Cuisine Fjordman Report

THE FJORDMAN REPORT: FRENCH HAUTE CUISINE…….

Fjordman files this report with the Tundra Tabloids on:

French Haute Cuisine and the Birth of the Western Restaurant

Forks existed in Greco-Roman Antiquity, but then as pitchforks and as a serving utensil. From the tenth through the thirteenth centuries AD they were fairly common among the wealthy in Byzantium. In the eleventh century, a Byzantine wife of a Doge of Venice brought forks to Italy. While spoons and knives were well-known in the ancient world, the triumph of the knife and fork as the mainstays of European tableware was slow in coming. It was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the fork became a standard item at elite tables.
Forks used solely for dining were luxuries and markers of social status among the nobles. At the court of Versailles, Louis XIV of France allegedly did not approve of forks, yet his grandson adopted the custom. Even in the late 1600s, commentators noted that the English do not use “forks but fingers.” They initially ridiculed forks as being effeminate and unnecessary, but eventually, eating with forks was considered fashionable among wealthy British citizens.
Like many other ideas and habits, the custom of eating with knife and fork was spread from Western Europe to other parts of the world during the colonial period. The most important holdout has been East Asia, where chopsticks as eating utensils originated in China in ancient times. They are currently used in neighboring regions such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam as well, often made of bamboo or plastic, but also of metal, ivory and different types of wood.
The Italian Renaissance writer Bartolomeo Platina, or Sacchi (1421-1481) in 1465 composed De honesta voluptate et valetudine (“On honourable pleasure and health”), which became the first printed European cookbook. After him, surprisingly few similar titles were written. The great French chef François Pierre de la Varenne (1618-1678) published Le cuisinier françois in 1651. Most food writing took the guise of medical and dietetic advice in the humoral tradition, with less practical advice on how to prepare food to make it as delicious as possible. “La Varenne’s book was not really about how to improve one’s health by adjusting one’s diet. It was a cookery book and it was perhaps the first European cookery book almost entirely dedicated to the task of instructing its readers how to cook food.” It introduced a whole new culinary vocabulary to its readers. He published his work in the vernacular at a time when Latin was losing out to French as the lingua franca of Europe’s elites.
After La Varenne, the development of a highly influential French haute cuisine (“high cooking”) continued with the chefs Marie-Antoine Carême (1784-1833) and Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935). Escoffier contributed to Prosper Montagné’s (1865-1948) publishing of the first edition of Larousse Gastronomique, an encyclopedia of French gastronomy, in 1938. Carême was a great theorist and classifier who specialized in pâtisserie (pastries and sweets), “which he considered to be a branch of architecture, and saw himself as a culinary artist, an inventor, a creator.” Chef to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838) or Talleyrand, the influential French diplomat and political survivor, Carême subsequently worked briefly for Tsar Alexander I of Russia (1777-1825), then George IV (1762-1830), King of Hanover and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and finally James Mayer de Rothschild (1792-1868) of the prominent Jewish banking family.
Some early English cookbooks were The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy (1747) by Hannah Glasse (1708-1770) and The Compleat Housewife from 1742 by Eliza Smith. The Joy of Cooking, first published in the United States in the 1930s by Irma S. Rombauer (1877-1962), has been printed in millions of copies. Pellegrino Artusi (1820-1911) published the major Italian cookbook La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiare bene (“The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well”) in 1891, following the political unification of Italy.

Elliott Shore tells the story of the Western restaurant in Dining Out – The Development of the Restaurant, a chapter in the fine book Food: The History of Taste, edited by Paul Freedman:
“People in the Western world have eaten away from home for centuries, but the restaurant as opposed to the inn, foodstand or other modest convenience or necessity, has existed for merely 250 years. The restaurant began, and remained for about its first century of existence, as an exclusive place for the wealthy, which served – in London, Paris, New York, Berlin – an international more-or-less French cuisine with little variation. Even as the restaurant started to become more accessible to a varied clientele, the uniformity of the offerings remained fairly constant for another century. It is only in the last fifty of those 250 years that we can start to speak of the move towards the phantasmagoric array of food, of atmosphere and of styles of service that have made the restaurant such a successful and ubiquitous feature of the culture of taste. Naturally, long before the modern restaurant was born in the mid-eighteenth century, there were many occasions to dine, or at least to eat, while travelling or during the urban workday. Travellers had to eat some place, after all, and in medieval and early modern Europe pilgrims, students, emissaries and soldiers thronged the roads and had some expectation of being fed.”
Nevertheless, the first restaurants were found in China. In the twelfth century AD when Hangzhou was the Chinese capital city it had hundreds of tea-houses, theaters and hotels and numerous restaurants. In the West, although taverns serving meals had existed since ancient times, the first luxury restaurants developed in the late 1700s. Late medieval China had a sophisticated system of communications, with waterways and roads facilitating trade in products from all provinces of the Empire and beyond. You could get cheap-but-good noodles, or sit in a luxurious tea house in a garden landscape filled with colored lanterns and paintings and drink tea from fine porcelain. If it were a hot summer day, you could get refreshing iced drinks or even iced foods. Restaurants in Song and Yuan Dynasty China had waiters and menus along with some aspects of a sexual marketplace and social meeting place.
The restaurant is a specialized place to eat, not a traveler’s refuge that also serves food, like an inn. The Western restaurant with a professional waiter and all the attributes we now associate with it emerged during the 1760s in Paris. A coffeehouse or a café was not a restaurant in the modern sense because it did not have an extensive selection of cooked foods made for the diner and ordered from a menu. The Caffè Florian at St Mark’s Square in the middle of Venice, Italy has been in continuous operation since 1720 and has attracted famous guests from Goethe via Charles Dickens to Marcel Proust, but although it was a valuable place to socialize, its menu was limited to pastries and snacks to accompany the caffeinated beverages.
The Parisian gourmet-author Alexandre Grimod de La Reynière (1758-1837) in the early 1800s became the first modern reviewer of restaurants. “The French restaurant soon became a fixture not only of Paris but of international sophisticated culture, a major export product of France. In some ways, the French restaurant becomes truly French in its exportation to other countries, most notably to England. La Grande Taverne de Londres paid homage to French fascination with English public houses, and French food, prepared in London restaurants by chefs trained in Paris, complemented this act of trans-Channel fascination. Rules Restaurant, founded in 1798 and still thriving, seems to be London’s oldest. Started as an Oyster Bar, it claims to have served over the more than two centuries of its existence classic British dishes such as jellied eel and steak and kidney pie, but it developed in a milieu where French food was the standard. Fine French dining could be found in London hotels by the 1820s.”
This trend accelerated during the 1800s. “Restaurants multiplied in Paris in the first few decades of the nineteenth century as a bourgeois clientele took to the idea of sitting at individual tables and consuming a variety of dishes, chosen from a list complete with prices. Prior to the Revolution, there were less than a hundred restaurants in Paris, but by 1804 the number had increased five or sixfold. In 1825 there were nearly a thousand, and in 1834 over 2,000.”
Industrialization brought a new diet for the poor as well. Fish and chips were served for the first time in London around 1860. New technology played a major role in the introduction of this staple of British working-class cuisine, as North Sea steam trawlers brought huge hauls back home with fish packed on ice the moment it was caught.
According to food historian Elliott Shore, “Germany and Italy show a similar pattern to Britain and the United States: the restaurant was first imported from France through the introduction of grande cuisine by chefs trained in Paris and then the middle-class and lower-class versions of the restaurant followed in the latter half of the nineteenth century due to the rise in the urban population and the influence of technology. Germans took the word ‘restaurant’ into their language after 1850, and it was used to designate establishments that followed the example of the Café Royal or Delmonico’s. Previous German terms referred to inns or taverns and they were superseded, at least in legal terms, by the words Gastwirtschaft or Gaststätte, for those restaurants that would develop for the middle class. After 1840, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Munich would all boast well-known restaurants, many of them connected to the rise of the luxury hotel, a phenomenon that helped to make the classic restaurant an internationally familiar institution.”
The Jewish Kempinski family emerged in the 1860s and 70s with the establishment of a restaurant and wine store, expanding in the early 1900s to hotel ownership. It was in the world of hotels in the late 1800s, catering to an increasingly international set of wealthy travelers, that the original Western restaurant achieved its fullest form. The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel opened in New York in 1893, parallel to similar establishments in Hamburg, Naples and elsewhere in Europe. In 1896, Palace Hotel opened in scenic St. Moritz in southeastern Switzerland, which evolved into one of the world’s most famous winter sport resorts.
Hôtel Ritz was established in the heart of Paris in 1898 by the Swiss hotelier César Ritz (1850-1918). The Savoy Hotel in central London was opened in 1889 by the English theatrical impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844-1901). Ritz came to be its manager, and brought with him the French chef Auguste Escoffier. The French chef and restaurateur Paul Bocuse (born 1926) and others in the 1960s and 70s promoted a lighter style of cooking with their innovative nouvelle cuisine, which was less opulent than the traditional grande cuisine.

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