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Honoring Barbizon heroes on 11/10

Leave the cold; enter pot au feu heaven

It was a funny day, me deliberately leaving behind all the heavily “planned activities at US battlefield cemeteries for Veteran’s Day” to strike out into the French countryside.  On such an autumn holiday I thought why not explore the landscapes of the Barbizon school, maybe even climb around the fabled rocks and crags of Fontainebleu forest?   I sure wasn’t in any hurry to get up or get out; wasn’t even sure the car would start after all those weeks in Amman.  But there I was in a parking lot behind the town around noon, picking my way over  John Constable Way and up and down the steps of St. Martin Chapel, emerging, to my complete surprise, into the main town square just as the music struck up.  You can see the chapel in the picture, partly blocked by the giant head of Vercingetorix, doomed leader of the Gauls against Caesar’s legions in 51 BC, who was the centerpiece of the town’s war memorial, funded in part by American subscription. 

Everyone in town showed up.  It was not our Veterans’ Day commemoration; it was specifically the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day, the end of the brutal and devastating trench warfare of WWI that literally destroyed the flower of France.  And those losses were very specific for the families who showed up at the ceremony.  Old fat guys carried the flags and laid the flowers.  The mayor, sashed in red, white, and blue, gave a moving speech.  Eight kids read the poems they’d written to honor the dead and (always) La Gloire de France, though all the red-faced boys had to be coaxed by the local teacher to read their works of art.  I was completely surprised and moved–this was no big orchestrated ceremony with political overtones; this was all about people like you and me thinking about family members who went off to war for any number of reasons and laid down their lives for it–or, with any luck, lived to tell about it.

So what’s the upshot?  Everyone left the ceremony and immediately filled up all the restaurants in town to enjoy the day.  Restaurant La Boheme featured one of the great soul foods of France–pot au feu.  It is exactly the right dish for a cold day in autumn and so soulful in its simplicity and heartiness that I hope you will just bite the bullet and make it from scratch.  Easy enough to do, if you just take it in stages: Classic pot au feu.