Lard wasn't that long ago. Given the renewed prevalence of Health Whisperers, those progressive forms of trad wives who fetishize the ancient ways and call soup "bone broth", it is probably an alternative sold at high cost to people who also buy raw milk.

For my father, lard was a way of life. Bread made in my grandmother's kitchen with lard and salt and pepper was his school lunch. That wasn't bleak to him, he didn't go to therapy about it, it was just his life. We were poor when I was a child, below the poverty line most of the time, but not as poor as he'd been. He had provided us a better life than he'd had. 

In Clay, by Franck Bouysse, the characters aren't in poverty, but the kids still eat lard. No one ate it for flavor, it just makes dry bread seem softer. The salt and pepper gave it some sort of flavor.
The author is the same age as me, so perhaps he also remembers takes of lard being common, before vegetable alternatives were deemed healthier, and that is why it's background early in the book.



There are a lot of compelling details in Clay, when France was still a superpower, before they lost an entire generation fighting because the "iron dice" were rolling and every leader in Europe insisted the other team would blink.(1) Along with lard being eaten by relatively well-off people, other details tell you it was a France of a long-lost time, even if it was only a century ago. Just 20 years after the novel is set, for example, few people would still put stone in a pot to level out the boiling.

The military culture of the time has changed also. France of the first World War still had military leaders ruling by fear and submission and belief that more of that led to victory.(2) The book isn't about any of those things, any more than it's about the clay in its title. It's there, but symbolic more than a book about a young man who likes to sculpt.

If you are reading it in English, you may chuckle at some of the Americanisms of the translator. People in Alaska of 1914 called alcohol "hooch" but no one else in the United States did yet, and no one in France would have used the term.

Yet even translated the varying stories have a young person's authenticity about the time that probably hasn't existed since the 1980s. Writers born in the early 1960s were around people who had lived through it and writers remember stories.

You can learn a lot more about older cultures from works by people who weren't writing about culture at the time. You find it in cookbooks and other places you might not expect from those periods. You can also find it in older writers who came up at a time when generations weren't marketing label gimmicks like they are now. They were real, they happened every 20 years. I had my great-parents and their stories around until my 30s and into my 40s because I was born on my great-grandfather's 60th birthday.

Bouysse either had a similar experience or he's got a legendary ability to place himself into the minds of other people. I accepted the book from the publisher because I assumed it was about the science of clay. I read a whole book about the science of beer foam, I wrote a whole book about the science of Halloween, so I'd read about clay. Instead of being science, it is a touching novel of a time so unrecognizable to modern people who think being poor means not having high-speed internet. That time may seem like fantasy but it was real. And it was pretty great to revisit.

NOTES:

(1) Similar to the American Civil War, where wealthy elites traveled to Manassas, Virginia, with picnic lunches to see a fight, convinced  Democrats who wanted to keep owning slaves would be routed in weeks. But instead saw General Thomas Jackson, still in a Union uniform because his Virginia Military Institute jacket was only for a Major, earn the nickname "Stonewall" - and Republicans learned that owning people was really, really important to Democrats and it was going to be a long fight.

(2) It failed in the machine gun age. After Lenin surrendered to Germany and gave up a third of its productive land and people (including Ukraine), the spring of 1918 and no second front meant the German army tearing through France. No trench warfare by then, entire British and French divisions disappeared in weeks. The only thing that stopped them was General Black Jack Pershing and two divisions of American soldiers with morale. Morale because Germans sank American supply ships with their submarines and the U.S. had entered the war. Then the two American divisions became 10, and then another 10, and by November of 1918 the Germany that had nearly sacked France in June had surrendered and Russia got its territory back. A whole military culture that had been common for 2,000 years went extinct in Europe.

The last gasp of that ancient culture on a large scale of military by fear was Iraq in 1991. Their Republican Guard, what CNN had touted as elite and the fourth largest fighting force in the world, evaporated before volunteer soldiers who had morale and confidence. Out in front spearheading that attack was the French Foreign Legion, who went so far so fast on that opening morning the rest of the United Nations contingents watched in wonder.