More than 80 years after D-Day, the recipes and ingredients introduced during France's wartime occupation are slowly making a comeback.

By June 1940, German forces had blitzed through France in just six weeks, leading more than half of the country to be occupied. As a result, French staples like cheese, bread and meat were soon rationed, and by 1942 some citizens were living on as few as 1,110 calories per day. Even after World War Two ended in 1945, access to food in France would continue to be regulated by the government until 1949.

Such austerity certainly had an impact on how the French ate during and just after the war. Yet, more than 80 years after Allied forces landed in Normandy to begin liberating the nation on D-Day (6 June 1944), few visitors realise that France's wartime occupation still echoes across the nation's culinary landscape.

In the decades following WW2, the French abandoned the staples that had got them through the tough times of occupation; familiar ingredients like root vegetables and even hearty pain de campagne (country bread) were so eschewed they were nearly forgotten. But as wartime associations have slowly faded from memory, a bevy of younger chefs and tastemakers are reviving the foods that once kept the French alive.

There aren't many French residents old enough to vividly recall life in wartime France today, and fewer still would deign to discuss it. Author Kitty Morse only discovered her great-grandparents' "Occupation diary and recipe book" after her own mother's death. Morse released them in 2022 in her book Bitter Sweet: A Wartime Journal and Heirloom Recipes from Occupied France.

"My mother never said any of this to me," she said.

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Aline Pla was just nine years old in 1945 but, raised by small-town grocers in the south of France, she remembers more than others might. "You were only allowed a few grams of bread a day," she recalled. "Some [people] stopped smoking – especially those with kids. They preferred trading for food."

Such widespread lack gave rise to ersatz replacements: saccharine stood in for sugar; butter was supplanted by lard or margarine; and instead of coffee, people brewed roots or grains, like acorns, chickpeas or the barley Pla recalls villagers roasting at home. While many of these wartime brews faded from fashion, chicory coffee remained a staple, at least in northern France. Ricoré – a blend of chicory and instant coffee – has been on supermarket shelves since the 1950s. More recently, brands like Cherico are reimagining it for a new generation, marketing it as a climate-conscious, healthful alternative traditional coffee.

According to Patrick Rambourg, French culinary historian and author of Histoire de la Cuisine et de la Gastronomie Françaises, if chicory never wholly disappeared in France, it's in large part thanks to its flavour. "Chicory tastes good," he explained.........

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