Classical Cider
www.metmuseum.org
I subscribe to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s daily feed, highly recommended.
So a couple of days ago I was delighted when the title that popped up was “cider.” Now I have a long term fascination with cider, above all with the fermented cider that in so much of France, Spain, England, the United States, perhaps even parts of Mexico, was the alcoholic drink through much of history. Food and art in one.
And above you have the painting that appeared. Date 1865. And French.
My goodness, what in the world is this? Figures in classical costume feeding apples into mills, while sheep (the white blobs) snooze under the apples trees in the background.
Well, it just shows how little I know about the history of French art in the nineteenth century. This is by the major muralist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), in itself a surprise since I didn’t know there was a school of muralists in France. Nor did I know that he influenced, among others, Seurat and Gaugin.
So let me quote part of the story that the Met tells.
In a career that spanned fifty years, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes played a seminal role in the resurgence of mural painting in France during the nineteenth century. His first decorative paintings, “War” and “Peace,” exhibited at the Salon of 1861, led to the 1864 commissioning of the monumental mural “Ave Picardia Nutrix” (Hail, Picardy the Nourisher) for a large stairwell in the newly constructed Musée de Picardie in Amiens. “Cider” and “The River,” respectively, are studies for the left and right sides of the mural.
“Cider” and “The River” present an idealized vision of Picardy’s distant past, and their subjects would have resonated particularly in the 1860s, a time when each region of France was rediscovering its unique history, character, and culture as part of a broader movement toward decentralization.
One of those “aha” moments.
Picardy in the north of France was a land of apple trees and sheep and cereals. But from the Parisian point of view it was part of the outer darkness, the regions of France that did not speak the cultured French of the Isle de France, the language of diplomacy. Like almost all the French regions it was foreign territory, to be brought into the territory and culture of the French nation.
Puvis de Chavanne’s painting is thus the advance guard in the huge French effort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to make the motley collection of peoples and languages in the territory that was now France really and truly French. (The problem of making diverse ethnicities and language groups into a nation was a problem facing many countries of course, not just France). Speak langue d’oc in the south of France. Well, we’ll collect some recipes. Speak Basque or a version of Catalan, ditto. Speak German, OK. And so on. It’s an early attempt, before the Franco-Prussian War (1870-72). The effort to make different regional cuisines part of a coherent French whole picks up after that and comes to full momentum in the 1930s.
So this is part of a pattern: the wine makers who added a tower to their farmhouse and Chateau to the name of their wine; the cheese makers who invented heritages going back to the Revolution or before. Now we have cider makers going back to classical antiquity. And all part of the French nation.
A few concluding thoughts.
1. I think Puvis de Chavannes has the technology wrong. The mills he shows are for dry grinding not wet grinding. Most apple juice extraction was based on grapes or olives, hence roller mills or presses of some kind.
2. On cider, look at a wonderful book by Roger French, The History and Virtues of Cyder (including preceding illustration) that, among other things, talks about the growth of the cider industry in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an alternative to importing wine.
3. So desperately sad that a little more than fifty years after Puvis painted this tranquil ode to the antiquity of Picardy, the Battle of the Somme reduced Picardy to a sea of mud, rats, and misery. Now it’s back, celebrated as terroir.
You’re absolutely right Rachel. Apples are not milled, but pressed. The simplest of which lokks like a barrel with open staves and a screw mechanism on the top. More complex modern ones – and I actually worked in an orchard when I was younger, though they wouldn’t let me operate the press, are much the same. Huge hydraulic machine that squishes the juice from apples, nothing more. NOW, says I. Time to make some my self. If only I could get my hands on good tart cider apples.
What better back up than you Ken. And wouldn’t some good cider be great? Don’t you think it is a two stage process, though, like oil and wine. First crush to break up the olives/grapes/apples, then squeeze to get out all the juice.
I very much enjoyed the cider article above. I noted you have had a long fascination with fermented cider both in Europe and the USA. I have read some of the literature and in the course of writing a short paper became intrigued with the story myself. One question that occurs relates to the way history suggests that beverages such as cider were essential to early settlement of NA since there was a view that water was unsafe. It surely could not have been unsafe in that first fifty or so years, was it that the taste of water was simply not ‘alcoholic’. Anyway, thank you for the article, I enjoyed it very much and read as many as I can.
Heather, I thought your name was familiar, then I realized you had that intriguing paper for Davis on indigenous Australian foods. I missed the presentation (chairing or something elsewhere) but learned a lot from the paper when I read it.
I’m not sure I have a decisive answer to your question. I think I would begin with the general principle that everyone believed it was dangerous to be in a place where you had not grown up. Why? Well, usually because strange foods upset the humoral balance (I think the principle if not the specifics prevailed until about WWII). Hence it was not perhaps a sense that water per se was dangerous (and it only takes a small settlement to make it so) but that you wanted to consume the foods of home. Or am I completely crazy?
Heather, take a look at Sarah Hand Meacham’s book, *Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake* (2009) for more on the water question. Meacham discusses the reasons that the English who came over first did not traditionally drink water (many English rivers polluted by garbage and waste of various types — as early as 1388 a law forbade throwing garbage into English rivers, etc.). It doesn’t take long for a group of people (settlement) to mess up the water, whether well or river. The humoral belief seems to be at work here, too, with people blaming cold water for the demise of people around them.
On another note, this painting certainly illustrates the fact that we cannot necessarily use art to prop up ideas about technology or food in the past.
Cindy, thanks for this. I don’t know Sarah Meacham’s book but it’s on my list to look up. It would be interesting to get a handle on how long it takes to mess up water. You are absolutely right, I think, that it happens almost overnight. And don’t forget stock. My father said that as an undergraduate on a Cambridge walking tour of the Lake District, his group gulped the clear, fresh mountain water only to discover a dead sheep in the stream when they went on another few hundred yards.
And Cindy, you are so right about art as a source that has to be at least validated by other sources. Delwen Samuel has torn through analyses of Ancient Egyptian food based on art.
Dear Rachel,
Maybe it’s my European continental eye, but I see a clear symbolist picture of Picardy in this painting. There is no technological mistake.
Just as you wrote “Picardy… land of apple trees and sheep and cereals”, so it is represented in the mural: there are sheep in the back, there are apples (the treading barrel) in front, and there is cereal (the corn mill -antique Roman type- with its white flour sacks next to it). Puvis de Chavannes would have known what a juice press looked like.
The apples are turned into pulp by stamping/treading. That’s why the barrel is open and there is a naked man taking the fruit up a ladder. The press is not shown.
Must I remind you that in old technology the fruit was not pressed directly by the force exerted by a screw. Presses could not withstand such a strain in those days. Pressure came form a heavy wooden beam that was first lifted by the screw. Woven mats, loaded with apple pulp, would then be stacked under the beam, which was then lowered by releasing the screw, thus pressing its weight on the stacked apple pulp and releasing the juice
Hi Nick, sorry to be so long in posting this. And as always thanks for the insightful comments.
OK it makes sense that the mill in front is for flour. But that raises the question why they are showing the Roman horse or donkey mill. Were these still in use in Picardy in the 19th century. Or is this supposed to be Picardy in Roman times? In the latter case, this supports my thesis that legitimacy is being sought in Antiquity for contemporary French practice. Do we have any evidence about what the agriculture was in Roman times? And surely the technology changed in (say) 1700 years?
On turning apples into pulp by stamping, were they left to over ripen. In the cider apple orchard outside our back door when I was a child (no longer operating) the apples were far too hard to be stamped unless, perhaps, you wore heavy boots.
And as to the old technology, I’d be interested in your thoughts on how old is old and what those days are. Sounds like you grew up with this.
Here’s symbolism for you. it doesn’t even look like (nineteenth century) Picardy at all. I think of the region as large agricultures in open, dry plateaus and valleys. No rocky outcrops. P. is Kent extended eastward.
Antiquity was a thankful way of expressing other things (as you mention: legitimacy).
The buildings on the left tell of backwardness. They are definitely not Roman. Yet on the right, a stone building of temple dimensions is being built. The new France?
Don’t take the image too literal.
Good points about the terrain and the buildings Nick. And I take your point about not taking the picture too literally. But I assume that both artist and sponsors thought it was showing something important.
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