Savoring the Past? Culinary Connections and Colonial Memories in France and Algeria

Examination of the culinary connections between France and Algeria provides a prism from which we can reexamine the cultural legacy of empire.  Culinary choices can, of course, be unselfconscious, a simple act of meeting a basic, daily need.  Cuisine can also part of the “national imagination, a set of public, political, performative, symbolic discourses.”  Evidence suggests that the reflective and non-reflective aspects can not be separated.  Perhaps nothing is more ubiquitous in North Africa than couscous—particularly the wheat at the base of the finished dish--and in France than alcohol—principally wine.  Yet, as this essay will argue, each symbolizes the cultural links, the shared history, between France and its former colony of Algeria.  The remembrance (and, one should add, the selective forgetting) of that colonial history has also led to these same commodities serving as markers of differentiation from the colonial “other.”  Their place within present-day culinary practices reveals anxieties about a national identity bound by memories of colonial rule and years of brutal war.