The Sophisticated Table
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By CAROLINE WEBER
Published: November 28, 2008
In the 1660s, discussing the culinary innovations that had recently taken root in Louis XIV’s France, an English chef named Robert May bemoaned his French counterparts’ newfound focus on “Sauce rather than Diet.” To calorie counters who recoil in horror at the butter and cream that abound in French haute cuisine to this day, May’s lament will strike a familiar chord. (Once, in the naïveté of youth, I was almost thrown out of a venerable Parisian restaurant for asking if the chef could prepare a “low fat” version of his lobster bisque.) But in fact, when discussing the meals served across the channel, the Englishman was distressed by something other than their high fat content. He was referring instead to a distinct change in the way the French had come to view and practice cooking. Historically, European cuisine had promoted the pseudomedical belief that particular seasonings and modes of preparation could — and should — eliminate imbalances in the human constitution. In the middle of the 17th century, however, leading French gastronomes let go of this idea and undertook the refinement of flavor for its own sake. Butter and cream sauces, whose value was gustatory (enhancing the taste of underlying ingredients) as opposed to medicinal (recalibrating the body’s four “humors,” as set forth by Hippocratic physicians), thus came to the fore, and an elegant, toothsome new brand of cooking was born.
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Illustration From “A Revolution in Taste”
The dessert course as depicted in François Massialot’s “Court and Country Cook,” 1702.
A REVOLUTION IN TASTE
The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800
By Susan Pinkard
Illustrated. 317 pp. Cambridge University Press. $32
In “A Revolution in Taste,” Susan Pinkard, a historian at Georgetown University, explores the striking technical, material and philosophical shifts that profoundly altered French cooking between the second half of the 17th century and the revolution of 1789. Before this period in history, Hippocratic dietetics had maintained that disease was caused by excess humors (moist, hot, cold or dry) for which food could correct. Seasonings, in particular, were thought to adjust a dish’s elemental properties in crucial, therapeutic ways. For example, “dangerously cold and moist fish, such as lamprey eel (a surfeit of which was said to have killed Henry I of England), could be transformed by a sauce of pepper, garlic and marjoram into a delicious and healthy dish.” Guided by these curative principles, ancient and premodern chefs relied heavily on spices, which masked underlying tastes and aromas. This practice gave rise to the conviction that fine cooking “fused many layers of flavor into a single, unitary whole, rendering individual ingredients unidentifiable to even sensitive palates.” As Pinkard astutely points out, this culinary aesthetic persists today in regions ranging from Mexico to the Middle East. “Mexican kitchen lore,” she writes, “claims that if one can identify a recipe’s ingredients by smelling the steam rising from the pot, the mixture must cook longer to achieve a perfect blend of flavors.”
This perspective held sway in French kitchens until the 17th century, when a population boom led to the expansion of suburbs outside Paris, thereby driving the moneyed families who had once spent summers in the city’s immediate environs to seek bucolic escapes in the countryside proper. Owning farms and vineyards soon became commonplace for rich Parisians, who thereby metamorphosed — intentionally or otherwise — into part-time farmers and vintners. A profusion of newly available garden-fresh ingredients in turn inspired techniques that enhanced the foods’ intrinsic qualities instead of submerging them in spice. The result was a cuisine that one of its founding fathers, Nicolas de Bonnefons, called le goût naturel (the natural taste). “A cabbage soup should taste entirely of cabbage, a leek soup entirely of leeks, a turnip soup of turnips and thus for others,” Bonnefons decreed in “Les Délices de la Campagne” (“The Delicacies of the Countryside”), his seminal 1654 cookbook. “Food should taste like what it is.”
While it might sound self-evident in the age of Chez Panisse and Whole Foods, this promotion of culinary simplicity and purity revolutionized the way the French thought about food. For starters, as Bonnefons’s list of examples suggests, it sparked a new appreciation for vegetables. In the days before le goût naturel, vegetables had been unwanted guests at the sophisticated French table; even the great 14th-century chef Taillevent — who prepared dishes for the Valois kings and from whom one of Paris’s most superb restaurants today takes its name — mostly excluded them from his repertoire. (The single exception was his recipe for stewed cress, which Taillevent recommended as a cure for gallstones.) With Bonnefons and his confrere La Varenne, whose influential work “Le Cuisinier François” (“The French Cook”) appeared in 1651, vegetables assumed pride of place in French cooking, served only with mild seasonings and smooth, emulsified sauces that allowed for their essential flavors to shine through. Meat, fowl and fish soon received the same treatment, most notably with the development of “basic preparations” like roux, jus, coulis and marinade, as well as sauce blanche and sauce veloutée. Still essential to countless canonical French recipes, these enhancements represented a move away from old culinary practices in that they served “to accent the natural characteristics of principal ingredients, not to transform them chemically, nutritionally or aesthetically.”
During the Enlightenment, this emphasis on culinary naturalness took on a strong political dimension, as philosophes like Denis Diderot, the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt and Jean-Jacques Rousseau railed against the aristocracy’s inauthentic social posturing and wasteful spending habits. These practices, which functioned to maintain or improve people’s standing in an unequal, prestige-obsessed social order, prompted Rousseau to champion a return to a simpler, more natural way of life. For him as for many of his contemporaries food prepared plainly and with an eye to its innate characteristics thus formed part of a broader social program: that of restoring dignity to man as he was born, not as an unjust, artificial society had made him. Although concerned with the rites of cooking and not the rights of man, Pinkard’s lucidly argued and carefully researched account is, in this respect, more than just a story about food. It is the story of a society that broke with the past — and became modern.
Caroline Weber, the author of “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution,” is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
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