Sweet Invention by Michael Krondl

Author:Michael Krondl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2011-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

TEATIME ON THE RUE ROYAL

In France, bourgeois women were the pastry shop’s primary clients. This was in part a result of the transformation of French society after the collapse of the monarchy, in part due to the changes brought about by industrialization. Paris in particular became increasingly unmanageable (at least as far as the middle class was concerned) in the period between 1779 and the founding of the Third Republic in 1870, decades when deadly street protests alternated with revolutions. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the capital’s population roughly doubled. The city’s poor crowded into dark fetid tenements, their untreated sewage flowing into the Seine, which also became their primary source of drinking water. The streets were rough, filthy, and dangerous throughout the city. The upper classes, as yet, weren’t segregated by district, or even by building, so that “respectable” women had no choice but to mingle with fishwives when they opened their front door. Cafés, which, even in the days of Napoleon’s empire had welcomed women, became no-go zones except for men and for women you wouldn’t bring back home to mother. Consequently a kind of fortress mentality took hold in the thick-curtained apartments of the middle class, where even the type of entertaining described by Lady Morgan became more constricted. The salon did not quite melt away, but it was no longer the sort of intellectual sparring ground where both men and women could talk politics. Now the important decisions were made in smoky cafés by men with fat cigars, while the salons were ever increasingly places to chat about matters of taste rather than affairs of state.

Meals were changing too. The grand dinners and even the exclusive salons once held at Versailles had existed in a world somewhere between the public and private spheres, a little like an exclusive restaurant or club. That was no longer the case. In the bourgeois century, dining at home increasingly became a private event presided over by the woman of the house rather than a professional maître d’hôtel. The cook, but most especially the confectioner, needed to make a new, more modest kind of product, more nibble than show. Pastry shops proliferated to supply small-scale desserts like savarins and baba rums, religieuses and charlottes for the nuclear family dinner table and other intimate get-togethers. Certainly the sort of dizzying desserts deemed necessary for Talleyrand’s table would have been all too ostentatious for an afternoon visit where coffee, chocolate, or (less likely) tea were offered by women to women along with sweet snacks from the pâtissier. All that was left of the splendid eighteenth-century aristocratic collation was the unassuming afternoon goûter.* In an early-twentieth-century shopping guide to Paris, the American writer Frances Sheafer Waxman described the city’s habits a generation earlier: “All French people, men, women and children, were wont to break the long wait from a twelve o’clock lunch until an eight o’clock dinner [with the goûter]. The French society lady would stop in the midst of her

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