Finistère – France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France

The Potato Chronicles: Memories of Brittany

Francesca Cannan — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 10:00:22 +0000

In the early 1990s, I lived in a cavernous stone manor in the village of Logonna-Daoulas in Brittany, just across from the tiny but popular pub and across the parking lot from the less popular church. Each morning I drove into the city of Brest to teach at an English immersion school. Even the Brestois called Brest an “ugly” city, demolished in WWII and then rebuilt quickly, sitting like a blemish on the nose of France that juts into the Atlantic. But the Breton countryside outside the city is a lovely drive through undulating gray-green fields steeped in mist and rain. Potato fields. Miles and miles and miles of them.

A food lover, I worked my way through the Breton catalog of culinary wonders during my first few months in Brittany. I ate delicately spun buckwheat crepe-like galettes, my favorite filled with a perfect balance of musky smoky sausage and briny seaweed. I feasted on piles of mussels coaxed to open their shells in a savory brew of mellowed alliums, wine and then the sea broth given up by the crustacean, a baguette there to soak up every single drop of buttery, tangy broth. At my friend’s cottage by the roaring gray ocean, I slathered slices of dark buckwheat bread with the famous brilliant-yellow Breton butter salted by the sea and ate it alongside razor clams we had just dug up from the sandy beach. And my cheeks got round with weekend brunches ending in flaky, caramelly kouign amann pastry.

The bar across the street from where the author lived. Photo F. Cannan

Those first few months I don’t know if I ate even one potato. “Earth apple” in French and Breton: pomme de terre, aval-douar. I wondered where the produce from all the fields of green went if not to the Breton table. In fact, my introduction to those potatoes – Amandine, Charlotte, Marianna, to name just a very few – began not à table but on the streets of Brest. Literally on the streets.

I was on my way home from school one evening, later than most commuters. It was a typical drizzly gray spring but the eerie silence was more like a city after a winter storm. Farmers protesting low prices had dumped tractor loads of potatoes at major intersections. The piles were now a whispering soft mush like when you add too much milk to the spuds.

Cars quietly shushed through the slush or got stuck, like me, in a foot of puree. A tall lusty gendarme, in the normally menacing all-black uniform, directed traffic with the glee of a child on the first real snow day in December. He lifted up my car’s back right rear where the tire was spinning in the muck with a hearty, “Hop là!” The thrust sent a spray of potato up the front of his jacket and his feet slid out from under him on the slippery sliding mess. He fell flat on his derriere, laughing up at the sky; I half expected him to make a snow angel in his delight. “Oh, la, la, quel bordel!” he laughed.

Finistère, Brittany viewed by plane. Photo F. Cannan.

My introduction to the importance of potatoes to Breton chefs happened at a small café on a blustery winter day, the wind roaring in off the Atlantic. The waitress standing at my table, a round older woman with remarkable posture, tapped a pad with her pencil. Her apron was pristine, white and pressed, a towel tucked on the side to give a table a quick swipe. She was all business and waiting for my order. The special of the day? Lapin chasseur – rabbit, hunter-style. With potatoes.

It sounded lovely. But in my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed naïve American way, I asked in my clumsy French, “What is there as vegetables?”

The waitress, a bit like my stern second-grade teacher, Mrs. Bodfish, who said a lot with a little, stared silently. She must have realized Americans can be dense. “Potatoes,” she repeated.

Not to be deterred I went on, “Well, in my country, potatoes are not truly considered as a vegetable.”

She continued to stare. I matched her ability to be frugal with her words, with my ability to go the extra mile. “It’s like the rice or the pasta? How do you say, a ‘starch’?”

Nothing. Surrendering, I ordered the lapin that the hunter had slaved over with the potato vegetables. The rabbit was tender and fell away from the bone with a simple touch of a single fork tine. Mushrooms melted away on my tongue in a caramelly brown sauce and a medley of herbs teased my palate. And with each bite? A bit of potato to perfectly bind and carry the woodsy meat, mushroom and sauce without disturbing the delicacy of the flavors.

The waitress came by and asked brusquely how everything was. “Très, très bon – délicieux.” She gave a short and sure “of course” nod and went back to the other customers. My stomach gloriously warm and full, the bill paid, I was calling my farewell when the waitress remembered something and gestured for me to wait.

She called to the chef in the kitchen. He appeared at the window where orders were placed – tall and thin, eyes quick and gray-blue like the Breton sea, cheeks red and glossy with the heat of the kitchen. She presented me ceremoniously with a dramatic sweep of her arm. “This,” she emphasized, “is the woman who said potatoes are not a vegetable.”

He looked me over from head to toe and back again. He enunciated. “C’est le légume de baaaaase, madame,” which translates to “Lady, it is the foundation on which all other vegetables rest, on which all food rests, in fact.”

There it was. The reason for the glorious green and rolling fields laying down a carpet from the city to the sea as I passed on the drive to work each day. And from that moment on, I began to see them everywhere. Humble, unassuming potatoes – the necessary support to the dishes that stole the culinary thunder but were not complete without them.

There was Kig ha farz – buckwheat flour dumplings cooked in a linen sleeve alongside boiled meats and vegetables – with potato cooked in the salty, savory broth. Not a restaurant dish but a simple stick-to-your-ribs meal meant to gather family around the table after Sunday mass. Poulet à la Bretonne, simmered on the stove in a Breton cider as fine as any dry white wine, only became a full dinner when served with golden roasted potatoes. Historically, the fisherman of Brittany took potatoes with them for long days out on the water and would add a medley of fish from their catch with a bit of water and sea brine to make the working man’s cotriade, a nourishing soup at sea. And every Breton village had its own recipe for the fisherman’s soup perfectly suited to the many many rainy, windy days of Bretagne.

In 2023, I will be heading back to revisit the land of pommes de terre. I know I can expect some rain, I can expect drives through lovely countryside, and I can expect some incredible meals with the essential foundation of potatoes.

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Where and Why to Visit the American WWI Sights of France

Gary Lee Kraut — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:17:46 +0000

The American First World War memorials, monuments and cemeteries of France are sadly under-visited despite their historical significance, the beauty of their landscapes, their notable Art Deco and architecture, and the enormous efforts that the American Battle Monuments Commission (i.e. U.S. tax dollars) put in to maintaining them.

Admittedly, war touring isn’t for everyone. After all, that’s far from the Eiffel Tower, isn’t it? (Well, no, you can actually see the Eiffel Tower from an American war cemetery.) And you’d rather be drinking Champagne, right? (Well, the largest U.S. WWI monument in France actually overlooks Champagne vineyards at Château-Thierry.) And you’d rather visit the Gothic cathedrals of France than the war shines of Americans. (You mean like those that you’ll pass along the way?)

OK, I won’t try to convince you. But if you’ll give a look and listen to the presentation below, you’ll see and learn why someone—maybe not you, but you’ve got curious friends and relatives, right?—might want to visit these sights.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Earlier this year I met with John Wessels, Chief Operating Officer of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), to ask if the ABMC would be willing to participate in a Zoom talk with me to explain to readers of France Revisited the interest of knowing about and one day visiting the American WWI sights of France. He readily agreed. There was then a question of finding the right person to co-present with me.

I’ve written many articles about touring American war sights in France relative to both the WWI and WWII, I’ve have given lectures in the United States on the subject, and I’ve personally taken numerous travelers to visit these sights. But I’m a generalist regarding travel and touring in France. So I needed a true specialist to join me for the presentation, preferably a military historian who’s visited the sights to be discussed who could speak authoritatively about both major events of the First World War and the creation and evolution of memorials, monuments and cemeteries. Thanks to John Wessels and to the ABMC’s media and communications duo of Hélène Chauvin in Paris and Ashley Byrnes in Arlington, we found the perfect specialist for the program: Ben Brands, the ABMC’s historian and a war veteran himself (Afghanistan).

I now invite you to watch the France Revisited “Conversation with an Expert” below in which Ben Brands and I speak about the American WWI memorials, monuments and cemeteries of France. This presentation—illustrated with numerous maps and photos—was conducted and recorded via Zoom on November 10, 2022, with a live audience of readers of France Revisited. Several segments were rerecorded shortly thereafter so as to resolve technical problems and for coherence.

The timeline below the video indicates the list of topics, events and sights along with the speaker, whether Ben Brands (BB) or myself (GLK). The full presentation lasts 1½ hours. If you wish to watch only portions of the presentation, I recommend that you watch it directly on Youtube and on full screen so that you can click or tap directly on the timeline in the Youtube description section in order to arrive at segments of particular interest to you and better view details of the images. Be sure to watch my introduction and Ben Brand’s conclusion to understand the underlying reasons for organizing this presentation.

Video timeline

0:00:00 Introduction by Gary Lee Kraut
0:05:40 Ben Brands presents the work of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC)
0:07:12 Who is Ben Brands? What is his role as historian at the ABMC? His tour of duty as a company commander in Afghanistan.
0:12:22 A comparison between a WWII map of the Invasion of Normandy 1944 and WWI maps of northern and northeastern France and Belgium. (GLK)
0:15:24 American entrance into war. Pershing visits Lafayette’s tomb in the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. (BB)
0:18:39 The annual changing of the American flag over Lafayette’s tomb in Paris. (GLK)
0:19:30 Origin and evolution of the ABMC. (BB)
0:23:35 The Lafayette Escadrille Memorial. (BB)
0:27:41 The Suresnes American Cemetery. (GLK, BB)
0:32:00 Mont Valérien, a major French WWII memorial, a 5-minute walk from the Suresnes American Cemetery. (GLK)
0:34:17 The American Naval Monument at Brest. (BB)
0:36:39 Why didn’t the Germans intentionally harm the Allies’ WWI sights during WWII? American involvement in the Somme. The Somme American Cemetery. (BB)
0:40:35 Cantigny. (BB, GLK)
0:42:09 Amiens and the American Red Cross huts at the former Cosserat Textile Factory. (GLK)
0:45:01 Art Deco design and architecture in Saint Quentin and Reims. (GLK)
0:46:33 The American Monument at Château-Thierry, Paul Cret, Belleau Wood, the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. (BB)
0:57:52 The French-American House if Friendship in Château-Thierry. (GLK)
0:58:34 The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery. (BB)
1:01:04 Quentin Roosevelt, a president’s son killed in aerial combat. (BB)
1:05:08 Anne Morgan and the National Museum of French American Cooperation in the Château de Blérancourt. (GLK)
1:05:56 The Saint Mihiel American Cemetery and the Montsec American Monument. (BB)
1:09:20 Philanthopist Belle Skinner and the village of Hattonchâtel. (GLK)
1:10:18 Verdun and the Douaumont Ossuary. (GLK)
1:11:56 The Montfaucon American Monument. (BB)
1:14:18 African-American soldiers: segregation, heroes, awards and burials. Jewish grave markers. (BB)
1:20:52 The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. (BB)
1:23:09 The Romagne German Cemetery, Jean-Paul de Vries’ Romagne 14-18, Sergeant York. (GLK)
1:25:17 The French and American Tombs of the Unknown Soldier. (BB)
1:27:25 Conclusions by Gary and Ben.

Sights discussed in this presentation are located in the Paris region and the departments of Finistère (Brittany), Somme (Upper France), Aisne (Upper France) and Meuse (Eastern France).

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