Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

by H. Sutherland Edwards

The science of cooking in France was in a languid condition when Francis I. ascended the throne. The presence of ladies at his court, and the {374} fêtes and banquets which were given, reanimated the cuisinier. It was the renaissance of the kitchen as well as of the arts; and Francis I. imported from Italy cooks as well as painters and sculptors. The Italian cooks viewed their art in a very serious light. Montaigne well portrays a typical member of their order.

“Just now,” he writes, “I was mentioning an Italian I have recently entertained, who acted as maître d’hôtel to the late Cardinal Caraffe until his death. I made him describe his duties, and he gave me a discourse on this science of the jaws with a gravity and countenance quite magisterial, precisely as if he had been engaged on some subject in theology. He indicated the different stages of appetite: that which exists after fasting, and that which remains when the first or second course has been served; the methods employed, now simply to gratify it, now to awaken and spur it; the policy with which he prepares his dishes, adorning and embellishing them so as to fascinate the eye. After that he entered upon the order of the service, full of fine and important considerations; the whole inflated with a magnificence of words such as characterises a treatise on the government of an empire.”

The luxury of gastronomy was carried to such a point in France that edicts were issued by several French kings for the purpose of restraining it; but the Italian cooks whom Catherine de Medici brought to the court of Henri II. easily contrived to vanquish the law. They formed a school and produced pupils who were destined to surpass their preceptors. Until the Revolution the profession of cook was regulated by a succession of statutes. So far back as 1260 the corporation of “goose-cooks” (geese being their most important commodity) received statutes from the provost of the merchants. Later on the name of “roasters” was given to them; and anyone not of their order who ventured to cook for the public was termed a traitor. The cooks of Paris had already been made the subject of many enactments when Louis XIV., in 1663, gave them new statutes which were registered in parliament the following year; nor was it until the Revolution that their profession became free.

In the seventeenth century the culinary art had reached a high pitch of perfection, and epicures abounded in high life, amongst princes, seigneurs, and even bishops—indeed bishops in particular. One day when a certain archbishop famed for good living, in a sense otherwise than ecclesiastical, had dined at the palace of his episcopal brother in the capital, he called his servants around him and said: “I have been dining with the archbishop of Paris; there was this and that dish, and such and such defects. Now I tell you, so that you may fall into the danger, that if you were to treat me in that fashion, you would be wishing to throw away your lives.” At the end of dinner he was accustomed to send for Maître Nicholas, his cook, and say: “Maître Nicholas, what shall we have for supper?” After supper his inquiry was: “Maître Nicholas, what shall we have for to-morrow’s dinner?” Another bishop having returned home very hungry and demanded his dinner, the episcopal cook made his appearance empty-handed. “As a bishop,” he said, “I forgive you; but if you fail to produce my supper, I shall talk to you like a man, and flatten your nose for you.”

Louis XIV. was a great gastronomist, but in the refinements of the culinary art Louis XV. eclipsed his predecessor. The artists of the kitchen were not yet in his reign paid twenty thousand francs a year, as they have since been paid in Paris; but they were petted, yielded to, and stroked down when out of temper. The cooks from Languedoc were chiefly in demand at Paris; they received very large salaries and exercised domestic despotism, the other servants of the household having to bow to their authority.

Expense was nothing when it became a question of stimulating the jaded appetite of a count or a wealthy merchant. Mercie in his “Picture of Paris” shows us a maître d’hôtel presenting the bill of fare to his aristocratic master, who throws it down disdainfully, exclaiming: “Always the same dishes! You have no imagination. These are nothing but nauseating repetitions.” “But, monseigneur, the sauces are varied.” “I tell you the whole thing is detestable, and I can no longer eat it.” “Well, monseigneur, I will prepare you a grilled boar.” “When?” “To-morrow. I will make him drink sixty bottles of champagne first. And after that I want you to eat a Jamaica turtle.” “Bravo! And when? Where is the turtle?” “In London.” “Send a courier at once: let him fetch it post-haste.” The courier is despatched, and returns with the turtle. There is a solemn conference as to the most effective way of preparing the animal; and after all kinds of processes, it appears on the table. That dish has cost a thousand crowns. Seven or eight gourmands devour it, and while they are drinking costly wines discuss the question as to how much a peasant can live on. They decide that three sous a day are enough for him, and that the inhabitants of the towns are well off if they have seventeen. Beyond these figures all is superfluity, according {375} to the turtle-devouring economists.

The whole court of Louis XV. consisted of gourmands, loyal imitators of their sovereign. Marshal de Richelieu attached his name to various dishes, prepared for the purpose of making an epicure’s mouth water. The gay and ingenious Mme. de Pompadour invented three or four recipes which have become famous. Gastronomy, however, did not flourish at the court of Louis XVI., who was by no means fastidious in the choice of his food, and for whose robust appetite rude joints of meat amply sufficed. Coming to the Revolution, we find the culinary art injured a good deal by the arbitrary closing of the mansions of the great nobility.

Those thousand and one ruinous inventions without which courtiers, financiers, and ecclesiastics found existence impossible, were seductions for the severe Republicans. A celebrated gastronomist, Grimod de la Reynière, paints, in what he doubtless intended for very black tints, the calamity which marked the revolutionary period. “It is an unquestionable fact,” he writes, “that during the disastrous years of the Revolution not one fine turbot entered the market”; and he has thus exposed himself to Republican reproaches as to the seat of his patriotism and political sentiment being his stomach.

All the celebrities of the eighteenth century sat at the table of the la Reynières, which was more sumptuously kept than Scarron’s. There was first the grandfather, la Reynière, who died in 1754 with a napkin under his chin, suffocated by a pâté-de-foie-gras; then the father, whose dinners were better than his society, if we are to judge from the remark passed upon him by one of his guests, namely: “You can eat him; but digest him you cannot”; and finally the son, who has exercised by his pen and his stomach a considerable influence on gastronomy, and rescued French cookery from the indifference of the Revolution.