Felipe Fernández-Armesto on the origins of the restaurant, haute cuisine and Champagne, and the sorry case of the tardy lobster.
1400ad
The first French cookbooks imitated Moorish cuisine. Sugar,
still a luxury, made food sweet. Saffron gilded it, rose water perfumed it, and
milk of almonds made it rich. Today's taste for tajines and couscous is an echo
of the middle ages.
1500
The Renaissance: artists of the skillet discarded the
Moorish palette. The new chefs were Italian, inspired by the sharp, salty,
viscous preferences of ancient Rome. The physician at the court of Henri II
(born 1519-died 1559) was alarmed at the rediscovery of fungi as food: these
"phlegmy excretions", he warned, were ancient murder weapons, which massacred
banqueters in antiquity. Fine wine, another Roman obsession, played a
complementary part, stimulating appetites and aiding digestion. Château Latour
was recommended as a digestif by the essayist Montaigne (1533-1592), a gourmand
who ate so ravenously that he bit his fingers in his frenzy for his food.
1600
Royal patronage promoted French cooking. Henri IV
(1553-1610), who aimed to put "a chicken in the pot" of each peasant, funded
banquets as lubricants of policy. The table of Louis XIII (1601-1643) featured
22 kinds of fish and 28 of fruit. The "complaisant digestion" of his successor,
Louis XIV (1638-1715), introduced enlightened gluttony to the court. Louis's
sister-in-law saw him eat "four soups, a pheasant, a partridge, a plate of
salad, sliced mutton with garlic, two lumps of ham, a plate of pastries, fruits
and preserves" at one sitting. He incapacitated himself with food on his
wedding night. A butler killed himself when his lobsters arrived late. The
secrets of Louis's kitchen were divulged in cookbooks: by 1691, when François
Massialot (1760-1733) published a book whose title, Cuisinier Royal et
Bourgeois, summed up the process of social diffusion, the embourgeoisment of
haute cuisine had begun. Meanwhile, Dom Pérignon (1639-1715) invented the art
of making Champagne, storing his wine in bottles strong enough to contain the
pétillance (effervescence) of secondary fermentation. Coffee, introduced in
1644, revived a taste for the exotic, while, in 1686, the development of the
croissant celebrated a Christian victory in Austria over the crescent banners
of the Turks.
1700
The appeal of French food grew with the prestige of French
culture: only England resisted, patriotically loyal to roast beef and sceptical
of superfluous sauces. The English even flirted with Portuguese wines in their
trade wars against the French. Imperialism inaugurated the age of sugar,
chocolate, global grocery. While abundance inspired extremes of gastro-nomic
inventiveness for the elite, cooking became philosophy in 1765, when the
restaurant movement began in a 'house of health' run by one M Boulanger, whose
shop sign pledged: "Hasten unto me, all whose stomachs labour, and I will
restore you." A new journalistic breed - food critics and restaurant reviewers
- made Paris the shrine of foodie pilgrims. Later, the Revolution dispersed to
the world the chefs of decapitated aristos: the French style, after spreading
slowly for centuries, suddenly became universal.
1800
The 19th century consolidated French supremacy. Antonin
Carême (1784- 1833), founder of grande cuisine, organised spectacular,
Roman-style meals. In 1825, Jean-Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin wrote what is still
the world's best food book, La Physiologie du Go�t. Brillat-Savarin exalted cooking as
art and science, inviting ladies of his acquaintance to experiment with
aphrodisiacs, and advocating kitchens as the laboratories of the laws of
nutrition. He justified gourmandism on the grounds that it showed "implicit
obedience to the commands of the Creator, who, when he ordered us to eat in
order to live, gave us the inducement of appetite, the encour-agement of
savour, and the reward of pleasure". Industrialisation intervened, but the
French exploited the new techno-logies to serve the table. In 1804, Nicolas
Appert (1750-1841) began experiments in bottling: at first, the needs of the
army were paramount but when, in 1810, he made his process public, he appealed
to gourmets and housewives. Sardines were the commercial
breakthrough: first canned in the 1820s, by 1880 they emerged from French
canneries at the rate of 50 million tins a year. Hippolyte Mège-Mouriés
(1817-1880) responded to the crisis in butter supplies in 1869, mixing beef fat
with skimmed milk and stirring in a bit of cow's udder. He called his product 'margarine'
because its anaemic tone resembled pearls known as 'margaritas'. Science even
saved the wine industry, after phylloxera struck the vine-yards. American
grafts restored French stocks, the first sign that France's near-monopoly was
vulnerable to competition.
1900
Yet French food relied for its reputation on the
inventiveness not of its industrialists, but of its chefs and gastronomes.
Auguste Escoffier (1846- 1935), "the chef of emperors and Emperor of chefs",
founded the grand h�tel style, which left amateur cooks, and traditional and foreign cuisines on the
wrong side of a chasm. His books were the most influential culinary texts since
the writings of ancient Rome's top chef, Apicius. He created dishes for the
celebrities of the new century: cuisses de nymphe Aurore (a dish of frogs'
legs) for the Prince of Wales, and peach Melba, in honour of the owner of the
smoothest stage voice of the day, whose memory survives only on menus. His
showy, ingenious, liquor-lashed, cream-besotted dishes dominated haute cuisine
until the Seventies, when light-handed, digestion-friendly nouvelle cuisine
became the last French fashion to reshape the way we eat.
2000
Doom-mongers are trumpeting the decline of French
pre-eminence. Inter-national cuisine and fashionable fusion are the gastronomic
counterparts of cultural pluralism, while French wines are rivalled by the best
of the rest. One country can no longer dominate the tables of the world, or
even the west, but centuries of passion are not easily effaced. The French have
accommodated every crisis of the past, without ever compromising on quality. At
the world's table today, their hegemony may be unsustainable, but their
excellence is unshaken.