Lard culture wasn't that long ago. Given the renewed prevalence of Health Whisperers, those progressive forms of trad wives who fetishize the ancient ways, lard is now an alternative food fad, sold at high cost to people who also want raw milk, or rendered from pork fat on their induction stoves. For my father it was a way of life.
Bread made in my grandmother's kitchen with lard and salt and pepper was his lunch. He didn't describe it as bleak, he didn't go to therapy about it, the way tedious celebrities go on about in interviews if fans are mean about their movie, it was just his life. I grew up poor, below the poverty most of the time, but not as poor as he'd been. He provided a better life for his kids than he'd had and telling us about lard sandwiches was proof. Before President Clinton made organic™ a government marketing designation so it could be sold at a premium to wealthy elites, we did organic farming. It was just called being poor then. We wished we had money for glyphosate.
In Clay, by Franck Bouysse (English translation by Lara Vergnaud) out May 20th, the people aren't in true poverty, they own the land they farm, but the kids still eat lard because they are poor. No one ate it because they wanted it, it just makes dry bread seem softer. My father said the salt and pepper gave it some semblance of flavor. The author of Clay is the same age as me, so perhaps he also remembers it being common in the diets of his family, before seed oils and Crisco were deemed healthier by the same epidemiology field that now insists are not.
There are a lot of little details like that in Clay, details of a time when France was still a superpower, before they lost an entire generation fighting because the "iron dice" were rolling but every leader in Europe insisted the other team would blink. No one claiming to be an expert seemed to realize how far killing technology had advanced.(1) Details that are just background and not forced show the reader it was a France of a long-lost time, even if it was only a century ago, rather than telling us. Just 20 years later, few people would put a stone in a pot to level out the boiling, for example, but it is in the book because in 1914 it was still common.
Clay
isn't about cooking, any more than it's about the clay in its title. Those are shown to create the world, just like it's more than a book about a young man who likes to sculpt.
That kind of background is valuable to future generations in a way works by historians are not.(2) You can learn a lot more about actual early 20th century England reading an Agatha Christie novel than you can a history book.
But some things do not change, and you can learn about French culture now reading what he writes of things then. We live in a world of billions of people but we're each living in a small community. If we are able to do so, we can leave a difficult environment but for the poor, it is not always that simple. Sometimes you are just stuck. Especially in a country like France, where without the right school or the right connections, upward mobility is very challenging.
The plot outline is nondescript enough you won't get a lot of the real book. Basically, the iron dice have rolled, war has broken out, the Germans and their allies are in a fight with Russia and France, and England, run by a German family, was going to have to fight also. That is the big world they live in. In the small world, there are two farms and people trying to get by in a world of stress that is hard to comprehend for most.
The small stories are important and Clay does a fine job of making us feel the despair.
NOTES:
(1) Like the American Civil War, where wealthy elites traveled to Manassas, Virginia, with picnic lunches to see the first fight, convinced all those Democrats who seceded because they wanted to keep owning slaves would be routed in weeks. They instead saw General Thomas Jackson, still in a Union uniform because his Virginia Military Institute jacket was only for a Major, get off a train and rush his men to the fight and earn the nickname "Stonewall" - which helped the Confederacy win the day.
(2) The military has changed also. The Napoleonic belief in fear and submission creating the tools of victory finally collapsed for good when Iraq's Republican Guard, which CNN had touted as elite, the fourth largest fighting force in the world, evaporated before soldiers who had morale and confidence in 1991.
