Stainless Steel Cookware & Kitchens

<<<   An Early History of Cooking -- Part 1


Under Louis XIV. further advances were made. His maitre d'hotel, Bechamel, is famous for his sauce; and Vatel, the great Conde's cook, was a celebrated artist, of whose suicide in despair at the tardy arrival of the fish which he had ordered, Madame de Sevigne relates a moving story. The prince de Soubise, immortalized by his onion sauce, also had a famous chef.




In England the names of certain cookery-books may be noted, such as Sir J. Elliott's (1539), Abraham Veale's (1575), and the Widdowe's Treasure (1625). The Accomplisht Cook, by Robert May, appeared in 1665, and from its preface we learn that the author (who speaks disparagingly of French cookery, but more gratefully of Italian and Spanish) was the son of a cook, and had studied abroad and under his father (c. 1610) at Lady Dormer's, and he speaks of that time as " the days wherein were produced the triumphs and trophies of cookery." From his description they consisted of most fantastic and elaborately built up dishes, intended to amuse and startle, no less than to satisfy the appetite and palate.

Louis XV. was a great gourmet; and his reign saw many developments in the culinary art. The mayonnaise (originally ma y onnaise) is ascribed to the duc de Richelieu. Such dishes as "potage a la Xavier," "cailles a la Mirepoix," "chartreuses a la Mauconseil," "poulets ci la Villeroy," "potage a la Conde," "gigot a la Mailly," owe their titles to celebrities of the day, and the Pompadour gave her name to various others. The Jesuits Brunoy and Bougeant, who wrote a preface to a contemporary treatise on cookery (1739), described the modern art as "more simple, more appropriate, and more cunning, than that of old days," giving the ingredients the same union as painters give to colors, and harmonizing all the tastes.



The very phrase "cordon bleu" (strictly applied only to a woman cook) arose from an enthusiastic recognition of female merit by the king himself. Madame du Barry, piqued at his opinion that only a man could cook to perfection, had a dinner prepared for him by a cuisiniere with such success that the delighted monarch demanded that the artist should be named, in order that so precious a cuisinier might be engaged for the royal household." Allons done, la France! " retorted the ex-grisette, "have I caught you at last ? It is no cuisinier at all, but a cuisiniere, and I demand a recompense for her worthy both of her and of your majesty. Your royal bounty has made my negro, Zamore, governor of Luciennes, and I cannot accept less than a cordon Neu" (the Royal Order of the Saint Esprit) " for my cuisiniere."

The French Revolution was temporarily a blow to Parisian cookery, as to everything else of the ancien regime. "Not a single turbot in the market," was the lament of Grimod de la Reyniere, the great gourmet, and author of the Manuel des amphitryons (1808). But while it fell heavily on the class of noble amphitryons it had one remarkable effect on the art which was epoch-making. It is from that time that we notice the rise of the Parisian restaurants. To 1770 is ascribed the first of these, the Champ d'oiseau in the rue des Poulies. In 1789 there were a hundred. In 1804 (when the Almanach des gourmands, the first sustained effort at investing gastronomy with the dignity of an art, was started) there were between 500 and 600. And in 1814, to such an extent had the restaurants attracted the culinary talent of Paris, that the allied monarchs, on arriving there, had to contract with the two brothers Very for the supply of their table. Among the great gastronomic names of Napoleon's day was that of his chancellor Cambaceres, of whose dinners many stories are told. Robert (the eponym of the sauce Robert), Rechaud and Merillion were at this period esteemed the Raphael, Michelangelo and Rubens of cookery; while A. Beauvilliers (author of Art des cuisines) and Careme (author of the Maitre d'hôtel francais, and chef at different times to the Tsar Alexander I., Talleyrand, George IV. and Baron Rothschild) were no less celebrated.' Perhaps the greatest name of all in the history of the literature of cookery is that of Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), the French judge and author of the Physiologie du gout (18 2 5), the classic of gastronomy.

In England Louis Eustache Ude, Charles Elme Francatelli, and Alexis Soyer carried on the tradition, all being not only cooks but authors of treatises on the art. The Original (1835) of Thomas Walker, the Lambeth police magistrate, is another work which has inspired later pens. Like the Physiologie du gad, it is no mere cookery-book, but a compound of observation and philosophy. Among simple hand-books, Mrs. Glasse's, Dr Kitchener's and Mrs Rundell's were standard English works in the 18th and early 19th centuries; and in France the Cuisiniere de la campagne (1818) went through edition after edition. An interesting old English work is Dr. Pegge's Forme of Cury (1780), which includes some historical reflections on the subject. "We have some good families in England," he says, "of the name of Cook or Coke. . . . Depend upon it, they all originally sprang from real professional cooks, and they need not be ashamed of their extraction any more than Porters, Butlers, &c." He points out that cooks in early days were of some importance; William the Conqueror bestowed land on his coquorum praepositus and coquus regius; and Domesday Book records the bestowal of a manor on Robert Argyllon, by the service of a dish called " de la Groute" on the king's coronation day.

Whatever the local varieties of cooking, and the difference of national custom, many believe that French cooking is admittedly the ideal of the culinary art, directly we leave the plain See Lady S. O. Morgan's France, 1829-1830, for an account of a dinner by Careme. The spread of cosmopolitan hotels and restaurants over England, America and the European continent, has largely accustomed the whole civilized world to the Parisian type. The improvements in the appliances and appurtenances of the kitchen have made the whole world kin in the arts of dining, but the French chef remains the typical master of his craft. Schools of cookery have been added to the educational machine. The literature of the subject has passed beyond enumeration. From Cookery, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911