The Prince de Soubise was famous in the reign of Louis XV. for giving great dinners, and paying nobody but his cooks, and the young ladies of the opera. He once varied his extravagance by a splendid fête, which was to terminate by a supper. His chef waited on him with the bill of fare for the banquet, and the first article which attracted his attention was “fifty hams.” “Half a hundred hams!” said the Prince, “that’s a coarse idea, Bertrand. You have not got to feed my regiment of cavalry.” “Truly, Prince! and only one ham will appear on the table; I want the remaining forty-nine for adjuncts, seasonings, flavourings, and a dozen other purposes.” “Bertrand,” replied the Prince, “you are robbing me, and I cannot allow this article to pass.” “Monseigneur!” exclaimed the offended artiste, “you doubt my morals, and libel my merit. You do not know what a treasure you possess in me; you have only to order it, and those fifty hams which so terribly offend you, why, I will put them all into a phial not bigger than my thumb!” The Prince smiled, and Bertrand triumphed.
The cooks of the young King Louis XVI. remarked, with mingled terror and disgust, that his appetite was rather voracious than delicate. He cared little what he ate, provided there was enough of it; and he looked to nutrition rather than niceness. A succulent joint with him had more merit than the most singular of dishes, the invention of which had perhaps caused three nights of wakefulness to its author. But the aristocracy, the law, and finance, maintained tables which ought to have been the pride of Versailles. Late dinners, or gorgeous suppers, were indulged in to such a degree by the moneyed classes, that it was familiarly said, that of an evening the chimneys of the Faubourg Saint Honoré made fragrant with their incense the entire capital. It was reckoned that, at this period, twenty thousand men had no other profession than that of “diner-out,” which they carried on, like the parasites of old, by retailing anecdotes and news in return for the repast. It was a time when “Monseigneur” thought nothing of dispatching his cook to London to procure a turtle; which, after all, was less extravagant than the process of Cambacères, who had his Périgord pies sent to him through the post, “On His Majesty’s Service.” The Languedocien cooks in France were paid the quadruple of the salary of the family tutor, good eating being so much more essential to life than mere instruction; and, besides, could the family tutor have accomplished any thing that could equal the achievement of the family cook who could bring to table entire a “sanglier à la crapaudine?” The cooks of the age of Louis XVI. invented the “bouillie” and the “consommé,” because mastication was considered by them a vulgar process; and the royal cooks, during Passion Week, manipulated the vegetables placed before the King into the forms of ocean-dwelling fish, and gave to the semblance the taste of the reality for which it passed to the eye.
The glory of gastronomy was again rising when it was suddenly quenched by the revolutionary torrent, and the nation was put on a three years’ meagre dietary by the Jacobins and the Directory. But the Revolution, which affected to hate cooks as aristocratic appendages that ought to be suppressed, sometimes made, where it hoped to mar. The case of Ude is one in point.
Monsieur Ude, like Prince Eugene, was originally intended for the Church. At the breaking out of the French Revolution, he was residing, for instruction, with an Abbé, and master and pupil had to fly before the popular indignation, which, for a time, assailed the Church, and all therewith connected. Ude’s life was in peril in the public streets, and he just saved it, by rushing into the shop of a pastrycook, where he found a permanent asylum. The “house of Ude,” like other great houses, nearly perished in the great political shipwreck of the day, and this particular scion thereof took to the study of practical gastronomy, and became chief supreme in various great kitchens, from that of royalty down to that of Crockford.
When the sluices of the French Revolution were opened, how diverse were the fortunes of those who fled from before it! It was the same with the gentlemen who had followed the fortunes of Napoleon. They were scattered, like the Generals of Alexander, without being able, like them, to retire upon independent sovereignties, and rear dynasties of barbaric splendour. Some went to Greece to crush despotism, some went to Lahore to aid it. A few, like Latour d’Auvergne, took to the Church; but, saving that portly person himself, none had the good luck to reach the archiepiscopate. Those who failed to procure employment in foreign armies, and yet could not lay aside their propensity for killing, went to the East, and prescribed as Physicians. Such of the rest as were absolutely fit for nothing, and willing to do it, inundated England, and undertook the light and irresponsible office of Private Tutors!
But it was the earlier Revolution that afforded examples of the greatest contrasts. Many young men, intended for the Church, changed their profession, and became popular, useful, and rich, in the households of European royalty, as civilizers of the kitchen, who raised cookery from its barbarous condition to a matter of science and taste. Perhaps the most curious of the waifs and strays of the Revolution flung upon our shores, was the Chevalier D’Aubigné, who contrived to live, as so many French gentlemen of that time did, in bitter poverty, without a sacrifice of dignity. He had one day been invited by an English friend to dine with the latter at a tavern. In the course of the repast, he took upon himself to mix the salad; and the way in which he did this, attracted the notice of all the other guests in the room. Previous to the period of which I am speaking, lettuces were commonly eaten, by tavern frequenters at least, au naturel, with no more dressing than Nebuchadnezzar had to his grass when he dieted daily among the beasts. Consequently, when D’Aubigné handled the preparation for which he had asked, like a chymist concocting elixir in his laboratory, the guests were lost in admiration; for the refreshing aroma of a Mayonnaise was warrant to their senses, that the French Knight had discovered for them a new pleasure. One of them approached the foreign magician, and said, “Sir, it is universally known that your nation excels all others in the making a salad. Would it be too great a liberty to ask you to do us the favour to mix one for the party at my table?” The courteous Frenchman smiled, was flattered, performed the office asked of him, and put four gentlemen in a state of uncontrollable ecstasy. He had talked cheerfully, as he mixed gracefully and scientifically, and, in the few minutes required by him to complete his work of enchantment, he contrived to explain his position as emigrant, and his dependence on the pecuniary aid afforded by the English Government. The guests did not let the poor Chevalier depart without slipping into his hand a golden fee, which he received with as little embarrassment, and as much dignity, as though he had been the Physician De Portal taking an honorarium from the hands of the Cardinal de Rohan.
He had communicated his address, and he, perhaps, was not very much surprised when, a few days after, he received a letter in which he was politely requested to repair to a house in Grosvenor Square, for the purpose of mixing a salad for a dinner party there to be given. D’Aubigné obeyed the summons; and, after performing his mission, returned home richer by a five-pound note than when he went out.
Henceforth he became the recognised “fashionable salad-maker;” and ladies “died” for his salads, as they do now for Constantine’s simulative bouquets. The preparer was soon enabled to proceed to his responsible duties in a carriage; and a servant attended him, carrying a mahogany case, containing the necessary ingredients for concocting various salads, according to the respective tastes of his employers. At a later period, he sold, by hundreds, similar mahogany cases, which he had caused to be made, and which were furnished with all matters necessary for the making an irreproachable salad, and with directions how to administer them. The Chevalier, too, was, like old Carré,—whose will was so cleverly made by the very disinterested friends who had never before spoken to him,—a prudent and a saving man; and by the period which re-opened France to the émigrés, he had realized some eighty thousand francs, upon which he enjoyed a dignified retirement in a provincial town. He invested sixty thousand francs in the Funds; with the other twenty thousand he purchased a little estate in the Limousin, and, if he lacked a “legend” to his device, I would have helped him to one in “Sal adfert.”
A Knight over a salad-bowl is not a chivalrous picture; but the stern necessity of the case gave it dignity, and the resulting profits quieted the scruples of the gentleman. When Booth pounced upon Captain Bath, sitting in a dirty flannel gown, and warming his sister’s posset at the fire, the noble and gaunt Captain was taken something aback, and said, in a little confusion, “I did not expect, Sir, to be seen by you in this situation.” Booth told him “he thought it impossible he could appear in a situation more becoming his character.” The compliment was equivocal; but the Captain said, “You do not? By G— I am very much obliged to you for that opinion; but I believe, Sir, however my weakness may prevail on me to descend from it, no man can be more conscious of his own dignity than myself.” The apology of good Captain Bath in Fielding’s “Amelia,” would have served the Chevalier who made salads, had he needed one.
If a salad made the fortune of a Chevalier, it on one occasion made that of a female cook, with whose dexterity in this respect a learned English Judge was so enchanted, that he raised the lucky maiden to the quality of wife. If we discuss the traits of life at table, we have nothing to do with the secrets of household; but an incident, illustrative of the consequences of this match, may be mentioned. The Judge ever after was famous for protracting the sittings in court beyond all precedent and patience; and when weary Barristers were aghast at hearing a new cause called on, when the night was half spent, and fairly remonstrated against the judicial cruelty, the learned husband of his cook would remark with a sigh, “Gentlemen, we must be somewhere; we cannot be better any where than where we now are,”—the half of which assertion was stoutly denied by his hearers.