The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [176]
2. CHICKWEED: In French mouron; the English-language name comes from the fact that the seeds are used for chicken feed. Chickweed, Stelleria media, grows wild in the temperate zones of the world and has edible spinachlike leaves that the ancient Greeks and Romans were particularly fond of. In past centuries with less food transport, chickweed was valuable in Europe because it was one of the few foods that would grow in the northern European winter and grew wild. But in Les Halles, Cadine was selling chickweed as bird feed.
3. POSITIVISM IN ART: At this time, the mid-nineteenth century, positivism was a very trendy idea and one that had greatly influenced Zola. It was originated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who is sometimes considered the first sociologist. Positivism holds that knowledge cannot be attained through such intellectual pursuits as metaphysics and theology but only through scientific observation.
4. SAINT-HONORÉ CAKES, SAVARINS, FLANS, FRUIT TARTS, PLATTERS OF BABAS: These pastries, though still easily found, were invented in mid-nineteenth-century Paris and were the height of culinary fashion at the time the novel is taking place. Saint-Honoré was, according to legend, invented in 1846 in the Paris shop of a celebrated pastry maker named Chiboust. It is a ring of puff pastry topped with little cream puffs filled with pastry cream and topped with caramel. Chiboust's great invention, chiboust cream, which is pastry cream blended with meringue and set with gelatine, fills the center.
Savarins were invented at about the same time, in the Paris pastry shop of the Julien brothers. Their origin was the medieval Slavic cylindrical yeast cake known as a babka, which traveled to Alsace, where it became a yeast cake with dried fruit soaked in kirsch syrup, lost its k, and became baba. In Paris the dried fruit was eliminated, the yeast cake was baked in a small ring mold, the cake was soaked in rum syrup, and it was renamed after the great nineteenth-century French food writer Brillat-Savarin.
5. FROMAGE BLANC: Fromage blanc is a fresh cheese made from milk, barely fermented so that it has at most the thickness of yogurt.
6. GRAS-DOUBLE: A particular beef tripe. Tripe is made from the stomachs of ruminating animals—that is, cud-chewing animals such as cows and sheep, but also deer. Ruminators digest their food, usually grass, by regurgitating it through a series of stomach chambers until it reaches the fourth chamber, the abomasum, where it is finally broken down by gastric juices. All four chambers produce tripe, though the last, the most important to the animal, is the least important to us. The most popular tripe, the honeycombed, comes from the second chamber, the recticulum. Gras-double is made from the first chamber, called in French the fame and in English the paunch or rumen. The smooth exterior and rough interior provide two very distinct textures, thus double tripe, gras-double.
7. “HE'LL GO BACK TO THE PENAL COLONY, YOU KNOW”: The word Zola uses here is le bagne, which originally referred to prison ships on which the navy kept as many as six thousand convicts off the coast of France. But after 1852, when the emperor Napoleon establishd the penal colony of French Guiana, it became known as le bagne and prisoners or former prisoners of French Guiana became known as les bagnards.
8. IN THE CLASSICAL POSE OF LEDA: In Greek mythology Leda was the daughter of an Aetolian king and the wife of a king of Sparta. Zeus came to her in the form of a swan and raped her, a union that resulted in Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux. Since she also lay with her husband that night, there were varying theories about who was the father of whom. The legend of Leda and the swan became a popular Renaissance motif, painted by Michelangelo