Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France (review)

This is the last book drafted by the notable French culinary historian Jean-Louis Flandrin, who passed away in 2001 at the age of seventy. This book was based upon a seminar that was to crown a long and prolific career devoted to topics such as sexuality, the invention of birth-control, and the evolution of family; and since the 1970s the methodical vagaries of food distribution and production, the varieties of European cuisine, and the genealogy of table manners from the Middle Ages till modern times. Offered to us in an elegant translation, this book leaves both a bitter and a joyful impression. An unfinished project published posthumously, it can look like a deserted banquet table, a superb cloth strewn with outlandish dishes, some of which are left untouched, while the party has moved on to another room. Facing the spectacle, we might want to imitate an artist like Spoerri who would freeze it by gluing the remains together and then exhibit the result as a found object, or, like an anthropologist, we can try to understand the exact rationale of this or that particular presentation. Thus, it is amusing and almost touching that Flandrin should have left us an oblique self-portrait when, through the voice of Montaigne, he evokes the flamboyant food specialist that he was. This is how Montaigne describes Cardinal Carafa's maître d'hôtel in his Essays:

He discoursed about the science of eating with masterly gravity and bearing, as if discussing some major point of theology. He distinguished different sorts of appetite for me: when fasting, after the second course, after the third; the ways to just satisfy it, or to awaken and stimulate it; the guiding principles about sauces in general, then in terms of specific attributes and effects of ingredients; the differences between salads according to season, those that should be warmed, those that should be served cold, how to garnish and enhance them to make them even more pleasing to the eye. Next, he expounded on the sequence of a meal, with many interesting and important considerations.

(127–28)

Indeed, what Flandrin makes us see is that there is an immanent theology concealed in each meal, and in culinary matters questions of precedence among the order of archangels are not idle lore or arcane gloss, but burning issues of everyday life—at least for those who entertain—issues that are underpinned by a whole episteme.

In this tantalizing and unfinished book, Flandrin appears as a structuralist insofar as he brings a long history of culinary mores to bear on relatively recent transformations; he looks to me like another Foucault who, instead of having written Les Mots et les Choses, would give us a posthumous Les Mets et les Sauces. To be true, he doesn't provide new recipes for sauces but opens up the semantic spectrum of what "mets" (and its derived term, "entremets") stands for. A number of terms are left in French, wisely, as even for native speakers they can sound obscure or they have hugely changed their meaning over time: hors d'oeuvre, a term borrowed from architecture and referring to any extraneous food served before the meal begins, relevé, an intermediary dish replacing a course just after it has been taken away; entrée, the third course following the hors d'oeuvre and the relevé, coming immediately before the roast; and finally entremets, a mixture of sweet and savory dishes coming just after the roast course, often accompanied by entertainment. Thus, the most visible and radical reordering of the service often described by food-historians, was the replacement of the service à la française (in which huge quantities of platters were served in several courses, an overabundant choice but which implied that guests would make their own selection and combine a few dishes inventively) by the service à la russe (in which platters were passed...