A guest blog post by Dr Emily Hayes, Oxford Brookes University.

Le vin, c’est de la géographie liquide, wine is liquid geography, according to the French geographer, Érik Orsenna. At the online conference organised by the French Société de Géographie to commemorate the bicentenary of its foundation in December 2020, this quote was returned to again and again. A French man talking about wine, what a cliché… On reflection, perhaps it should not surprise.

As fans of the French TV drama Engrenages know, liquide in French signifies cash, specifically the sort that flows readily and becomes difficult to trace. I am not an economic historian, but William Macintosh’s financial affairs seem somewhat murky. Documents suggest that he may have owned shares in the Paris Water Company and derived an income stream from other bodies. Orsenna’s quote seems, to use a word that I know that I absorbed from Innes Keighren’s PhD, apposite. Some of that income, Macintosh invested in living and eating well in the south of France. The bills and receipts in his archives evidence this.

For example, the archives hold a 1785 bill for bottles of Château Margaux wine from the Bordeaux region to the west (Macintosh specified the 1781 cuvée), but also a barrel of everyday wine for drinking ‘with friends’. France has strong regional qualities. Being familiar with rural life in the country, and the standard practices of sociability and ways of integrating a community, I imagined that the latter might have been drunk with some of the many visiting workmen or tradespeople that we know Macintosh or one of his manservants, John Heffernan or Joseph, engaged with. Perhaps this wine was for an end-of-day aperitif. Perhaps sharing a glass of wine facilitated Macintosh’s language learning.

The papers also document a purchase of Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine, from a vineyard just to the north of Avignon. I myself bought a bottle (of white, as it is cheaper than the red) from this vineyard, located above the Rhône river valley, when on an archaeological dig near the town of Orange in my twenties. Later, back in the north of France, it was like uncorking pure sunshine.

Certain words are transformed when you read them. More than ink scrawled on paper, the fragrances of the objects to which they refer waft off the screen. Their tastes imagined and conjured in the mouth. A 1784 bill in the archive listed spices, cinnamon, cardamom, saffron as well as tea, coffee and sugar—foods that are today everyday ingredients in my own kitchen cupboard and handled so regularly that the mind cannot help but make the research experience more vivid.

A bill (undated) for metal work on a hook for hanging a lantern also included the cost of two bottles of tarragon vinegar. Such papers are often just scraps containing only a few scrawled lines, but upon reading them, imaginary conversations and promises being made as to how source good local products come into view.

Meat consumption appears to have been substantial with numerous receipts for beef, lamb, veal, hams and boiling hens. As well as oil, Macintosh’s cook used white lard, still a feature of Provençal cuisine today. Alongside these foods, the household expenses record the consumption of salads, artichokes and lemons.

Bread was a generously consumed staple. However, one 1784 document reveals household hierarchies: one type of bread for servants and another for les maîtres, the masters. These bills were important as they not only detail what was consumed, but also who consumed it. They, thus, provide insights into the numbers of servants, and their roles, who lived with Macintosh. They also show that visitors to the house were frequent—offering, perhaps, further evidence of French sociability.

In a failure of the imagination on my part, when I participated in archaeological digs, it became a pattern that I was more interested in historical sources rather than archaeological ones, and the contemporary landscapes and people around a site. The food especially drew me. Similarly, the wine and food consumption of Macintosh and his household is what stands out for me from the archival assemblage of bills, receipts and letters dating from the 1780s and 1790s. The occupants of Macintosh’s house enjoyed cream and a bill for the chilled cream deserts bavarois a la crème jumped off the screen, when I came across it.

Les palourdes, or clams, also known in Provence as les clovisses pop up amongst the bills. The French author Marc Le Gros, in his book Éloge de la palourde (2009), or Ode to the Clam, claims that the clam is discrete and its inner life all ‘rythme, cadence’. The archaeological record shows that Mesolithic hunter and gatherers in what we now call Provence consumed clams millennia ago. On the dig that I worked on there, we cooked up huge pots of this cheap and readily available source of protein, an ideal quick, light meal in the warm south. Surely the mechanics of eating clams with your hands, sucking out the flesh and sauce from the shell and throwing out those which remain closed, do not change? Though it is unknown who in Macintosh’s household consumed this sea food, such familiar experiences seemingly transcend time and make one feel connected to the historical figures of study. The Macintosh papers compounded a longing in my bones and every cell of my body for France which returns with seasonal regularity, especially in the spring. And it was the lists, described here, of what would be called produits du terroir, locally sourced products, which did it.