The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France

ONE: Defining the Cook

one Defining the Cook An excellent cook is worth seeking with care and deserves to be especially well paid for his efforts. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1788) In his influential accounting of the various orders, offices, trades, and professions of the Third Estate, the jurist Charles Loyseau (1564–1627) meticulously ranked a comprehensive hierarchy of occupational categories: men of letters, with scientists coming first; faculties of theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and arts; financiers and merchants; guild artisans, some of them—apothecaries, jewelers, mercers , and drapers—more honorable than the others; and, finally, farm workers. Even if in practice a variety of forms of unincorporated work chipped away at the edges of this idealized model, such categories continued to define forms of work during the Enlightenment.1 In the eighteenth century, occupational institutions like guilds remained essential, not only for providing economic organization, but also for helping to define “social identity, honor, and gender roles,” in the words of one scholar.2 Yet cooks, and indeed domestic servants in general, had no place in this orderly world. Loyseau situated gens de bras, unskilled laborers he disparaged as “base persons,” outside of his neatly tiered system.3 Here we would find servant cooks, cast among those brutes operating at the absolute bottom of the Old Regime’s occupational ladder. Insignificant though their labor might have appeared to a jurist like Loyseau, cooks hardly lacked for numbers.While it is impossible to state with any precision the total number of cooks working even in Paris, let alone in France as a whole, Parisian servants were estimated to range anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 during the eighteenth century, easily comprising the city’s single largest occupational category at a time when the entire urban population numbered around 600,000 individuals.4 Within this enormous population of servants, little often separated the thousands of “cooks” from the far greater number who did “a little cooking” in the course of their work. There were a handful of cooking-related guilds— 14   The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France pastry cooks (pâtissiers), roasters (rôtisseurs), and caterers (traiteurs)—but these occupations were both quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to the world of servant cooking. In Paris, between 150 and 200 apprentices entered the pastry cook and roasting guilds each year.5 Meanwhile the press—just one facet of the overall servant employment market—carried dozens of advertisements posted by servant cooks each month. Even in smaller cities elsewhere in France, servant cooks numbered in the hundreds.6 If we turn to sources like notary records, we find that servant cooks outnumbered guild cooks in all types of transactions other than apprenticeship contracts, where of course domestic servants were grossly underrepresented.7 Far more important than this quantitative disparity , however, is the absolute dominion that servant cooks wielded in the public imagination over the theory and practice of cooking. As we shall see in the following chapters, every cookbook published in France was written by a servant cook, and the debate that surrounded food, culture, and the body was inextricably and exclusively bound to domestic service. The disorder associated with cooks extended beyond their mere exclusion from guild labor. Domestic service was actually viewed by contemporaries as somehow entirely outside the world of work. First, servants were defined, not by the work they did, but by their utter dependency on their masters.8 This inferior status followed automatically from contemporary understanding of labor, where “skill was considered to be in the worker, not in the job.”9 Second, emerging economic theory branded domestic servants as a “sterile” class that contributed nothing to the productive output of French society.10 According to Carolyn Steedman , “the servant did work that was not work,” in the eyes of contemporaries.11 Finally, cooks played havoc with contemporary gendered divisions of labor. In contrast to the almost exclusively male guild system, cooks included large numbers of both men and women among their ranks.12 Thus unlike nearly all other urban trades and even positions of domestic service, no clear lines delineated cooking as an overwhelmingly masculine or feminine pursuit. Cooks thus did not merely operate outside of the contemporary model of occupational labor; they inverted (and in some eyes, perverted) that model. In stark contrast to the social contempt that dogged cooks and other servants, we encounter Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s encouraging advice that an “excellent cook” was “worth seeking.” When he wrote, Mercier captured the exuberant mood of...