There’s a certain smug ruthlessness to a siege. The bullies and murderers who have the upper hand lounge in the countryside, doing nothing more martial than maintaining barricades to keep the hungry and thirsty cut off from food and water. The smug quality of the cruelty can be found in Otto von Bismarck’s comment during the Prussian siege of Paris, 1870-71: “Eight days without cafe au lait will suffice to break the Parisian bourgeoisie.”
Or the German encirclement of Leningrad in WWII, when the German generals set about starving the population on the principle that it would save their army the cost of feeding prisoners. What can one say about a nation with citizens in living memory of such atrocities using the same tactics themselves?
But for the smug ruthlessness to last, a siege must be well executed, and nothing the Russians have done in Ukraine has been well executed. Let’s put it this way: I doubt there are any Russki generals making jokes about Ukrainians folding for want of cafe au lait. They are discovering that Ukrainians are made of sterner stuff. (The cafe au lait taunt didn’t even hold true of the French, who managed to come up with a substitute for milk in their coffee: chalk and water.)
That doesn’t mean Ukrainians don’t suffer. It is a measure of their courage that they are holding up not just in spite of indiscriminate bombing, but in spite of the looming specter of starvation.
It’s such an ugly business that I have to admit it didn’t seem right, what with the terror being inflicted on innocent Ukrainian citizens, to explore the delights of a forgotten cocktail in this space. I might have filled the column with descriptions of Ukraine’s unique drinking culture, which includes such homemade delights as horilka (alcohol and water flavored with fruit or hot peppers) and varenukha (vodka, spices, dried fruit, ginger, honey, cinnamon, cloves, and hot peppers). Instead, in the spirit of appreciating the determination of Ukrainians by understanding the terrors they are facing, and facing down, let me give some details of the Prussians’ brutal monthslong siege of Paris.
Painting a picture of the gruesome situation was impressionist Edouard Manet. He sent a letter (by balloon, no less) to his pupil Eva Gonzales: “A piece of horse meat is a great joy. Donkey is regarded as a feast fit for princes. There are butchers for dogs, cats, and rats.”
Rats were “a rich man’s dish,” according to Alistair Horne’s history of the siege, The Fall of Paris, “on account of the lavish preparation of sauces required to make them palatable.” Rats weren’t the only, um, protein to come sauced or souped up. The aforementioned horse meat was served dozens of ways, including cote de cheval braise and culotte de cheval a la mode.
Also on fashionable menus were “joints of bear, deer, and antelope.” Wolves hung in butchers’ windows. Kangaroo fresh from the zoo was served at the restaurant Chez Brebant. Horne writes that even the crowd favorites at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, “two young elephants called Castor and Pollux were dispatched after several disgracefully inept attempts with explosive bullets.”
Civilians under siege are subjected to “bombardment, hunger, disease, assault, rape, slavery, pillage, destruction of homes and buildings and the desecration of cultural and religious sites,” write historians Alex Dowdall and John Horne. It’s quite a litany, and it doesn’t even include being exposed to damaged nuclear power plants.
As the subjects of this column are often food and drinks, the kind of food and drink I feel like endorsing this week are the sort delivered by fearless battlefield drivers of the Red Cross, and the sort offered by the generous people of neighboring countries. It may not be Dom Perignon. It’s better.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
