A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine (review)

In writing the history of food, more specifically of French haute cuisine, scholars have often turned to the study of early culinary texts. The sudden surge in published cookbooks from 1650 through the 1800s has provided researchers with richly detailed sources of the historic shift from heavily spiced, medieval cookery to what we now know as modern, nouvelle cuisine with buttery sauces and simpler preparations. Until recently, food historians focused their attention primarily on the recipes themselves (and to what little we know of the cook-authors). Culinary history, in the tradition of hagiography, had become a fetishistic study of less religious than delicious objects; authors pursued food from manor farms to banquet tables like a moveable feast. Readers may always have an appetite for these works, but what do they teach us about the people of the past who invented new tastes and the social and economic conditions that fostered new dietary habits?

Pinkard's contribution to our understanding of this historical turn brings a synthetic approach. She depicts the rise and fall of markets and food surpluses in France, as well as the scientific knowledge and cultural beliefs that contributed to what might have been the most significant transformation in French cooking (and the greatest contribution to gastronomy in the West before the advent of modern food preservation and fast food). Rather than seeing the popularity of medicine and dietetics as the primary cause for the decline of spicy cuisine and the rise of delicate cooking, Pinkard affirms the widely held Braudelian interpretation, namely, that nouvelle cuisine first appeared in the 1740s and later gained a strong following throughout the eighteenth century with the greater availability and variety of vegetables and the lesser demand for spices.¹ Her analysis of this shift offers little original research, but it does provide greater nuance than the rise and fall thesis. As she argues, one culinary tradition did not simply supplant another but more often co-existed in the French diet throughout the eighteenth and even into the nineteenth centuries.

Pinkard describes the inherent contradictions of nouvelle cuisine, deemed simple and natural, which, with its numerous steps and ingredients, was hardly simple to prepare. She briefly addresses the far-reaching debates about nutrition and dietary health among doctors and physiologists, focusing her attention on the published food therapies that prescribed much of eighteenth-century dietetics. To chart the change in food habits, she focuses on evidence from court memoirs, banquet menus and the publication record of leading cookbooks.

Pinkard performs careful analytical work with culinary texts familiar to many food historians, offering critical readings and counter-evidence (particularly about the nature of kitchen work) to demonstrate how social practices and cultural beliefs influenced changes in taste. Her book may finally put to rest many culinary myths that have persisted in the popular mind. One example is the unfounded belief that modern French cooking arrived in Paris in the early sixteenth century with Catherine de Medici and her cooks from Italy. Without ignoring the key contributions of published food writers of the period that helped to shape this "revolution," Pinkard's work goes further to situate their lives and their ideas about the natural taste of foods within the larger conversations held forth by Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers.² The refinement of taste went hand in hand with the refinement of manners and consumer habits.