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The Cheese Woman, or What did people eat, not eat, and dream of eating during the Siege of Paris?
Which one of these two delicious treats was almost impossible to find during the Siege of Paris? Here in France, the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris by the Prussians is largely forgotten - except for one thing: On a mang é du rat - “ We ate rat.” The Siege is notorious for the culinary boundaries it led starving Parisians to cross. But when you look into it a little deeper, you realize that it wasn’t just rat for lunch and some animal from the zoo for dinner. Learning about what most Parisians ate during the four months of the Siege was a fascinating and unexpectedly touching experience for me. Instead of being an initiation to all the different kinds of meat you can eat, it taught me how surprisingly little has changed in 150 years when it comes to putting together some dinner when the best food is scarce. Actually, the best food wasn’t scarce, at least in my opinion. I often think about how I would have lived before chocolate was brought to Europe from the New World and made widely