Among French works of art from the early 19th century, one, a lithograph dating from 1808, holds a special interest for anyone who takes a serious interest in what we eat and drink.
Called Les Cinq Sens (The Five Senses), it’s the work of Louis-Léopold Boilly. To illustrate all the senses in a single image, he crowds together five individuals, each signifying one of the avenues through which we perceive the world. As a girl sniffs perfume, a gentleman exercises his sense of touch by caressing her hand, while, above him, another presses his ear to a watch and, at the top of the picture, an antiquarian uses a magnifier to examine an objet d’art.
Absorbed in their private sensations, none of the four notices the fifth. Eyes wide in appreciation, he holds a plate in one hand while licking the fingers of the other. Clearly, something he’s just eaten has ravished his sense of taste.
By placing a contented eater at the center of his composition, Boilly leaves us in no doubt with which of the senses his sympathies lie. Much as one would expect an artist to place greater value on the eyes, he naturally, as a Frenchman, assigned a privileged role to the palate.
In 1825, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, France’s premier philosopher of cuisine, wrote in The Physiology of Taste: “The destiny of nations depends on how they feed themselves.” To the generation that followed the fall of Napoleon in 1815, sweeping statements of this kind were not uncommon as its members searched for a new belief to motivate the continuing progress of Europe toward modernity. That food would play a part in this quest, and an important one, was a novel concept for most countries. Not so, however, for France.
For centuries, French culture was segregated into three tiers état or estates: the peasants and middle class or bourgeoisie, who made up 80 percent of the population, the clergé or Catholic church and the noblesse or nobility. (In 1787, British politicians recognized a so-called “Fourth Estate,” the press).
Each estate signified its status by what it ate. The aristocracy consumed only what was noble; not of the earth. In their eyes, most vegetables, but particularly potatoes and turnips, were fit only for animals. They also ate no fruit that had touched the ground, since it was believed that such contact was poison. While an association with earth tainted the meat of cattle, sheep and pigs, animals that lived in the wild were considered edible. As with a warrior, the courage shown by a hunted and cornered animal also counted in its favor. The wild boar or sanglier, though a species of pig, could be hunted and eaten, since it earned nobility by living free and, when trapped, fighting savagely for survival.
The church, the ruling ritual of which replicated Christ’s last meal with his disciples, regarded food as a reminder of our animal natures, to be enjoyed in moderation. Rather than rejoicing in the numerous biblical references to food, from a few baskets of bread and salt fish feeding a multitude to water becoming wine at the marriage feast at Cana, the church required believers to curtail their appetites by fasting for the 40 days of Lent and forgoing meat on Fridays.
Food was of most importance to the third estate, the peasantry, since it regulated life and death. A single failed harvest could induce famine and starvation. “The table epitomises the peasant’s very existence,” writes one food historian. “It is the locus of all social relations, a metonym of the earth contracted to four legs, and, when it is replete with food, an icon of the fields in which the peasant labours.”
Given this history, it was inevitable that the French would excel in the appreciation of food and drink, the methods used to prepare them, the manner in which they are served, even the terms in which we discuss them. From bouquet, bouillon, banquet, canapé, crouton, consommé, carafe, chef, entrée, gourmet and gastronome to hors d’oeuvre, menu, pâté, purée, sauce, sauté and terrine, the vocabulary of cooking and eating is overwhelmingly French.
In 1927, the annual Salon d’Automne (Autumn Art Exhibition) officially recognized cooking as one of the fine arts, next to painting and sculpture. For a week, the best chefs in Paris took turns to prepare meals at the Salon’s restaurant. By 2010, this acceptance had been internationally endorsed. In that year, UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, designated the classic French dinner or repas for 20 or more diners as an element in humanity’s “intangible cultural heritage.” To share such a meal with family and friends did more than satisfy hunger; it was “a social practice designed to celebrate the most important moments in the lives of individuals and groups.”
Had anyone doubted this importance, the French language offered ample evidence. Food references pepper the slang known as la langue verte: the green tongue. The French equivalent of “the cat’s out of the bag” is “the carrots are cooked.” Someone stupid is a navet—a turnip—or a poire—a pear. Business is only discussed at the end of a meal, “between the pear and the cheese,” while to behave boorishly is to “spit in the soup.” It’s also traditional, if a trifle old-fashioned, to wish one’s fellow guests “bon appétit” (good appetite) as they begin a meal.
Wherever one looks in the social history of France, food is an unacknowledged subtext. Aside from those creators of the kitchen itself who, in preparing dishes for the table, do so with one eye on aesthetic appeal, the French also excel among those who paint and draw food, write about food, film and photograph food, even set it to music. Marcel Proust’s cycle of 13 novels, known as À la recherche de temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), hinges on the memory of a taste; that of a fragment of cake dissolved in some lime flower tea. Gérard Depardieu, one of many actors and performers to own vineyards and restaurants, also starred in a film as François Vatel, the chef who, in 1671, killed himself in the belief that the fish for a royal banquet had not arrived.
Gertrude Stein, encouraging Ernest Hemingway to refine his writing style, sent him to study the single-minded way in which Paul Cézanne painted apples. For the Surrealists of the 1920s and ’30s, food was a key that unlocked secret spaces in the mind. René Magritte’s The Son of Man shows a businessman in a bowler hat whose face is obscured by a shiny green apple. Luis Buñuel’s film Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) follows a group of middle-class ladies and gentleman as they drift around France, casually skirting violent death while they search for a place to eat lunch.
In the way that citizens who fail to turn out for the polls are described as “voting with their feet,” the French have, occasionally, voted with their stomachs. During the 1995 presidential election, a Parisian restaurant patronized by both candidates, Jacques Chirac and Édouard Balladur, invited its clients to vote for one or the other by ordering their man’s favorite dish. A preference for Chirac’s hearty country sausage over the prissy Balladur’s herrings in oil was reflected in the former’s landslide victory.
France not only pioneered the arts of the kitchen but it was the first nation to acknowledge that certain individuals possess a unique ability to understand food. In defining this skill, it added another word to the international lexicon. A connoisseur, from the verb connaître, is someone who knows his subject, and whose opinion is accordingly privileged. The world of food expertise further refines the definition by distinguishing between gourmets, those who have a heightened appreciation of food; gourmands or gluttons, who carry that appreciation to excess; and gastronomes, defined by UNESCO as “individuals who possess deep knowledge of the [culinary] tradition and preserve its memory [and] watch over the living practice of the rites, thus contributing to their oral and/or written transmission, in particular to younger generations.”
The Son of Man, René Magritte, 1964
Among gastronomes, the function of food and drink is not to satisfy hunger but to tantalize, its motivation a desire, often painful in its intensity, to channel an appreciation of the world through an intentionally restricted area of the senses. Gastronomes seldom eat more than a mouthful of any dish or take more than a sip of wine. Under their influence, the best restaurants introduced a menu de dégustation or tasting menu, made up of a dozen or more dishes, but tiny servings of each. By removing hunger from the equation, gastronomes elevated food to the peak of discrimination. If, as the English epicurean Walter Pater suggested, all art aspires to the condition of music, then it must follow that, in France, food tends to the condition of art.