Garlic & Pearls

Muriel introduces Suzanne to a teasing paradox: Monoprix stores crop up in city and town centres all over France, and yet 87% of French people never shop there. How can this be? This is a breathless tale of the buccaneering French high street, in which a thrifty magasin populaire imagined during the 1930s Depression is transformed into quite a different beast – urban, chic and pop, but still selli...

The dark is rising, and Suzanne is on hand to make the back of your neck prickle with the creepy, poetic and quintessentially British ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, aka MR James. Enter a twilit world of marshes and mists, country houses and seaside inns, where curiosity leads tweedy gentlemen scholars to unspeakable horrors: a hairy ghoul rises out of a manuscript; a hooded figure crawls...

Things get rather raffish and French as Muriel entices Suzanne into that most Gallic of spaces - the boudoir - and tells her everything she ever wanted to know about it but was afraid to ask. What actually happens in that room? What is it for? We open the door on the dazzling boudoirs of the 18th-century elite, filled with art and chinoiserie, on exquisite women’s retreats and on men’s delirious d...

They seek him here; they seek him there... Suzanne gives Muriel a riveting rendering of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Hungarian émigrée Baroness Orczy's colourful and melodramatic 1905 historical novel set during the French Revolution, in which a gallant mild-mannered fop and his associates stick it to Madame Guillotine by rescuing French aristocrats on the run from bloodthirsty sans culottes and the...

Muriel tells Suzanne the story of the printed cotton or linen known as toile de Jouy, generally printed in a single colour on a neutral background and created in the late 18th century by an enterprising German émigré, the engraving and colour specialist Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, at his thriving manufacture of Jouy-en-Josas. Patterns of exquisite refinement were beloved of the powerful, from Q...

Suzanne explores dystopia, one of the most significant sub-genres of the British novel, where trouble often starts with the breakdown of the monarchy and aristocracy (which sounds a bit like France). It begins with Jonathan's Swift's Gulliver's Travels, then Mary Shelley comes along, then HG Wells's War of the Worlds – where most of Woking is destroyed even before the M25 is built....

Muriel and Suzanne discuss a new French film set during the years 1940-41, a pivotal time in the history of France and Britain, as General de Gaulle, powered by 'a certain idea of France' and refusing to accept Pétain's new collaborationist regime, relocated to London to seek support from the British, devise the Free French response to the defeat and plan the recapturing of France. How good is the...

Suzanne enlightens Muriel about the Beaufort Scale and explores the remarkable story of its creator, hydrographer Francis Beaufort, who went to sea as a boy, was shipwrecked in the Far East, took part in Napoleonic sea battles against the French and in 1805 devised a brilliant empirical scale full of poetic language to evoke the changeable quality of the wind and its effect on the sails of a ship...

Camus’s terse 1942 novel about an enigmatic killing won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1957. It is entrenched as a French literary classic and as a gateway to Philosophy in French schools. But what, asks Muriel, do the book and its recent film adaptation by François Ozon tell us about morality, justice and the complicated history of the French in Algeria?  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pr...

Lashings of ginger beer all around and nostalgia galore as Suzanne explains the refreshing drink's quasi-parodic Famous Fives connection and unpicks the origins and history of ginger beer, taking in the trading of the exotic ginger root, its feeding into the British obsession with beer, fermenting and experimentation, some Victorian tales of temperance leagues, brown bottles, scoby and vinaigrière...

Muriel faces up to the melancholy that comes to us all towards the end of summer, and find a Gallic expression of it in the 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, a huge bestseller and succès de scandale set on the French Riviera. The book launched the career of its teenage author Françoise Sagan – herself an iconic forerunner of the rebellious French youthquake of the 1960s. Is the story – a timeless Gree...

Suzanne presents Muriel with the magnificent dome of scarlet studded with berries that is summer pudding and reveals the dessert's intriguing origins, which lie in 19th-century hydropathy. What inspired the British to deploy a plain, uncompromising pudding made of bread and native fruit as a health food? Suzanne seeks out the original recipe of the pudding, which turns out to be the tip of the ice...

What is the quintessential French summer food? Melon, of course, of the orange-fleshed and deeply aromatic variety. In the summer, Muriel explains, the French go into a sort of melon frenzy, chasing the perfect ambrosial experience, and this brings with it the agony of choice. Selecting the right melon is an inexact science, at once thrilling and anxious-making. Weighing up a melon in the palm of...

Can you hear the clarion call of a tinny version of 'Green Sleeves'? That familiar cheery chime is calling us to the ice cream van, plying its way all over the UK in the summer. Suzanne explores its history, its British-American mash-up of creativity, crucial Italian connection, technical challenges and complex regulations. Who invented Mr Whippy? How did the 99 chocolate flake come to b...

The golden age of topless sunbathing in France lasted a little over a decade, from the 1970s to the tail end of the 1980s. French women pioneered it and were also first to abandon it. But how and why? Muriel retraces the story of a particular aspect of Gallic art de vivre which was highly codified and attempted to recast the social contract between women and society. How natural was it? How cultur...

Another case of Suzanne pinpointing the essence of Britain; another first-time taste experience for Muriel! What are scampi fries but fish and chips, pubs and the British seaside holiday all condensed into a tiny mouthful of fishy saltiness. Covering ground from Georgian recipes of Italianate dishes of langoustines to extruded snacks of the 1980s, Suzanne tells the story of how the whole of B...

In the wake of the banning of absinthe in France in 1915, a new apéritif was born, redolent with aniseed and liquorice, a taste at once medicinal and full of the joie de vivre we associate with the South of France. But what does 'pastis' mean? Who invented it? In what way did it have political implications? And why is it so central to French apéritif culture? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

Muriel tells the story of the stripy Breton top and wonders how a pattern – stripes – once considered sacrilegious and satanic gradually became the epitome of French elegance. We explore the evolving cultural history of a powerful symbol, the role of seaside holidays, of sailor suits as the preferred outfits of smart children, and the formalisation of the uniforms of the French Navy...

Biros at the ready as Suzanne takes Muriel on a tour of a very British obsession: the pub quiz. Did it begin on a mythical night in Yorkshire in 1946? Is it one of the primary ways in which the British relate to each other socially? And if so, why? Can the Zoom quiz be credited for keeping the nation together during Covid? Are the best pub quizzes, Suzanne asks, ultimately where the British sense...

With French historian Charlotte Faucher as her guide, Muriel explores the madly ornamental pink-brick Art Deco wonder that is the French Cultural Institute in South Kensington. Though the building dates from 1939, the idea of setting up a French Institute in Britain as a gateway to a better understanding between our two nations arose in 1910, the brainchild of Marie d'Orliac, an enigmatic figure w...

This episode, full of suspense and mystery, is brought to you by the letter J! In the English language, the letter and its distinctive sound are deployed in their glory, whereas the French soften the letter J (as in je or bijou). The letter's story, which comes to full expression in 1629, is bound with that of the printing press. Who invented the letter J? Suzanne retraces the evolution of this ex...

In 1910, Paris was an ultra-modern electrified metropolis at the height of its confidence, insouciance and triumphant glamour. Then came the winter rains, and the Seine began inexorably to rise, causing chaos and devastation. Parisians living near the river soon found themselves getting about the streets in rowing boats and on improvised wooden walkways. The man of the moment was the then prefect...

Starting with the glorious 1934 novel The Nine Tailors by queen of crime Dorothy L. Sayers, set in the mystical, liminal landscape of the Fens and in the haunting world of ancient bell ringing, Suzanne explores the English art of campanology. Ringing in rounds requires intense mental and physical discipline – in the novel, the intrepid Lord Peter Wimsey rings bells for nine hours solid – and this...

Suzanne and Muriel welcome as a special guest the food writer and journalist Debora Robertson. a perceptive observer of French village life in the South-West – and the French psyche – in her Substack, Lickedspoon. She describes what it's like to be an exotic Brit in the French countryside and shares on-the-ground anecdotes about French behaviour. We find out which is more important, croi...

How, wonders Suzanne, did Britain come to gift the Big Z to the entire world? And how did Britain become a place where pedestrians can expect, in most cases, to find a crossing in the right place? The presence of zebra crossings is the fruit of a long evolution involving bitter parliamentary debates and the tension between limiting speed and protecting an Englishman's freedom of the highway. We me...