French Gastronomy by Jean-Robert Pitte

Author:Jean-Robert Pitte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cooking/History
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

“Francogastria”

A few years ago, Francophonia became a battle horse for French cultural institutions and politics. It is talked about much more now than in the period when French was the language of all the European elite. We do not talk about “Francogastria”— a terribly ugly word that almost looks like a disease!—that is, the French way of eating well, and so much the better, because the latter still goes almost without saying in much of the country, as soon as one tries to find fine food.

Theodore Zeldin is wrong when he traces the international reputation of French cuisine back only to the beginning of the nineteenth century.84 In fact, it dates back to the seventeenth century. Le Cuisinier françois was translated into English as early as 1653, two years after it was published in France, and then into German and Italian (six editions by 1815). The same is true of Cuisinier royal et bourgeois and many other works. In his preface, Massialot writes without modesty and without any doubt, because the fact is recognized abroad, at least in court circles: “We can pride ourselves in France on having the edge over other nations in cooking.… My book can be very good evidence of what I propose.”85 In 1687, a German named Tomasius complained, “Today, at home, everything must be French. Clothes, words, furniture.… There is not even anything bad that is French that is not the exclusive fashion.”86

All the European sovereigns recruited French cooks by offering them small fortunes. We could cite, for example, Vincent La Chapelle, an itinerant cook who officiated in England, Holland, Germany, Portugal, on ships, and in the East Indies, as well as at Louis XV’s court. His Cuisinier moderne, in five volumes, was first published in English in London in 1733, and then in French in Paris in 1742. He was the inventor of “sauce espagnole,” for a long time the base for a multitude of other sauces. The most famous of expatriate cooks is undoubtedly André Noël, who directed the kitchen for Frederick II, the king of Prussia.87 Born in Périgueux in 1726, he entered into the service of the Berlin sovereign in 1755, as provisions officer under the orders of the Lyonnais cook, Joyard. In 1764, Casanova described him as “a very cheerful man… who was the only and dearly beloved cook of His Prussian Majesty.” Not all the dishes he prepared were French, but a certain number of them were, such as that “bombe de Sardanapale,” a stuffed cabbage, still prepared today in Périgord and elsewhere in France, served in 1772 and earning its creator an ode from the king in 137 lines: “Today, Sir Noël, you outdid yourself! Oh! That bombe de Sardanapale was a marvel of taste, was a dish of the gods!”

In about the same period, Clouet, in the service of the duke of Newcastle, was a celebrity across the Channel, and then entered the service of Marshal Richelieu once he returned to the country.88 Throughout the eighteenth and

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