Garlic & Pearls

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 ...

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...

Muriel and Suzanne raise a shaken, not stirred pickled-onion-and-Orangina cocktail to toast a vintage episode of the podcast. Now 100 hours into exploring Britishness and Frenchness, they each select their 5 favourite episodes presented by the other and reflect on what they have discovered along the...

Muriel wonders why the May 68 uprisings happened so expansively and explosively in the France of De Gaulle and not in Howard Wilson's Britain. She takes Suzanne back to a time of flying cobblestones and bourgeois Maoist students on the barricades. What triggered the events, what fanned the fire? How...

Suzanne takes Muriel on a journey to a faraway land, travelling into the hidden depths of a dinner plate. Its famous pattern – trees, a pagoda, a bridge, a boat, a fence – tells a version of Romeo and Juliet's story set in Imperial China. The plate was first made in England in the 18th century, but ...

In France, a country with a multiplicity of cheeses, only one achieves national unity: the humble Vache qui rit – or Laughing Cow. But what are the origins of this product? Invented in the wake of the Great War as a trailblazing 'fromage moderne', it shares a terroir with the more prestigious Comté,...

An imposing stag stands in a dramatic landscape, in a famous painting hanging in pride of place in the National Scottish Gallery. But what are we really looking at, asks Suzanne. An accomplished oil painting by a Victorian master? A great icon for Scotland? Is is the painting a case of cultural appr...

What makes a garden distinctly French? A geometrical layout, straight lines of regular topiary and not a hair out of place! How, Muriel asks, did the  jardin à la française  develop as an expression of French thought and sensibility? Together, one man, royal gardener André Le Nôtre, and hi...

There are over a million Labradors in the UK, but where did this sturdy marvel of bright countenance and sweet temper originate? Is it really possible to invent a dog? Yes, says Suzanne, though she concedes that the seed of the Labrador breed came from the now extinct Newfoundland St. John's water d...

Monocles and canes at the ready! Muriel traces the 19th-century origins of a familiar and somewhat raffish figure of Frenchness. Part boulevardier, part dandy, part poet, the flâneur is a leisurely observer of the urban landscape. But where did he come from? What is his legacy? And can there be such...