It may be concluded, that the regency and the reign of Louis XV. were among the grand epochs of French cookery. The long peace which followed the treaty of Utrecht, the large fortunes made by the tribe of financiers, who, in ruining the state, enriched themselves—the tranquil and voluptuous life of a monarch who gave himself more concern about his personal pleasures and enjoyments than his royal renown—the character of the courtiers and public men of the day—all contributed to stamp an intensely sensual character on the age of Louis XV. A taste for English equipages and horses was now introduced, and our puddings and beef-steaks were also imitated. The example of the regent was refined on and extended in this reign. The petits soupers of the king were cited as models of delicacy and gourmandise. The kitchen in France, as in all the world over, requires “the cankers of a calm world and a long peace,” to sustain and support it; while the troubles of the League and the Fronde, the temperament of Louis XIV., and the despotic and tempestuous character of Richelieu, interfered with its progress in former reigns. There were great cooks as well as great captains in the reign of Louis XIV., notwithstanding the disparaging remarks which Carème casts on the memory of Vatel; but a witty author maintains that the only ineffaceable and immortal reputation of that time handed down to us in cookery, is that of the Marquis de Bechamel, who introduced into the sauce for turbot and cod fish an infusion of cream. The Bechamel de turbot et de cabillaud still maintain their popularity, though kings, dynasties, and empires have fallen, and half the globe has been revolutionized.
In the royal kitchen of Louis XVI., the art as an art declined; but the sacred fire of cookery (to use the inflated language of some of the craft) was preserved in many old houses, as, for instance, in the establishments of Marshals Richelieu and Duras, the Duke of La Vallière, the Marquis de Brancas, the Count de Tessé, and some others, who equalled in the delicacy of their tables the elegant sumptuosity of the reign of Louis XV. The excesses of some of the French nobility of this day would now appear incredible. One hundred and twenty pheasants were, at this period, weekly consumed in the kitchens of the Prince de Condé; and the Duke de Penthievre, in going to preside over the estates of Burgundy, was preceded by one hundred and fifty-two hommes de bouche! Can any, after this, wonder at the excesses of the Revolution? The unexpected death of Louis XV. (says a gourmand of the succeeding reign, and who survived the Revolution and the Consulate) struck a mortal blow at cookery. His successor, young and vigorous, ate with more voracity than delicacy, and did not pride himself on (the words are untranslateable) a “grand finesse de gout”—an exquisite delicacy of taste in the choice of his food. Large joints of butchers’ meat, and dishes essentially nutritive, represented his ideas of good living. His enormous appetite contented itself in satisfying hunger; learned efforts were not necessary to stimulate its vast cravings.
The French Revolution at length broke forth, and the historians of the kitchen speak with mournfulness of its effect on the science, which Montaigne quaintly calls l’art de la gueule. The kitchens of the faubourg of St. Germain and the Chaussée d’Antin no longer smoked, the perfumes of truffles were exhaled and vanished, the great and noble of the land were obliged to fly for their lives, and too often to dine with Duke Humphrey, or at best to dine frugally and sparingly. The financiers, who aped the luxuries and mimicked the extravagance of the court, were all ruined or denounced. The stoic’s fare—the radish and the egg, the Jus nigrum of the severe Spartans, and the black bread of the Germans of the middle ages, scarcely fit food for horses, were now revived. For three long years this spare Spartan régime continued. Had the Goths and Vandals gone on a little longer, says a witty epicure, who survived the Revolution, the receipt for a fricassee of chicken had been infallibly lost. The markets were no longer supplied. Beef, mutton, ham, and veal, had disappeared; as to fish, it was preposterous to think of it.[7] Not a good turbot, or salmon, or sturgeon, says Grimod, appeared during the Revolution. Fowls and game had become a “sick epicure’s dream,” not a solid reality. Nor were these miseries confined to Paris alone. “You might go into a country market,” says the same author, “with a ream of assignats in your hand, and not be able to buy a sack of flour.” A return to a gold currency produced a visible alteration in the Res Cibaria. The louis and five-franc pieces again peopled the markets with a populace of poultry and partridges. Cooks again began to talk in the language which the Italian maître d’hôtel of Cardinal Caraffa addressed to the pleasant and witty Montaigne, language which the laughing author has imperishably recorded in those inimitable volumes, which will be read and admired so long as the French language and literature endure. “Il m’a fait un discours de cette science de gueule avec une gravité et contenance magistrale, comme s’il m’eust parlé de quelque grand poinct de theologie. Il m’a dechiffré une difference d’appetits; la police de ses sauces; les qualités des ingredients et leurs effects, les differences des salades. Après cela il est entré sur l’ordre de service plein de belles et importantes considerations, et tout cela enflé de riches et magnifiques paroles; et celles mêmes qu’on employe à traiter du gouvernement d’un empire.”
The oxen of Auvergne and Normandy were now again marched slowly and gravely up from the provinces to be slaughtered in Paris. The sheep of Beauvais, of Cotentin and the Ardennes, were again, as under the old régime, cut up into cutlets, and the cooks soon appeared. Instead of serving as chefs de cuisine, butlers, intendants, and maîtres d’hôtel, they now were called citoyens, pensionnaires, and rentiers; for there were no grands seigneurs to employ them. For a while there was some inconvenience, but a Frenchman sooner accommodates himself to circumstances than any other human being, and such of the cuisiniers as had saved somewhat from the shipwreck of the Revolution formed eating-houses, taverns, and restaurants. These establishments have since become the temples of good cheer and gourmandise, in which wandering Englishmen spend and have spent millions upon millions of money; but it is an historical fact known to few, that the greater number of these restaurants owe their origin to the Revolution.[8]
The complete overthrow of the French kitchen, the work of three centuries, might have been effected at this season, had not its traditions been preserved. Happily there were Acolytes and Neophytes sufficient in existence, says one of the historians, to catch and perpetuate the scientific savour of the ancient “flesh pots.” In such a loss as this, weightier interests had been imperilled than mere cookery. More than half the intelligence, and nearly all of the French agreeability of the past age, had been in a great degree promoted by the French cuisine. The cook of the Condés and the Soubises contributed in no mean degree to give a zest and a vivacity to the dinners at which Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, D’Alembert, Duclos, and Vauvenargues so often met; and this remark applies, in a great degree, to the suppers of Madame du Deffand, the dinners of the Baron D’Holbach, and the dinners, suppers, and pic-nics of the agreeable Crawford of Auchinames, whose “Tableau of French Literature” is not sufficiently known nor read in our day. It was at these social réunions that French conversation, then indeed a style parlé became animated and improved by the exquisite cheer which the “cunning hand” of the cook provided. A few hours of delightful, easy, unrestrained conversation between polite and well-informed men, did more to advance the progress of the human mind than the labours of a wilderness of speculative bookmaking academies. The solution of many great and grave questions—the propagation of new and enlarged views, the production of ingenious essays and instructive memoirs, are all owing to that elegant and agreeable body of men and women, kept together in a main degree by the exquisite attraction of petits soupers and luxurious dinners.
From the moment of the Executive Directory, 1795, to the period of the 18th Brumaire, all the historians among; the great cooks admit that their illustrious art was under the greatest obligations to Barras, that well-born tribune of the people, of whose family it was said, “noble comme les Barras, aussi anciens que les rochers de Provence.” Whether as Commissary of the government at Toulon—at whose siege, by the way, he first became acquainted with Bonaparte—or as Director, or as residing as a private gentleman at his château of Grosbois, Barras always exhibited those epicurean tastes which were either natural to him, or which he had acquired from a residence at the French settlement of Pondicherry.
During the most ferocious periods of the Revolution, there were but two splendid exceptions to the self-denying ordinances of the time. That desperate demagogue Danton loved and copiously indulged himself in morels, and is recorded to have given dinners at 400 francs a head; and Barras, when in the Directory, had his button mushrooms conveyed to him en poste from the Bouches du Rhone.
Napoleon, who may be said to have succeeded to power at the epoch of the 18th Brumaire, is falsely represented as an enemy of the pleasures of the table. It is true, a love of good cheer was not a dominant passion with him; he did not exhibit the crapulous gluttony of an over-fed sensualist, but he was not insensible to the pleasures of good eating. M. de Bausset,[9] the prefect of the Imperial palace, has handed down in his most interesting work some of the Emperor’s ordinary bills of fare. They are distinguished by simplicity and moderation, but there is also a pervading suitableness and taste very significant of the man, and of the nation over which he “reigned and governed.”
M. de Cussy, also attached to the kitchen and household of the Emperor, and who obtained from his patron, or assumed, the title of Marquis de Cussy, has also left us interesting details on the subject. One day at breakfast, says he (this was some time after his marriage), Napoleon, after having eaten, with his habitual haste, a wing of a chicken à la Tartare, turned towards M. de Cussy (who was always present at the Emperor’s meals), and the following dialogue took place between them: “The deuce! I have always hitherto found chicken-meat flat and insipid, but this is excellent.” “Sire, if your Majesty would permit, I would desire to have the honour of serving a fowl every day in a different fashion.” “What! M. de Cussy, you are then master of 365 different ways of dressing fowl?” “Yes, Sire, and perhaps your Majesty, after a trial, would take a pleasure à la science gastronomique. All great men have encouraged that science, and, without citing to your Majesty the example of the great Frederick, who had a special cook for each favourite dish, I might invoke, in support of my assertion, all the great names immortalized by glory.” “Well, then, M. de Cussy,” replied the Emperor, “we shall put your abilities to the test.” The case might be left to a jury of gourmands on this evidence, and the Emperor would be convicted, if not of gourmandise, at least of friandises. Who will, however, deny the gourmandise of his arch-chancellor, Cambacères, or of his minister of foreign affairs, Talleyrand? “The first clouds of smoke” (says Ude) “which announced the resurrection of cookery, appeared from the kitchen of a quondam bishop.” Napoleon himself was in the habit of saying that more fortunate treaties, more happy arrangements and reconciliations were due to the cook of Cambacères than to the crowds of diplomatic nonentities who thronged the ante-chambers of the Tuileries. On one occasion the town of Geneva sent to the arch-chancellor a monster trout, together with the sauce, the expense of which was verified by the Cour des Comptes as amounting to 6000 francs, or 240l. of our money.
A rare epoch in the history of cookery was the publication of the first number of the “Almanach des Gourmands,” which appeared in the beginning of the year 1803, and which the late Duke of York called the most delightful book that was ever printed. The sale of this work was prodigious. 22,000 copies of the four first years were speedily disposed of, and the work subsequently went through new editions. As the book is very scarce everywhere, and not to be found in England, I may be pardoned for dwelling on it. Gastronomy became the fashion of that day. Every one spoke on the subject; many wrote on it. Cookery passed from the kitchen to the shop, from the shop to the counting-house, from the counting-house to the studies of lawyers and physicians; thence to the salons and cabinets of ladies and statesmen. The object of life, according, at least, to our simple English notions, seemed reversed: people in England eat to live; in France, they appeared to live only to eat. This was in consonance with French character and practice.