and Laure Flavigny (Paris: Larousse, 2000), 906.

Notes to pages 83–86

185

60 Hemmerdinger, “Un richesse nationale à faire fructifier: Le riz,” 2–4. 61 Erica Peters, “Indigestible Indochina,” in Empire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830–1940, ed. Martin Evans (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 94; Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 95; Dr. Edouard de Pomaine, “Causerie de médecin: Le riz,” Le Pot-au-feu, February 26, 1927, 90. 62 M. Pasques and G. Pasques, Français, mangez au riz (Paris: Librairie Larose, 1933), 5. 63 Perrier and Guilhaumon, “De l’alimentation dans l’armée,” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 4, no. 6 (1914): 337. 64 Rakotosaona, “Le riz: Son véritable rôle alimentaire,” (Medical Thesis, Montpellier, 1902), 59. 65 Paul Anmann, “Le gernier colonial,” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 8, no. 1 (1920): 25. See also Hemmerdinger, “Un aliment méconnu,” 115; Hemmerdinger, “Un richesse national à fair fructifier,” 4–5. 66 Achard, “Un peu de cuisine patriotique,” 1165. 67 P. Robert, “Comment on emploie le riz,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 873 (1931): 209–11. See also, “Le riz,” Le Pot-au-feu 39, no. 7–9 (1931); “Pilaf à la cubaine,” Le Pot-aufeu 39, no. 7–9 (1931). 68 Syndicat du commerce de riz et dérivés de Marseille, “Réponse a deux questions,” 6–7, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 69 “Le riz,” Bulletin du comité technique de l’alimentation, June 15, 1934, AN F10, 1988, D2F25. 70 Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés de Marseille to Minister of War, September 11, 1931, ANOM FP 110 APOM 592; Ruffier-Verduraz to Minister of War, November 4, 1931, ANOM FP 110 APOM 592; President of UCF to Maginot, December 17, 1931, ibid.; Ministry of War to UCF, January 20, 1932, ANOM FP 110 APOM 592. 71 Hemmerdinger, “Un aliment méconnu,” 127. 72 “Notre but pratique et social, notre programme scientifique, moyens de les réaliser: La question de l’alimentation humaine,” Bulletin de la Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire et d’alimentation rationnelle de l’homme 1, no. 1 (1911): III. 73 Armand Hemmerdinger, “Apprenons à nous défendre contre la vie chère,” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 13, no. 1 (1925): 5. 74 Armand Hemmerdinger, “Il faut parler de faire bonne chère avec peu d’argent: Quelques conseils practiques par temps de vie chère,” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 12 (1924): 350. 75 Ibid., 2–5. 76 Armand Hemmerdinger, “Des fleurs sur la table malgré la guerre!” Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire 6, no. 2 (1918): 130. 77 Erica Peters introduces Escoffier’s Le riz as well as many of the other rice promotional works discussed below in Peters, “Indigestible Indochina,” 94–6.

186

Notes to pages 86–90

78 Kenneth James, Escoffier: The King of Chefs (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 268. 79 Auguste Escoffier, Le riz: L’aliment le meilleur, le plus nutritif (Paris: Flammarion, 1927), 5. 80 Ibid., 8–9. 81 Pierre Cordemoy, “L’alimentation nationale et les produits coloniaux: Le riz,” ed. Agence Économique de l’Indochine (Paris: A. Tournon, 1928), 7; L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 12. 82 Georges Servoignt to the Director General of the UCF, February 25, 1928, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 83 Director General of the UCF to the Minister of Colonies, 1928, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 84 Cordemoy, “L’alimentation nationale et les produits coloniaux,” 6; Escoffier, Le riz, 9; L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 9. 85 Escoffier, Le riz, 67–8. 86 Cordemoy, “L’alimentation nationale et les produits coloniaux,” 8; L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 7. 87 Cordemoy, “L’alimentation nationale et les produits coloniaux,” 2. 88 L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 6. 89 Cordemoy, “L’alimentation nationale et les produits coloniaux,” 10. 90 L’Animateur des temps nouveaux, February 17, 1928, 2. 91 Director General of the UCF to Minister of Colonies, 1928, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 92 ANOM FP 100 APOM 592; Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 566. 93 UCF, “Programme de la propagande à entreprendre pour développer la consommation du riz,” ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 94 Director General of the UCF to the Minister of Colonies, 1928, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592; J. Alquier to the President of the UCF, May 18, 1928, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 95 “Pour la plus grande Indochine: Une mission du riz,” Saigon républicain, March 20, 1928, 1. 96 Prosper, “La croisade du riz,” Echo de Paris, May 27, 1928; “Pour l’accroissement de la consommation du riz,” Dépêche coloniale, May 28, 1928. 97 Direction des affaires économique of the Minister of Colonies to the President of the UCF, January 15, 1929, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 98 Compagnie franco indo-chinoise to Director of UCF, September 18 and 20, 1929, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. 99 ANOM FM 1affeco 14. This was a second “Office du riz” in Indochina. Governor General Merlin had founded an Office du riz to “upgrade the quality and marketing of the colony’s

Notes to pages 90–94

100 101 102 103 1 04 105 106 107 108 109 110

1 11 112 113 114 115

1 16 117 118

119

187

rice, and Governor-General Pasquier continued these efforts to make Indochinese rice more competitive on the world market.” Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 566. Governor General of Indochina to Minister of Colonies, December 13, 1913, ANOM FM 1affeco 14. Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’empire, 45. ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés de Marseille, Report of, August 10, 1930, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. Alquier to Director of the UCF, June 20, 1928, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. UCF, “Programme de la propagande a entreprendre pour développer la consommation du riz,” ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. President of the Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés du Marseille to the Director General of the UCF, June 19, 1931, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés du Marseille, “Notice sur le riz, sa cuisson & sa valeur alimentaire,” 2, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized People, 1886–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 67. Syndicat du commerce des riz et dérivés du Marseille, “Notice sur le riz, sa cuisson & sa valeur alimentaire,” 3, ANOM FP 100 APOM 592. “Pour combattre la vie chère,” Exposition coloniale internationale. Bulletin d’informations., February 1931, 14; Roger Homo, Fernand Rouget, and Joseph Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931: Rapport Générale présenté par le Gouverneur Général Olivier, vol. V, pt II, Les Sections coloniales françaises (Paris: Ministère des Colonies, 1933), 716. “Cuisine coloniale,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 871, June 1, 1931, 170. “Avis,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 874, September 1, 1931, 303. P. Robert, “Comment on emploie le riz,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 873 (August 1, 1931): 209. Le Cordon bleu, October 1, 1936, 546. The BNF microfilm collection does not include years 1932 to 1934 of Le Cordon bleu, so it is possible these advertising sections began as early as 1932. I can only document them from 1935. “Le riz d’Indochine,” Le Cordon bleu, January 1, 1935, 27. “Le riz d’Indochine,” Le Cordon bleu, January 1, 1937, 31. Gouvernement général de l’Indochine, “Campagne en faveur du riz bétail. Annonces paraissant dans la presse au cours de la 3ème année. 1933-1934” ANOM FR 9Fi421, 9Fi422, 9Fi534, 9Fi535. These images are accessible online via the BASE ULYSSE at http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr. Lemaire, “Manipulation,” 289–90.

188

Notes to pages 95–98

1 20 Lemaire, “Manipulation,” 292–3. 121 “Riz de l’Indochine,” advertisement published by the Comité de propagande du riz d’Indochine, 1933, as printed in Sandrine Lemaire, “Manipulaire: À la Conquête des goûts,” in Culture impériale 1931-1961, ed. Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2004), 83. 122 Lemaire, “Manipulation,” 289–90. 123 August, The Selling of the Empire, 41–2. 124 Colonial Ministry, Direction of Economic Affairs, “Les productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” ANOM FM 1affeco 118; Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, décembre 1934—avril 1935: Rapports généreaux et conclusions d’ensemble (Paris: Larouse Éditeurs, 1935)1:167. 125 August, The Selling of the Empire, 43. 126 Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 184–7. 127 Ibid., 193. 128 Rod Kedward, France and the French: A Modern History (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2005), 159. 129 Sauvy, 2: 382, Association générale des producteurs de blé, “Note sur la question des riz,” May 19, 1933, AN F10 1988; “Les productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” ANOM FM 1affeco 18; Association général de producteurs de blé, “Le problem du riz,” April 24, 1934, ANOM FP 100 APOM 591; Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 1: 65. 130 Association générale des producteurs de blé, “Le problème du Riz,” AN F10 1988. 131 Sauvy, 2: 385. 132 Syndicat des exportateurs français de riz de Saigon, “La question des riz et maïs d’Indochine,” December 1934, ANOM FP 100 APOM 591; Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 1: 65, 72. 133 Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 1: 73. 134 Sauvy, 2: 453. 135 Ibid., 2: 385–6. 136 Ministre des Colonies, Direction des affaires économiques, “Les Productions coloniales en fonction des besoins de la consommation française,” ANOM FM 1affeco 18. 137 Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 65. 138 Comité de l’Indochine, “Riz français d’Indochine contre blé français? Non, jamais!” ANOM FP 100 APOM 591. 139 Association générale des producteurs de blé, “Le problème du riz: La situation du marché du blé compromise par l’importation croissante des riz d’Indochine,” May 1, 1934, 4, AN F10 1988.

Notes to pages 98–105

189

140 Director General of the UCF to Président de la Commission des douanes du Senat, June 27, 1934, ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 141 Comité de l’Indochine, “Riz français d’Indochine contre blé français? Non, jamais!” ANOM FP 100 APOM 591; Director General of the UCF to Président de la Commission des douanes du Senat, June 27, 1934, ANOM FP 100 APOM 589/590. 142 Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 558. 143 Jean Leune, “Le bataille du riz ‘incohérence,’ ” La dépêche coloniale et maritime, June 11–12, 1934, 1. 144 Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 257, 264–8. 145 Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer: Annex (Paris: Larose Éditeurs, 1935), 17, 21. 146 Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 1: 5. 147 Ibid., 1: 74–6; Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 569. 148 Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer, 1: 76. 149 Ibid., 1:74-6; Schweitzer, “The French Colonialist Lobby,” 569.

Chapter 4 1 H. Pellaprat, “Gâteaux d’entermets: Le Dakar,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 774 (1923): 622; H. Pellaprat, “Entrées chauds, poulet au cary à l’Indienne,” Le Cordon bleu (1908): 561; Noel Peters, “Escalpes de homards à la créole,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 157 (1898): 9; Ch. Durand, “Cuisine modern: Langouste à l’orientale,” Le Cordon bleu (1914): 129: “Aubergines à l’algerienne,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 16 (1934): 245; “Salade malgache,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 7-8-9 (1931): 111. 2 Faustine Régnier, L’exotisme culinaire: Essai sur les saveurs de l’autre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 17. 3 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 33–4. 4 Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 3. 5 Nancy Jocelyn Edwards, “The Science of Domesticity: Women, Education and National Identity in Third Republic France, 1880–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 168. 6 Amy Trubek, Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 83. 7 Rich, Bourgeois consumption, 81, 87. 8 “Notre programme,” Le Pot-au-feu, April 15, 1893, 2. 9 “Notre programme,” La Cuisinière cordon-bleu, January 6, 1895, 4.

190

Notes to pages 105–109

10 For more on the gendered hierarchy between male professional chefs and female home cooks, see Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 140. 11 For more on the male chefs and instructors who authored most of the articles, see Trubek, Haute Cuisine, 84. 12 The title of Le Cordon-bleu was spelled with a hyphen until it was dropped in 1906. For the sake of consistency, I follow the catalog of the French National Library in referring to it by its later title, Le Cordon bleu, without the hyphen. 13 Henri-Paul Pellaprat, L’Art culinaire moderne: La bonne table française et étrangère comprenant plus de 3000 recettes (Paris: Bellegarde, 1936). 14 Michael Field, introduction to Modern French Culinary Art, by Henri-Paul Pellaprat, ed. René Kramer and David White (Wenatchee, WA: World Publishing Company, 1966): xiv. 15 Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 129. 16 Ibid., 146. 17 Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 84. 18 F. Barthélemy, “Cuisine étrangère: Cuisine chinoise,” Le Cordon bleu (1911): 607. 19 F. Barthélemy, “Cuisine étrangère: Cuisine marocaine,” Le Cordon bleu (1912): 304. 20 Trubek, Haute Cuisine, 84. 21 Claude Fischler, L’Homnivore (Paris, Éditions Odile Jacob, 1990), 63–6. Behavioral psychologist Paul Rozin has demonstrated the significance of this belief in incorporation. See especially, Paul Rozin and April E. Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” Psychological Review 94, no. 1 (1987): 23–41; Jonathan Haidt, Paul Rozin, Clark McCauley, and Sumio Imada, “Body, Psyche, and Culture: The Relationship between Disgust and Morality,” Psychology & Developing Studies 9, no. 1 (1997): 107–31; Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Sumio Imada, “Disgust: Preadaptation and the cultural evolution of food-based emotion,” in Food Preferences and Taste: Continuity and Change, ed. Helen McBeth (London: Berghahn Books, 1997): 65–82. 22 Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, 9. See also William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Martha Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 23 Susan B. Miller, Disgust: the Gatekeeper Emotion (Hillsdale: The Analytic Press, 2004): 191. 24 For a contemporary example of this phenomenon, see Lisa M. Heldke, Exotic Appetites (New York: Routledge, 2003), 126–7. 25 Rozin et al., “Disgust: Preadaptation and the cultural evolution . . .,” 68. 26 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), 171–4. 27 F. Barthélemy, “Cuisine étrangère: Cuisine chinoise,” Le Cordon bleu (1911): 609–11.

Notes to pages 110–113 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42

43

191

Barthélemy, “Cuisine étrangère: Cuisine marocaine,” Le Cordon bleu (1912): 306. Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, 17. M. Distel, “Cuisine arabe,” Le Cordon bleu (1914): 103–4. Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet,’ ”1–28. “Les aliments bizarres: Les mangeurs de terre,” Le Cordon bleu (1913): 57. E. Myhr, “Le kouscouss,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 174 (1905): 135–6. L. Maury, “Cuisine marocaine: Le kouscous,” Le Cordon bleu (1912): 296–7. “Pilaff d’agneau à la turque,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 76 (1896): 379. F. Barthélemy, “Cuisine étrangère: Cuisine chinoise,” Le Cordon bleu (1911): 615. Ibid., 607. Barthélemy, “Cuisine étrangère: Cuisine marocaine,” Le Cordon bleu (1912): 306–11. In one exception to this rule, couscous was integrated into a regional French meal in 1937 in a dish titled “ratatouille marocaine.” This dish consisted of ratatouille served alongside couscous and lamb, which made it Moroccan. Note that serving ratatouille, a regional dish from Provence, alongside couscous was enough to make it “Moroccan.” This dish did not appear in the annual index of recipes. “Du nouveau,” Le Cordon bleu, June 1, 1937, 314. “Novembre gastronomique,” Le Pot-au-feu, November 15, 1893, 5; “Avril gastronomique,” Le Pot-au-feu, April 1, 1895, 104. F. Barthélemy, “Les fruits exotiques: La banane,” Le Cordon bleu (1908): 82. Martin Bruegel, “How the French Learned to Eat Canned Food, 1809–1930s,” in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, ed. Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2002), 115. For more on tropical fruits in French cuisine, see Alberto Capatti, Le goût de nouveau: Origines de la modernité alimentaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 187–212. In a chapter titled “Les tropiques chez soi,” Capatti argues that colonial products, especially fruit, were only acceptable to the French public when they were denatured through canning or preserving (in the case of fruits) or homogenized (in the case of rum). This denaturing was necessary in part because the yellow flesh of tropical fruits recalled the yellow fever of their tropical origins and the dangers of a land seen as inhospitable to whites. Although I certainly agree with Capatti that the French showed great timidity in the first half of the twentieth century toward colonial and exotic foods, I disagree with his explanation that this was primarily because of the foods’ association with geographical locations and climates. French timidity toward exotic and colonial foods stemmed much more from a discomfort with colonized peoples than with locations and climates, and tropical fruits were the most acceptable form of culinary exoticism. For more on Hédiard, see Alberto Capatti, Le goût de nouveau, 187.

192

Notes to pages 113–115

44 Marianne, “3 Macaroons à la noix de coco,” Le Pot-au-feu (1929): 334. 45 Barthélemy, “Les fruits exotiques: La banane,” 80–4; “Connaissances utiles: Une nouvelle farine, la farine de banane,” Le Cordon bleu (1909): 165; “Bananesananas-noix de coco: Recettes choisies de quelques fruits coloniaux,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 7–8–9 (1931): 115; F. Barthélemy, “Les fruits exotiques: L’ananas,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 566 (1908): 25–8. 46 For an analysis of the “proper meal,” see Bruegel, “Workers’ Lunch Away from Home,” 265. For more on the meanings of the structure of meals, see Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36–53. 47 Pierre, “Tartellettes meringues à la Chloé,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 12 (1938): 309. 48 H. Pellaprat, “Gâteaux d’entremets: Gâteau hindou,” Le Cordon bleu (1910): 186. 49 L. Duverdier, “Gâteaux d’entremets: L’oriental,” Le Cordon bleu (1910): 557; L. Duverdier, “Gâteaux d’entremets: Le martiniquais,” Le Cordon bleu (1912): 133; H. Pellaprat, “Menus expliqués du Cordon bleu,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 823 (1927): 24. 50 L. Durverdier, “Vacherin à la créole,” Le Cordon bleu (1912): 61. 51 Pellaprat, “Cuisine coloniale,” Le Cordon bleu (1931): 311. 52 In her own analysis, however, Régnier embraces a broader meaning of exotic, equating it with foreign. Régnier, L’exotisme culinaire, 31. 53 “Novembre gastronomique,” Le Pot-au-feu, November 15, 1893, 4–5; “Nouveaux kakis,” Le Pot-au-feu, February 1, 1896, 43; Y., “La Banane,” Le Pot-au-feu, February 20, 1904, 60–2; “Comment on utilise les ananas en cuisine et confiserie,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 566 (1908): 15–24; F. Barthélemy, “Les fruits exotiques,” Le Cordon bleu, (January 1, 1908): 25–8; F. Barthélemy, “Les Fruits exotiques,” Le Cordon bleu (1908): 80–4; H. Pellaprat, “Entremets sucrés,” Le Cordon bleu (January 1, 1910): 12–4; L. Durverdier, “Gâteux d’entremets: Le cubain,” Le Cordon bleu (1911): 579–82; F. Barthélemy, “Les fruits exotiques,” Le Cordon bleu (1912): 260–4; “Sirop d’ananas,” Le Pot-au-feu, April 4, 1914, 108–10. 54 La Veille Catherine [pseud.], “Haricots rouges à la créole,” Le Pot-au-feu, October 15, 1897, 313–4; E. Myhr, “Cuisine exotique,” Le Cordon bleu (1908): 98; P. Robert, “Cuisine bourgeoise: Filet de boeuf à la marocaine,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 686 (1913): 7–10; “Plats exotiques,” Le Pot-au-feu, September 10, 1927, 382; “La cuisine coloniale,” Le Cordon bleu (August 1, 1931): 223–4. 55 See for example “Formule 1264,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 226 (1899): 411; Carle Pons, “Pilaff d’agneau à la syrienne,” Le Cordon bleu (1906): 377. 56 See for example “Crème brésilienne,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 7–8 (1935): 114–16. 57 Pellaprat, “Entremets sucrés,” Le Cordon bleu, January 1, 1910, 12–4; Duverdier, “Gâteaux d’entremets: Le martiniquais”; Carle Poms, “La mousseline martiniquaise,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 926 (1939): 35–6; “Les Entremets à l’ananas,”

Notes to pages 115–120

58

59

60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

193

Le Cordon bleu, no. 950 (1938): 28–29; “Tartelettes à la créole,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 9 (1938): 227. For more on antillaise recipes, see Régnier, L’exotisme culinaire, 104–5. H. Pellaprat, “Gâteaux d’entermets: Le Dakar,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 774 (1923): 622–3; H. Pellaprat, “Nouveauté gourmande: Le senegalais,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 844 (1929): 73–5; “Congolais,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 7 (1937): 36. F. Barthélemy, “Glaces: Ananas à l’indienne,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 518 (1906): 18; “Entremets de saison,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 774 (1923): 623–6; Pellaprat, “Gâteaux d’entremets: Gâteau hindou,” Le Cordon bleu (1910): 186. Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 72–4. See also Régnier, L’exotisme culinaire, 26. “Bananes-Ananas-Noix de Coco,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 7-8-9 (1931): 115; “Glace à la banane en rocher ou en écorces,” Le Pot-au-feu (1932): 99. C. Rivière, “L’Entremets de cuisine,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 919 (1935): 332–3. Martigues, “Aubergines ou courgettes farcies à l’orientale: Utilisation des restes,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 15 (1931): 227. H. Pellaprat, “Entrées chauds: Poulet au cary à l’Indienne,” Le Cordon-bleu (1908): 561–4; Noel Peters, “Escalpes de homards à la créole,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 157 (1898): 9; E. Myhr, “Formule 1302: Carottes braisées à l’indienne,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 232 (1899): 559–60; E. Myhr, “Cuisine étrangère: Courge au riz a l’indienne,” 493–7; J. Morard, “L’art d’accommoder les langoustes,” Le Cordon bleu (1906): 633. “Cuisine des grands restaurants,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 768 (1922): 494–5. “La Cuisine coloniale,” Le Cordon bleu (August 1, 1931): 223–4. Jessica B. Harris, Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 35, 206. Ch. Durand, “Cuisine modern: Langouste à l’orientale,” Le Cordon bleu (1914): 129–34. Ch. Durand, “Entrée chaude de boucherie: L’escalopes de ris de veau à l’orientale,” Le Cordon bleu (1911): 85. “A propos de curry,” Le Pot au feu, January 15, 1934, 13–4. Collingham, Curry, 138. H. Pellaprat, “Entrées chauds, poulet au cary à l’Indienne,” Le Cordon bleu (1908): 254–5. A 1911 gastronomic curiosity article on “La cuisine indienne” discussed the British colonialists’ use of Indian domestic servants and did not mention Pondicherry. F. Barthélemy, “Cuisine étrangère: La cuisine indienne,” Le Cordon bleu (1911):163–8. Ibid., 561. “La bonne cuisine bourgeoise,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 951 (1938): 72. “Aubergines à l’algerienne,” Le Pot-au-feu, no. 16 (1934): 245.

194

Notes to pages 120–125

77 Pascal Blanchard, “National Unity: The Right and Left ‘Meet’ around the Colonial Exposition (1931),” in Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, ed. Pascal Blanchard et al., trans. Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 188. 78 “Retour en arrière pas en avant,” Le Pot-au-feu (1931): 102. 79 Le Pot-au-feu did print a recipe for couscous in 1929. This recipe, however, was within a piece about Jewish cuisine, and therefore maintained its separation from French national cuisine. “Chronique gourmande,” Le Pot-au-feu (1929): 103–4. 80 The few examples included “Assiette angkor,” Le Pot-au-feu, May 15, 1934, 144; “Aubergines à l’algerienne,” 245–6; Une créole [pseud.], “Hors-d’oeuvre malgache,” Le Pot-au-feu, December 1934, 370–3. 81 Pellaprat, “Cuisine coloniale,” 170–1. See also “Chayotte à l’algerienne,” 346–8. 82 Léon Isnard, La Gastronomie africaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1930). 83 “Cuisine coloniale,” Le Cordon bleu, July 1, 1931, 198–9. 84 “La cuisine coloniale,” 223–4. 85 H. Pellaprat, “Cuisine coloniale: Le manioc,” Le Cordon bleu, no. 874 (1931): 255. 86 Pellaprat, “Cuisine coloniale,” 311. 87 Charlotte Rabette, La cuisine exotique chez soi par Catherine (Paris: Éditions de portiques, 1931); Anne Queillac, Cuisine coloniale: Les bonnes recttes de Chloë Mondésir (1931); Raphaël de Noter, La bonne cuisine aux colonies: Asie, Afrique, Amérique (Paris: Dêpot général de l’art culinaire, 1931). 88 Isnard, La Gastronomie africaine. 89 The collection of Le Cordon bleu at the French National Library has some gaps in the 1930s. Therefore, I was not able to access 1932–34 and most of 1935, including the indexes. However, based on the previous and following years, I am confident that my observations still apply for the 1930s as a whole. 90 Gaston Derys, “Cuisine antillaise,” Le Cordon bleu (January 1, 1937): 10–4; Gaston Derys, “Cuisine algérienne,” Le Cordon bleu (May 1, 1937): 234–9; Gaston Derys, “La cuisine nègre,” Le Cordon bleu, February 1, 1938, 64–8. 91 Derys, “La cuisine nègre,” 64. 92 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 87. Cited in Rebecca Earle, “ ‘If You Eat Their Food . . .’: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America,” The American Historical Review 115, no.3 (2010): 703. 93 For an analysis of a similar phenomenon in contemporary food writing, see Heldke, Exotic Appetites, 126–8. 94 Ibid., 64. 95 Poms, “La mousseline martiniquaise,” 35. 96 Carle Pons, “Commont doit-on utiliser les restes,” Le Cordon bleu, March 1, 1939, 136.

Notes to pages 127–130

195

Chapter 5 1 Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 51. 2 The American pavilion was a replica of George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon and contained displays on Alaska, Panama, the Philippines, Samoa, the Virgin Isles, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Ibid., 85. 3 Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, 1931 L’Exposition coloniale (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1991), 101–2. 4 Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious, 2. 5 See for example: Sylviane Leprun, Le théâtre des colonies: Scénographie, acteurs et discours de l’imaginaire dans les expositions, 1855-1937 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986); Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representations at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); Lebovics, True France, 51–97; Hodier and Pierre, 1931 L’exposition coloniale; Hale, Races on Display; Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious, 21–46. 6 Herman Lebovics refers to this division as that which he calls the “fabulous exposition” and “the improving exposition.” Patricia Morton also emphasizes this division between “primitive” and “civilized,” while focusing on spaces of hybridity where the division is unclear. Lebovics, True France, 70; Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 84. 7 Hale, Races on Display, 14–17. 8 Ibid., 86–7. 9 Fernand Rouget, Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931: Rapport général présenté par le Gouverneur Général Olivier, vol. I, Conception & Organisation (Paris: Ministère des Colonies, 1932), 6–111. 10 Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 199. 11 Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, 1931 L’Exposition coloniale (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1991), 101–2. 12 Rouget, Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931, 1: 313–14. 13 For more on Lyautey, see Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): 228–62. 14 Rouget, Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931, 1: 342–7. 15 Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 273. 16 For an analysis of this contemporary museum, see Caroline Ford, “Museums after Empire in Metropolitan and Overseas France,” The Journal of Modern History 82, no. 3 (2010): 625–61. 17 Ibid., 281. 18 Ibid., 292.

196

Notes to pages 130–138

19 Catherine Hodeir, “Le Musée des arts africains à l’exposition coloniale: Un musée permanent pour une exposition éphémère,” in Le palais des colonies: Histoire du musée des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 30. 20 Dominique François, “Janniot au Musée des colonies ou comment transformer un commande en chef-d’œuvre,” in Alfred Auguste Janniot 1889–1969, ed. Edwige Anne Demeurisse (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2003), 51. 21 Ibid., 48. 22 Michel Géo, Principal Export Items of Plant-based Products: rice, bananas, rubber, manioc . . ., 1931, Oil on canvas, 198  424 cm. Available from: Art Resource: www.artres.com (Accessed March 19, 2015). 23 Michel Géo, “Principal Export Items of Plantbased Products: oranges, tobacco, peanuts, henna, carob, dates, olives, cocoa, cork . . .,” 1931, oil on canvas. Available from: Art Resource: www.artres.com (Accessed March 19, 2015). 24 Michel Géo, “Principal Export Items of Plant-based Products, panel 3: Lacquer, rubber, pineapple, sugar cane . . .,” 1931, oil on canvas. Available from: Art Resource: www.artres.com (Accessed March 19, 2015). 25 The French Somalia pavilion also represented a mosque but contained no reference to religion on the inside. André Demaison, À Paris en 1931: Exposition coloniale internationale; Guide officiel (Paris: Editions Mayeux, 1931), 46. 26 Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 196. 27 Roger Homo, Fernand Rouget, and Joseph Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931: Rapport générale présenté par le Gouverneur Général Olivier, vol. 5, pt. 2, Les sections coloniales françaises (Paris: Ministère des colonies, 1933), 38. 28 Ibid. 29 Louis Bertrand, “À travers les sections de l’Exposition coloniale: L’Algérie,” Revue des deux mondes (1931): 827. Sections of the description of the Rapport général, published in 1933, are identical to those in Bertrand’s article. They are not designated as quotes or otherwise attributed. This is especially interesting as Bertrand, though an avid supporter of the Algerian settler population, was very critical of many aspects of the Algerian pavilion. Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931 5: 38. In far less detail, Demaison’s description of the Algerian pavilion confirms Bertrand’s account, particularly in emphasizing the abundance of food images and the “royaume du vin.” Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 95. 30 Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 38. 31 Bertrand, “À travers les sections de l’Exposition coloniale: L’Algérie,” 837. 32 Ibid.

Notes to pages 138–144

197

While in 1931 the Algerian pavilion began with wine before moving to more general agriculture, at the 1922 colonial exposition in Marseille, the first room of the Algerian pavilion was the “Sale des céréales.” Hale, Races on Display, 125. 33 Bertrand, “À travers les sections de l’Exposition coloniale: L’Algérie,” 828–9; Pierre Paraf, “L’Afrique du Nord,” L’Illustration, May 23, 1931, 49; Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 39–40. 34 Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 39. 35 Bertrand, “À travers les sections de l’exposition coloniale: L’Algérie,” 829; Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 40. 36 Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 40–1. 37 Ibid., 51. 38 Ibid., 41. 39 Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 97. 40 Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of National Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 2; Gilles Laferté also examines the concept of terroir and the promotion of regional wines and foods to a national audience. Gilles Laferté, La Bourgogne et ses vins: Image d’origine contrôlée (Paris: Belin, 2006). For more on the role of terroir in defining French national cuisine, see Vincent Martigny, “Le goût des nôtres: gastronomie et sentiment national en France,” Raisons politiques, no. 37 (2010): 39–52. 41 Kolleen M. Guy, “Wine, Champagne and the Making of French Identity in the Belle Époque,” in Food, Drink, and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe Since the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Scholliers (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 172. 42 August, The Selling of the Empire, 46. 43 Ibid., 47–8. 44 Ibid., 48. 45 Bertrand, “À travers les sections de l’exposition coloniale: L’Algérie,” 830–2; Trillat Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 41–8. 46 Georges Fontagnal, “L’Algérie à Vincennes,” in Le livre d’or de l’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931, ed. Fédération française des anciens coloniaux (Paris: Librarie ancienne honoré champion, 1931), 39–40. 47 For more on the celebration of the Algerian centennial, see Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 197–9. 48 Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 94. 49 Hale, Races on Display, 55–6. 50 Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 91; Paraf, “L’Afrique du Nord,” 41–2. 51 Paul-Emile Cadilhac, “Une heure en Tunisie,” L’Illustration, June 27, 1931, 3. 52 Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 106. 53 Ibid., 104. 54 Paraf, “L’Afrique du Nord,” 49.

198

Notes to pages 145–149

55 Hale, Races on Display, 131. 56 This restaurant staff was part of the group of 76 native Moroccans who lived and worked at the colonial exposition. Others worked in the souks or were on display wandering the gardens and patios. Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 212–13. 57 Paraf, “L’Afrique du Nord,” 48. 58 Ibid., 212. 59 Lebovics, True France, 70; Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 196. 60 Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 99. 61 Ibid., 175. 62 Dana S. Hale, “French Images of Race on Product Trademarks during the Third Republic,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 134–7. 63 ANOM ECI 69, file Dumont; ANOM ECI 69, file Esper; ANOM ECI 71 “Concessionnaires dont le cautionnement n’a pas été remboursé,” file David. 64 ANOM ECI 69 file Brahim. 65 ANOM ECI 69 file Esper. 66 Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 193. 67 See, for example, Hale, Races on Display, 5. 68 Fédération français des anciens coloniaux, ed., Le livre d’or de l’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931, 152. 69 Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 969. 70 Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 52. 71 “Miss Guadeloupe 1931,” Exposition coloniale international: Bulletin d’informations, February 1931, 8. 72 Maurice Larrouy, “Excursion aux anciennes colonies atlantiques,” L’Illustration, June 27, 1931, 17–18. 73 Fédération français des anciens coloniaux, ed., Le livre d’or de l’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931, 152. 74 Hale, “French Images of Race on Product Trademarks during the Third Republic,” 131. 75 Ibid., 137–40. 76 Black people of different origins including Sub-Saharan African and Antillais were often lumped together and undistinguished in interwar Parisian culture. As Dana Hale has demonstrated, this was true in trademarks, where on many products a black person’s origin was not specified and sometimes images of blacks in traditional Caribbean dress were used for products associated with Africa. Brett Berliner has argued that the legal distinction between citizens of the Antilles and indigènes from Africa “did not prevent the French from frequently conflating the Antillais with the indigène—both nègres linguistically and conceptually in the French mentality.” Hale, Races on Display, 25–6; Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, 7.

Notes to pages 149–157 77 78 79 80

81

82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

199

Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 841. Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars, 191. Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 593. Coffee was also available at the Guadeloupe, Martinique, Levant, and Madagascar pavilions as well as at the Pavillon de la dégustation Julien Damoy and at the very popular Café maure. Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 50–2, 72; Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 505; André Geiger, “Les États du Levant,” L’Illustration, May 23, 1931, 40. Ce qu’il faut voir à l’exposition coloniale (Lille: Imprimerie de la Société N.E.A. Héliogravure, 1931), 15. Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931 5: 401. ANOM FM ECI 69-71. André Dahl, “Souvenirs d’exposition,” Paris-soir, October 24, 1931, 2. Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 139. Groups that dined there included the Société d’acclimatation. “Déjeuner amical annuel,” Bulletin de la société nationale d’acclimatation de France 78 (1931): 393–411. Ce qu’il faut voir à l’Exposition coloniale, 60. Fédération française des anciens coloniaux, ed., Le livre d’or de l’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931, 838. Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 62. Homo, Rouget, and Trillat, Exposition coloniale internationale de 1931, 5: 303. Chamine, “Nederland,” Comoedia, July 4, 1931, 5. Geiger, “Les États du Levant,” 38–41. Paul-Emile Cadilhac, “Promenade à travers les cinq continents,” L’Illustration, May 23, 1931, 73. Demaison, A Paris en 1931, 36. “Cannibales authentiques,” Exposition coloniale internationale: Bulletin d’informations, October 1930, 6. See also Lauren Janes, “Writing about Cannibal Diets and Consuming Black Africans in France during the first half of the Twentieth Century,” French Cultural Studies 26, no. 2 (2015). “Madagascar comme à Périgueux,” Paris-soir, June 19, 1931, 2. Raymond Baudouin, “La table anthropophagique et son ravitaillement,” Paris-soir, May 16, 1931, 5. Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 65. Baudouin, “La table anthropophagique et son ravitaillement,” 5. Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 4. Ibid., 215. ANOM FM ECI 69–71. ANOM ECI 69, file Blazy.

200

Notes to pages 157–165

1 03 ANOM ECI 70, file Gence. 104 ANOM ECI 71, “Concessionnaires dont le cautionnement n’a pas été remboursé,” file Beutolila. 105 ANOM ECI 46; CHAN F12 11934 bis. 106 ANOM ECI 71, file Susini. 107 ANOM ECI 71, “Concessionnaires dont le cautionnement n’a pas été remboursé,” file Cornaz; AN F12 11934 bis. 108 Cadilhac, “Promenade à travers les cinq continents,” 71–4.

Conclusion 1 Sarraut, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises, 17. 2 Craig S. Smith, “In Paris streets, soup with a tang of intolerance,” New York Times, February 28, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/world/europe/28ihtparis.html?_r=0 (accessed March 30, 2015). 3 “Le Semaine coloniale de 1933,” Le Monde colonial illustré, May 1933, 66, as cited in Lemaire, “Manipulation,” 293. 4 Ferri-Pisani, Congo: Avec les chercheurs d’or et les pygmées parmi les éléphants et les gorilles (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1940), 7–8, as cited and translated in Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet,’ ” 21. 5 Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet,’ ” 21. 6 Ferri-Pisani, Congo, 7, as cited and translated in Neill, “Finding the ‘Ideal Diet,’ ” 21. 7 For more on culinary separation in the colonies, see Peters, Appetites and Aspirations. 8 Seth Sherwood, “In the Heart of Paris, an African Beat,” New York Times, December 18, 2005. See also, Erica Peters, “Defusing Phơơ: Soup Stories and Ethnic Erasures, 1919–2009,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14, no. 2 (2010): 165. 9 Sherwood, “In the Heart of Paris, an African Beat.” 10 Guy, “Culinary Connections,” 223–4. Guy cites Maurice T. Maschino, “Si vous mangez du couscous,” Le Monde diplomatique (June 2002): 7. 11 Smith, “In Paris streets, soup with a tang of intolerance.” 12 “Nicolas Sarkozy est ‘opposé aux repas de substitution’ dans les cantines d’écoles publiques,” LeMonde.fr, March 17, 2015, http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/ article/2015/03/17/nicolas-sarkozy-est-oppose-aux-repas-de-substitution-dansles-cantines-d-ecoles-publiques_4595581_823448.html#jpjHwT3rtuSHRaJD.99 (accessed March 30, 2015). 13 A. Gauducheau, “Acclimatation humaine et transformation des races par l’hygiène et l’alimentation,” Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France 84 (1937): 116.

Bibliography

Archival collections Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, France. Fonds Ministériel (FM), including the Affaires économiques (affeco) and Exposition Coloniale Internationale (ECI) collections. Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, France. Fonds Privé (FP), including the Archives du comité central français pour l'outre-mer (100 APOM). Archives nationales (AN), Paris, France. Including the Série F Agriculture (F10) and Série F Commerce et Industrie (F12) collections. Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Archives et manuscrits. Paris, France.

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Index Académie d’agriculture 74 Académie de medicine  74, 79 Acclimatization Society, see Société d’acclimatation AEF, see French Equatorial Africa Agence économique de l’Indochine  69, 71–2, 87–8 Afrique équatoriale française, see French Equatorial Africa Afrique occidentale française, see French West Africa Algeria  14–15, 48, 50, 53–4, 96, 106, 120–4 at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition  137–43, 146 AOF, see French West Africa Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC)  139 assimilation  11, 13, 64, 112, 153 association 64 authenticity  64–8, 118, 143–8 Baker, Josephine  65, 154–5 bananas availability of  8–9, 113 as exotic  65, 124, 132–5, 147–8, 155 promotion of  52 in recipes  114–16, 121 study of  55–6 Banania 148 Barthélemy, F.  108–13 Baudouin, Raymond  154–5 beans  16, 35–6 beets 21–3 beriberi 87 Bertrand, Louis  138 Bois, Désiré  55–7 Bourdieu, Pierre  59 bread costs and shortages  20–2, 29, 32, 81 in French cuisine  6, 77–8, 142, 159 in the colonies  63, 112, 142, 163 with rice flour  70–80

breadfruit 47 Brillat-Savarin 6 bureaucracy  27–30, 71–2 Cadhilac, Paul-Emile  143 cannibalism 153–7 China  70, 109–12 chocolate  8, 13, 85, 115, 147, 162 Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, see Musée permanent des colonies coconut  52, 55, 103, 113–17, 121, 147 coffee  8, 45, 59, 115, 127, 134, 145–51, 157, 162 Colonial Exposition, see International Colonial Exposition colonial lobby acclimatization scientists in the colonial lobby  45–56, 67–8 definition and formation  1–2, 9–13 in the First World War  28, 33, 37, 41–3 promoting imperialism  15–18, 128–30, 158–9, 161–3 promoting rice  74, 77–80, 91 Colonial Ministry  16, 27–9, 36, 41–2, 52, 69–75, 89, 94–7, 129, 156 colonial party, see colonial lobby Comité de l’Indochine  98 Conférence coloniale  29 Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer 1935 (Imperial Conference)  97–100 Congress of Colonial Agriculture  42 cookbooks  65, 82–3, 94, 105, 121–4 Cordemoy, Pierre  87–8 Le Cordon bleu (magazine and school)  65, 82–4, 93–4, 103–26, 163–4 couscous at banquets  1, 66 contemporary 165

218

Index

exoticized  110–13, 121–3, 126 at the 1931 Colonial Exposition  138, 145–6 creole  115–25, 147–8 cuisine African 123–5 French  2–9, 13, 17, 23, 55, 65–7, 81, 103–7, 111–20, 126, 157–8, 163 regional French  5, 7, 60, 105–6, 115, 121, 139 Curnonsky, see Sailland, Maurice Edmond curry  1–2, 13, 17, 58, 65–6, 106–7, 116–26, 163 Darles, A.  89 déjeuner amicaux, see Société d’acclimatation Delondre, Augustin  50–1 Demaison, André  142–3, 153 Derys, Gaston  123–6 dessert  1, 5–7, 82, 104, 113–18, 121–3, 157, 163 disgust  3–4, 84, 103, 107–10, 114, 123–6, 130, 136, 153–6, 162 Distel, Marthe  105 distinction  46, 54, 67, 78, 109, 152–5 Escoffier, Georges Auguste  5–7, 86–8 Etienne, Eugène  10 exoticism  2, 8, 13–17, 46, 53–60, 64–8, 103, 106–29, 139, 143–59, 163–4 famine 14 farmers  21, 26, 38, 69–70, 96–100 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst  104 First World War  11, 14, 19–43, 61, 73–7, 161–2 Fischler, Claude  3, 108 fish sauce  36, 61–4 fraud 75 French Colonial Institute  94, 98 French Colonial Union, see Union coloniale française French Equatorial Africa (AEF)  163 French West Africa (AOF)  14, 16, 30–2, 132–3, 149, 151–5, 157 frigo meat, see refrigeration frozen, see refrigeration

fruit, see also bananas; coconut; pineapple acclimatization and nutrition of  50, 85 availability of  8, 38 at the 1931 Colonial Exposition  131–5, 147–9, 157 in recipes  1–2, 6, 38, 113–16, 121–6, 163–4 Gabon  31, 60, 131–2 gastronomic curiosity  103, 107–13, 154–5 Gauducheau, Alexandre  56, 61–4, 82, 165 geophagy 110 grande cuisine, see haute cuisine Great Depression  8–9, 15, 26, 69–70, 95–100, 140, 162 Greater France  1–2, 8, 12–13, 16–17, 64, 70, 78, 88, 95–100, 129–30, 145–8, 155–63 groundnuts 31–2 groupe coloniale 10 Groupement des exportateurs de riz d’Indochine (GERI)  34, 71 Guadeloupe  14, 23–5, 41, 55, 117–18, 147–50 el Hadj, Ahmed  145 halal 3–5 haute cuisine  5–7, 86 Hédiard, Ferdinand  113 Hemmerdinger, Armand  72, 77, 82–6 horsemeat  48, 50 housewives  5–7, 72, 83, 85–91, 104–6, 111, 114 Identity Block  161, 165 Imperial Conference 1935, see Conférence économique de la France métropolitaine et d’outre-mer importation numbers other  8–9, 32, 39–40, 97 rice  32, 35–6, 70, 95–6, 100 sugar  8, 24–6 incorporation  2–3, 12, 17, 46, 62, 108, 161–6 of rice  75–80, 87 India  52–3, 65, 83, 117–20 Indochina  20, 33–7, 69–71, 73–8, 81, 84, 93–101, 122, 162 International Colonial Exposition 1931 (ECI)  85, 91–4, 114–15, 120–1, 126–59, 163

Index

219

intrasauce 60–4 Isnard, Léon  122–3

Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN)  47–9, 55

Janniot, Albert  130–4

naming of dishes  82–2, 94, 103, 115–16 natalism 92 Nigg, Lucien  61, 64 nuoc-mam, see fish sauce nutrition  10, 16, 72, 78, 85–8

Kaplan, Steven  22, 77–8 Korsmeyer, Carolyn  3, 108 Lahille, Abel  73–5 L’Animateur des temps nouveaux (magazine) 87–8 la Vielle Catherine, see Saint-Ange, Evelyn Ébrard Lebrun, Albert  41 Le Pen, Marine  4 Le Pot-au-feu (magazine)  6, 65, 82–3, 103–9, 113–23 Loyer, Maurice  52–3 Lyautey, Hubert  31, 129, 154 Madagascar  10, 27, 37–41, 55, 63, 83, 149, 153–4 Magniot, André  28–9 manioc  79, 122, 134, 163 meat, see also intrasauce exotic, strange  52–4, 109–12, 123–4, 154–5, 163 in the First World War  20–2, 27 in the French diet  6, 86, 50, 61, 63–4, 81, 86, 165 frozen  8, 37–40, 62 halal  3–5, 165–6 imported  8, 37–41 mediation  17, 46, 55, 67, 156 Mille, Pierre  59 Ministère de ravitaillement  23, 28–31, 35–6, 41, 76 Ministry of Agriculture  34, 79, 97 Ministry of Colonies  9, 16, 27–9, 35–6, 41–2, 52, 69–75, 89, 94–8, 129, 156 Ministry of Supply, see Ministère du ravitaillement Ministry of War  31, 33, 49, 75 mise en valeur  10–11, 14–16, 20, 29, 40, 42–7, 53, 56–7, 62–8, 71, 88–90, 99–100, 104–6, 138, 145, 162 Morocco  31–2, 41, 66, 108–12, 143–7 Musée permanent des colonies 129–136

Office indochinois du riz 90 okra  115, 122 oriental  65, 83, 116–20, 145–50, 157 Outrey, Ernest  75–7 pain de riz, see rice flour peanuts, see groundnuts Pellaprat, Henri-Paul  7, 105, 119 Perrier, Edmond  49–52, 57 pineapple  9, 14, 113–18, 121, 136, 147–9, 153, 162–3 plus grande France, see Greater France Pondicherry 119 Prevost, Marcel  66–7 python  52–4, 124 race  3, 63–4, 79–81, 110–12, 117, 125–6, 130–2, 149–59 rational eating  85–6 rations  27, 30, 37, 63, 83–4 recipes  58, 65, 82–94, 103–26 refrigeration 37–40 Reinhart, Jules  28 restaurants Chinese 66 and French cuisine  5–7, 60 at the 1931 International Colonial Exposition  89, 129, 143–7, 149–57, 163 Quick 3–5 and the Siege of Paris  49 Revel, M.  32 rice as animal feed  97 during the First World War  33–7, 73–7 in French cuisine  8, 13, 31, 81–2, 86, 89–90, 92–3, 122 importation numbers  36, 70, 95–7, 100 in the military  83–4 prices 97 promotion of  57–60, 69–101

220

Index

quality of Indochinese rice  55, 83–4 and race  63–4, 78–9, 82–3 rice flour  73–80 Rollin, Louis  99 rum  115, 124, 147–9 Sahlins, Marshall  109 Sailland, Maurice Edmond (Curnonsky) 105–7 Saint-Ange, Evelyn Ébrard  105 St. Hilaire, Isidore Geoffroy  47, 51 Sarkozy, Nicolas  4, 165 Sarraut, Albert  11–12, 20, 33–7, 42–5, 56, 60–5, 71, 161 Senegalese riflemen  148 Service de l’utilisation des produits coloniaux pour la défense nationale 27–8 shipping  27–34, 39–41, 75–6 Siege of Paris 1870–1871  49–53 Société d’acclimatation 45–68 déjeuner amicaux  45–6, 51–68 founding and purpose  47–52 and rice  57–8 and siege of Paris  49–53 Société scientifique d’hygiène alimentaire  72, 85, 162, 164 souks 141–7 soy  27, 36–7, 54 sugar  8, 14–15, 19–27, 43, 59, 85, 133–6, 147–8, 162 Syndicat de la rizerie française 60 Syndicat des exportateurs français de riz de Saîgon  90, 98 Syndicat du commerce des riz et derives  84, 91–3

Syndicat patronal de la boulangerie de Paris et de la Seine 75 Tahiti  47, 52, 149 tariffs  9, 38–40, 70–1, 95–9, 140 taste  2–3, 47–68, 73–5, 108–11, 139, 143, 147–51 terroir 139 Thouin, André  47 tirailleurs sénégalais, see Senegalese riflemen Tompkins, Kyla Wazana  2–3 Tunisia 143–7 UCF, see Union coloniale française Union coloniale française (UCF) and First World War  20–1, 34, 39–43 origins 10 and rice promotion  34, 69, 75–99, 162 Van Vollenhoven, Joost  26–32 wheat  70, 78–9, 81, 139 in Algeria  141–2, 162 and the First World War  14, 21–2, 27–36, 73–7 prices 95–9 wine Algerian  137–45, 162 in French cuisine  6, 22, 63, 81, 85–6, 159, 165 World War I, see First World War Zamacoïs, Miguel  60