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5. Disputing Tastes: Gastronomy and Surveillance in the Culinary Marketplace of Post-Revolutionary France
- Louisiana State University Press
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5 Disputing Tastes gastronomy and surveillance in the culinary marketplace of post-revolutionary france G astronomy did not exist prior to the French Revolution. Certainly, French elites maintained fine tables, and French cooks found employment throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. Naturally, the French preferred the food to which they were accustomed over that of other countries; as the abbé Dubos observed in 1733, the French “favor foreigners in all things except cuisine and good air.” But during the Old Regime the French had not yet formulated a science of taste. Moreover, as the previous chapters demonstrate, artisans operating within the kingdom’s elite households and guilds took a prominent role in articulating and enforcing the aesthetics of food preparation and service. Alimentary concerns retained connotations of the base and elemental throughout the eighteenth century. In fact, most terms associated with consumption stressed the dangers of excess and indulgence. Dictionary definitions of gourmand approximated those of the English term glutton, with overtones of Christian morality. Elite luxury consumption took a heavy toll on the surrounding society, devoting vast resources to a privileged few, while the many struggled or starved. Catholic dietary laws strived to limit indulgence, although the church’s own leaders often failed to follow these strictures. By the 1760s and 1770s the tethers attaching rules of ingestion to Christian ideals had strained to breaking points, as evidenced by the public caterers’ argument that the sale of meat on Friday or during Lent should be a matter of personal preference rather than one of religious identity or state interest. However, it was only after the French Revolution that some diners attempted to publicly theorize consumption as independent of the Deity and to appreciate their meals on a strictly material register. 2 Defining Culinary Authority In the early nineteenth century gastronomy emerged as a term to identify a new science of food that integrated chemical and medical alimentary theories for the purpose of maximizing taste rather than improving health. It invoked the vocabulary and methods of science to create an art of dining, and by extension an art of cooking, thus enhancing the prestige of the cooking trade. The term, which was first used by Joseph Berchoux in a satirical poem, “La Gastronomie, ou l’homme des champs à table,” published in 1802, claimed classical ancestry and perhaps found linguistic resonance in the revolutionary popularity of astronomy. The aspiring literary and theater critic AlexandreBalthazar -Laurent Grimod de la Reynière further elaborated the genre in the pages of his annual guide to eating in the capital, Almanach des gourmands, published from 1804 to 1812, as well as in his Manuel des amphitryons, a digest of Almanach materials that appeared in 1808. Finally Jean-Anthelme BrillatSavarin , perhaps the most renowned savant contributor to this new field, published Physiologie du goût in 1825. These works developed the term gastronome to refer to a diner who employed scientific theories to maximize consumption quantity, quality, and pleasure. Conscious of the cultural taboos regarding consumption, the gastronome strived to rise above them, allowing his individual experience to guide taste. Gastronomic literature conferred culinary aesthetic authority on circles of educated amateurs rather than on cooks. Men of letters active in the world of the Parisian theater sustained gastronomy as both discourse and practice. They relied heavily on public dining as a mode of sociability, in contrast to their predecessors’ dependence on elite patronage, particularly evident in the dinners and suppers for men of letters sponsored by wealthy salon hosts and hostesses. These authors employed culinary metaphors in their evaluations of revolutionary and imperial society and penned a wide range of texts—including poems, vaudeville plays, and urban guides—that advocated a materialist and sensualist vision of consumption. Gastronomes emphasized the importance of public dining as an independent social arena and increased the profile of cooks on stage and in print, but they also profoundly subordinated the male cook’s authority to that of men who claimed to speak for the dining “public.” These critics represented cuisine as an art and themselves as the essential guides to that art. While the public cook had fortune and reputation at stake in culinary evaluations, the gastronome represented himself as a disinterested, objective third party and therefore a more reliable judge of culinary excellence. Finally, gastronomes identified their role as that of a sort of public police of the purportedly free [18.224.44.108] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 19:30 GMT) Disputing Tastes 3...