The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France

Introduction

Introduction The Italians, who style their ideas nicely, call the introduction the sauce of a book. François Marin, La Suite des dons de Comus (1742) In the final decades of the Old Regime, French cooks achieved universal dominion over the palate. In 1754, the chevalier de Jaucourt lamented the overwhelming international popularity of French cuisine, claiming that his countrymen had “found nothing so gratifying as seeing the taste of their cuisine surpass that of other opulent kingdoms, and to reign without competition from the one end of the globe to the other.”1 Three years later, in the play L’Ancienne et nouvelle cuisine, one cook characterized another’s work as satisfying even “the least delicate palates/from the Antarctic to the Arctic.”2 In his 1773 dictionary of arts and trades, Philippe Macquer claimed that“in all nations French cooks pass for those who cook best and whose taste is most delicate with respect to fine dining.”3 This notion was hardly limited to French imaginations. One Italian observer remarked with disgust,“Nowadays the French reign supreme in the science of flavour , from the North down to the South.”4 In England, indigenous cooks fiercely opposed the intrusion of French interlopers.5 And the same faith in the ability of French cooks circulated across the Atlantic: when one New Yorker witnessed a few French travelers spontaneously preparing an onion soup, he exclaimed in vindication that “it was true that all French people were cooks.”6 Although this mastery usually proved purely imaginary, it arose from cooks’ very real effort to transform themselves from servants into professionals. Operating at a unique intersection of domestic service and occupational expertise, cooks worked particularly unstable ground. They labored as domestic servants without the guild oversight that regulated most other urban trades, and unlike in almost every other occupation, large numbers of both women and men served as cooks. They toiled in kitchens that were perceived as sites of pollution and decay threatening the comfort and hygiene of residential space. They were entrusted 2   The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France with tremendous financial responsibility and yet remained widely suspected of fraud. In the face of this disorganization, cooks audaciously proposed to reconfigure their lowly occupation as a profession. By introducing something they called la cuisine moderne, or “modern cooking,” during the 1730s, cooks aimed at establishing themselves as expert engineers of taste through the fusion of a new theoretical knowledge with existing mechanical skill. Although largely formulated in cookbooks, la cuisine moderne’s most important contribution was not its recipes but rather its new cook: a“taste professional” who along with decorators, architects, and fashion merchants drove France’s consumer revolution; a health practitioner who along with doctors, surgeons, dentists, midwives, and pharmacists advanced his professional status by capitalizing on the Enlightenment’s new concern for bodily and material happiness over eternal salvation and the life to come. This book is about these cooks and how they sought to establish themselves as a profession and used the tools of the Enlightenment to do so. When it involved matters beyond the dining table, the civilizing role sought by cooks for the most part inspired pride. According to Antoine de Rivarol, a contemporarycommentator ,bysupplyingtheater,clothing,taste,manners,language, and a new art of living to the nations around it, France had come to wield over its neighbors “a sort of empire that no other people had ever exercised.”7 Nonetheless , pride in France’s achievements was tempered by a persistent undercurrent of anxiety about their nature and, more important, the rising status and power of those individuals behind them. Although founded upon the most sociable and polite of nations, this new French “empire” was unfortunately the empire of marginal characters, including not just cooks but men of letters, seamstresses, and actors. Worse still, it was also often an empire of women, since they were often most closely associated with the consumption and promotion of France’s cultural output.8 Yet even among this questionable company, cooks were viewed as especially disreputable. Detractors worried not just about cooks’ international “empire,”but also about the“empire”they wielded over those whom they served, exercising scandalously inappropriate dominion over the latter’s finances, passions , and bodies.9 In the process they disrupted social order, redefined aesthetic sensibility, and challenged medical science. Because of the dubious social standing of those most closely associated with the rapidly expanding sphere of French cultural influence, a curious disjuncture between practitioner and product...