France, to so many today, is the country for the best of eating, from the humblest restaurant or hotel up. All those lovely holiday brochures recall the supremacy of French cuisine. Post-famine in Ireland, spuds and buttermilk was widespread fare for those who lived in the country. In the cities, maybe tea and bread with marge were the staples. But France, that vast, rich (to us) country was no great provider for those who lived in its rural areas during the 19th century and even into this one. Hunger, indeed, was the norm at peasant's tables well into the 19th century and a real hunger, in rural France, only disappeared or - as a writer puts it, minds only became adjusted to its disappearance - as the 20th century was dawning.
Fear of famine haunted vast areas of the country. Eugene Weber, in his book Peasants into Frenchmen (1977), says "to this day" there are people who remember the older generation "as being stingy about food and as giving children as little as possible to eat". The folk memory from the Pyrenees to the Voages - i.e. from south to north - was of the calamities of the past.
In 1881 it was officially reported that in the Haute-Loire, where today so many tourists enjoy the good life, 17 out of 20 of the people were indigent or close to destitution. And, like poor producers, everywhere, they tended to deprive themselves of much of the good they brought forth, so as to sell their best and save up the cash. For these people there was sometimes bread or pancakes and always la soupe. Not soup as we understand it; sometimes a sort of gruel or any kind of hodge-podge boiled with water, the most abject being "just water with salt or fat added."
In the department of Tarn (Cevennes area), a traveller noted in 1852 that the poorer peasants greased their vegetable diet with a little lard in a small bag, plunged briefly into the water and used again and again as long as it lasted. Even in 1896 a Father Gorse noted around Limoges that the peasants saved for themmselves the scum of their produce. The butter they churned was seldom touched; eggs were for the market, as well as the hens and any fish they caught.