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  • Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France
  • Anca Sprenger
Flandrin, Jean-Louis . Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France. Trans. Julie E. Johnson, Sylvie Roder and Antonio Roder. Foreword by Georges Carantino. Foreword to the English-language edition by Beatrice Fink. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. 209. ISBN 0-5202-3885-0

Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France, published in 2007 in the prestigious "California Studies in Food and Culture" series, is an unfinished project. Jean Louis Flandrin died in 2001, before completing the study to which he had dedicated himself during his last years. The book was first published as L'Ordre des mets in 2002 and the English translation followed five years later, thus adding one more building block to Flandrin's seminal work on the history of family, sexuality and food.

The book has two parts, the first one focusing on the structure of meals in the classical age, the second on the often puzzling order of courses in France, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Flandrin argues that we are all too used to the ways of modern French gastronomy to realize that many of the now familiar rules are recent inventions that replaced others that seemed in their time equally logical. Even the presence, in the English translation, of terms like "entrée," "entremets," "au bleu," "fricassee" "ragout" "hors d'oeuvre" seems to make French cuisine a timeless reference. And yet Flandrin notes the presence of rather shocking dishes such as "porpoise" or "eels renversées" served at the end of a French medieval meal; he reveals the presence meat-based sweet dishes; and he dismantles the myth of the immutability of the current order of service. The birth of a distinctive trait of modern French cuisine (the separation between sweet and savory) thus appears as a historical event and not as a timeless characteristic. With countless examples and detailed graphs, Flandrin demonstrates that not only was the sequence of dishes different throughout history, but also that the exact same dietetic principles have led to different food practices in various cultures. Another myth that he dismantles is the one of the chaotic, unsophisticated but abundant medieval meals. Flandrin's minute analysis reveals the period's precise and intricate rules, although quite different from the modern ones. [End Page 141]

The other crucial change in the meal structure that Flandrin abundantly documents with cookbook excerpts and travel journals is the much debated mid-nineteenth century shift from the dramatic "service à la française" (where several dishes of the same course were concomitantly brought to the table) to the "service à la russe" (where dishes are passed around to be shared by all the guests). While the latter seems natural today, both had their proponents and adversaries, and the culinary historian takes note of conflicting comments that designated both ways as either more democratic or more elitist.

In order to help us navigate the labyrinth of menus and banquet descriptions, Flandrin questions and clarifies apparently obvious terms, from "meal," "dish" and "course," to "roast," "soup" and "salad" which are all have proved to be rather elusive. Readers learn that soups actually did not necessarily contain much liquid, and that a roast did not have to consist of browned meat as in modern day cuisine since it could also refer to poached fish in a meatless menu. The subtle differences between hors d'oeuvres, entrées and entremets can at times be puzzling: the ingredients, the cooking method, the temperature, the color, and the place in the meal sequence resemble the evidence in a mystery novel, but each may be just another false lead. In such enigmatic cases, the author himself asks questions to which he proposes some hypotheses, without ever imposing a definitive answer: Why was beef liver an hors d'oeuvre but calf liver an entremets? Why were geese and mallards in a white sauce served after the roast in a fourteenth century menu? Was the fish in the "fish roast" the equivalent of the one in the "meatless roast"? Did the Revolution transform the eating habits by undermining the Church's...

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