Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present

Philip Hyman and Mary Hyman

From 1480 to 1800 cookbooks were an important segment of French publishing. We have counted some fifty distinct texts on culinary subjects from that period.¹ It was not uncommon, however, for a successful title to be reprinted twenty or more times. Accordingly, these fifty texts appeared in 472 different editions. Some continued to sell for fifty years or more.

Printed Texts of the Renaissance

The case of the first cookbook printed in France is highly instructive, even exemplary. Known as Le Viandier, it was the successor to the best known culinary compilation of the Middle Ages. However, when the book was first printed, at the end of the fifteenth century, only 80 of the 230 preparations described came from medieval manuscripts; all the rest were new. Although the editor proudly proclaimed his devotion to the manuscript tradition, he did not hesitate to update this classic text. Other editors would adopt the same policy later on, publishing a new text under an old title. But one also finds old texts published under new titles. In any case, Le Viandier proved to be a smashing success: between 1486 and 1615 it was reprinted twenty-three times by thirteen different publishers in Paris, Lyons, and Toulouse.

For twenty years, Le Viandier reigned supreme. A first blow to its dominance was struck in 1505, when an Italian work, De honesta voluptate et valetudine by Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as “il Platina” or “Platine,” was translated into French under the title Platine en francoys.2 This text, which taught “the art of living,” included a recipe section in its first Latin edition that accounted for just under half of the text.

Around 1540 a new series of recipe collections emerged as a direct competitor to Le Viandier on its own turf. Unlike that work, and even more unlike the Platina, these books were rarely attributed to a specific author but were presented rather as the work of “a number of highly expert cooks.”³ The most comprehensive and widely circulated work of this new generation was entitled Le Grand Cuisinier de toute cuisine. Like Le Viandier before it, this was a compilation of current recipes together with older ones. A careful examination of the recipes in Le Grand Cuisinier reveals that two-thirds were totally unknown in the Middle Ages and that the kind of cooking the work teaches differs markedly from medieval cooking.

Le Grand Cuisinier was also innovative in the way it was organized. The structure of the book followed that of a dinner with three meat courses (en gras), with a chapter devoted to each course. The first chapter explained how to make gruel, cabbage, stew, haricot (a kind of stew), soup, and sweetbreads. The second chapter dealt with preparing capon, partridge, hare, swan, cormorant, mutton, veal, and several other dishes that were either boiled or roasted or wrapped in dough. The third chapter contained instructions for preparing jellies, almonds, creams, hulled barley, sauces, and several other foods. To these chapters was added a fourth covering dealing with such nonmeat items as eggs, fish (eel, pike, carp, sturgeon, and several other kinds of fish, both freshwater and saltwater), vegetables, and several other meats. The book ends with a section of “instructions on making a banquet” and a series of menus. Although the structure of a meal has changed somewhat over the years, most present-day French cookbooks are still organized in the same way, much more rigorous than the organization of Le Viandier. It is worth noting, moreover, that the chapter on fish is arranged in alphabetical order by the name of the fish (anguille, brochet, carpe, esturgeon).

Between Le Viandier and Le Grand Cuisinier on the one hand and the Platina on the other, the sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of a voluminous specialty literature of an intermediate kind, known as livres de confitures, literally “books of preserves.” These works, which contained recipes for preserves made with honey or sugar, preserves pickled in vinegar, spiced wines, bars of soap, perfumes, and plague remedies, were the ancestors of the so-called livres d’office of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

From the middle of the sixteenth century on, food lovers thus had a variety of works at their disposal: the “classic” Viandier and the more “modern” Grand Cuisinier for the kitchen, specialty books offering instruction in the art of making preserves and other “healthy” recipes, and, finally, a compendium of dietetic and culinary knowledge in Platina’s De honesta voluptate.

The Legacy of Le Cuisinier françois

Between the first edition of Le Grand Cuisinier de toute cuisine and the middle of the seventeenth century, a single new text with useful information about cooking appeared, Le Thresor de santé, written by “one of the most celebrated and famous doctors of this century.” In organization and approach, Le Thresor de santé may be compared with the Platina: the author, not content simply to describe the most commonly used ingredients, also tells us how they are prepared and in so doing provides a substantial number of recipes.4 In addition, it provides interesting information about the eating habits of people in the different provinces of France.

With the exception of this text, French publishers for a century confined themselves to reissuing recipes created in the late Middle Ages and the first half of the sixteenth century. Le Thresor de santé is the only evidence we have of the changes affecting French cooking in the second half of the sixteenth century, changes that presaged even more drastic modifications that would not be revealed until the publication of La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier françois in 1651.

The book is divided into two almost equal parts: the first is devoted entirely to meat, the second to nonmeat dishes with a special chapter on Lent. In each part the recipes follow the same order: soups, appetizers, second course, entremets, and pastry. There are also special chapters on basic preparations such as liaisons à conserver (preserving sauces), jus (gravies), and so on. Appropriately enough, the work begins with a recipe for a stock that can be used as “nourishment for all preparations, whether it be soup, appetizer, or entremets.”

As for the recipes themselves, the medieval heritage of gruel flavored with exotic spices was replaced by stews seasoned with native spices and garden herbs. Compared with sixteenth-century cookbooks, Le Cuisinier françois stands out for the unity of its style and the tone adopted by its author. Frequent references from one recipe to another, often between recipes separated by many pages, indicate that the text was conceived as a whole. Another rather remarkable fact is that in nine different places the author refers to himself in the first person, something never seen in any previous work. With all these innovations, Le Cuisinier françois, according to one contemporary, “derived honor from having bestowed rules and method” on an art that previously had neither.

Although Le Cuisinier françois included a treatise on preserves, this did not prevent the publication of specialized works on the subject. In 1653 Jean Gaillard published Le Pastissier françois, a work which, according to its preface, “seems to be the first of its kind, since no author until now has given the slightest instruction in this art…which was kept so very secret by the most celebrated pastry chefs of the court and of Paris that there are many very large cities and even entire countries in Europe where no one knows anything about it or is capable of practicing it.”

The fact that pastry in this period included savories as well as sweets is confirmed by Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel of 1690, which defines “pastry” as a “preparation of dough with one or more delicate seasonings of meat, butter, sugar, or fruit, such as pâtés, torts, tarts, biscuits, brioches, etc.” Pastry recipes had been included in cookbooks since the Middle Ages. Yet never before had all aspects of the art been presented in such a comprehensive way, and this is what made Le Pastissier françois as revolutionary as Le Cuisinier françois some two years earlier. Its importance was such that at the end of the century Furetière would give as his example of the word patissier the following sentence: “Le Pastissier françois is a book from which one learns the art of the pastissier.”

If Le Pastissier françois was the only work on pastry-making published in France between the middle of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century, this should not be taken to imply that the art of pastry-making itself was neglected. Many books dealt with all aspects of the culinary arts within the pages of a single volume.

Unlike books on pastry-making, books on confitures, or preserves (livres d’office), did not suffer from the publication of these encyclopedias of cooking. They seized the opportunity to become more comprehensive. The number of sugared preserves increased constantly. Distilled waters and cold and iced drinks were introduced, alongside flavored waters, soaps, pomades, and other hygienic products that had been included in the previous century’s Petit Traicte de confitures.

As dessert courses evolved toward ever more spectacular presentations, the illustrations in these compendia of preserves tended to become much more lavish than those in regular cookbooks. For example, the first recipe book to include an illustration of a fully set table (as opposed to a mere plan) was La Nouvelle Instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits (1692). This was a large, foldout plate depicting a table set with pyramids of fresh and preserved fruits, biscuits, jams, and other dessert foods.

Toward a New Cuisine

The last innovative cookbook of the seventeenth century was Massialot’s Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois, first published in 1691. This was the first culinary work to be presented in the form of a dictionary and to depict table layouts in situ—that is, in the form of drawings of a table situated in a room, covered with a tablecloth, and set with dishes and serving trays. Complemented in the following year by the publication of La Nouvelle Instruction pour faire les confitures, this was also the first multivolume cookbook. As it progressed through various editions and revisions, it was the only culinary treatise to follow the changes in cooking that took place in the early part of the eighteenth century. A slowdown is noticeable in the production of new titles and new publishing formulas. This period of stability, if not stagnation, lasted until 1734. During this time, Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois became Le Nouveau Cuisinier royal et bourgeois, and the cookbook section expanded from one to three volumes between 1712 and 1730.

The first writer to insist on a veritable rupture with the past and to characterize his cooking as modern was Vincent La Chapelle. While working in London, La Chapelle published his text first in three English volumes in 1733 and then in four French volumes in 1735. Entitled Le Cuisinier moderne, the work was the forerunner of a lavishly illustrated series of cookbooks that might equally well be considered art books. Three- and four-volume cookbooks subsequently became commonplace. In 1739 the first two volumes of Menon’s Nouveau Traité de cuisine appeared, and a third volume was added in 1742, the year that saw the publication of Marin’s three-volume Suite des Dons de Comus and the addition of a fifth volume to La Chapelle’s Cuisinier moderne. Finally, in 1755, Menon published his four-volume Soupers de la Cour.

It was also Menon who, in the crucial year 1742, introduced the expression nouvelle cuisine in the title of the third volume of his Nouveau Traité de cuisine, where he declared that “the chef who works in the new style is preferable to the one who persists in the old method.” Nevertheless, he went on to say that one must not “decry the old cuisine, since it must be the basis of the new.” Meanwhile, La Suite des Dons de Comus promised readers that they would see “the old cuisine reconciled with the new.”

Although the writers who published these books in the period 1743–1745 repeatedly stated that the new cuisine was “based on the old,” the gap between ancient and modern cooking continued to widen as nearly everyone embraced the new cause. This mid-eighteenth-century diversification of cooking affected the substance as well as the form of cookbooks. In 1738 Le Festin joyeux ou la Cuisine mise en musique, the first collection of recipes in verse, or rather song, was published. In another innovation, texts began to include not just table plans but illustrations in the text itself to aid in the creation of certain dishes, such as pigeon en tortuës and potage de citrouille in Massialot’s Nouveau Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois (1730) or the small drawings of lièvre au gîte and lapereaux en vis-à-vis in Le Cuisinier instruit (1758).

The transformation in the realm of desserts was no less significant, especially when it came to the development of ice creams and sherbets, to which Emy devoted an entire work entitled L’Art de bien faire les glaces d’office (1768). Meanwhile, the dessert table attained new heights of magnificence, and books on desserts often contained numerous high-quality illustrative plates. The five plates in Menon’s Maître d’hôtel confiseur (1750) depicted palaces, statues, terraces, and other decorative sculptures in sugar and frosting. But this was nothing next to the thirteen large plates in Gilliers’s Cannaméliste françois (1751), the most comprehensive treatise on desserts to that date. This work described how to construct enormous pastry tableaux on curved tables that allowed guests to “wander” among the sculptures and other decorations around which the bowls of dessert were arrayed.

Alongside this obvious taste for lavishness and luxury another tendency emerged. This new trend, which would change the culinary landscape of France forever, found its fullest expression in a modest volume published in 1746 and entitled La Cuisinière bourgeoise. This was also the work of Menon, and it was destined to become the unrivaled bestseller among cookbooks printed in France in the eighteenth century. In terms of longevity and number of editions published, La Cuisinière stands out above all other French cookbooks.

On the eve of the French Revolution we find a great stability prevailing in the small world of cookbooks and dessert books; yet at the same time we see signs of the changes that were to come. The success of La Cuisinière bourgeoise continued unabated, and while a few other quality cookbooks continued to be reprinted, no new cookbook appeared in France between 1758 and 1788, other than compilations such as Dictionnaire portatif de cuisine, published in 1767. Nevertheless, the culinary eighteenth century ended on a rebellious note with Jourdain Le Cointe’s Cuisine de santé (1789), which criticized “all those sticky roux, coulis, and sauces which are like glues poisoned with fragrant spices.” The revolutionary period proved to be a decisive turning point for culinary literature. After 1800, no pre-1789 text would be reissued by French publishers except for La Cuisinière bourgeoise.

Although the “culinary reality” captured by cookbooks turns out to have been quite selective and each work reflects different preoccupations, we nevertheless learn a wealth of detail about cooking technique and preparations that we could never discover in any other way. Some cookbooks, such as Le Cuisinier françois and La Cuisinière bourgeoise, met the expectations of a broad audience, whereas others, such as La Chapelle’s Le Cuisinier moderne and the more lavish pastry books, tell us about the extravagance of “dream banquets.” Whatever their nature, however, cookbooks allow us to see how food was prepared according to the rules of the art. Thanks to their wide readership, these books helped to transform individual know-how into a collective possession, thereby revealing the evolution of an eminently evanescent art that might at first glance seem almost impossible to convey by means of the printed word.

NOTES

1. Included as cookbooks in our survey were any works in which at least half the text consisted of recipes or which had titles indicating a culinary intention or which are generally recognized as cookbooks (see the list of first editions in the Bibliography). Thus we have included, along with cookbooks proper (i.e., works consisting primarily of recipes), works such as De honesta voluptate et valetudine by Bartolomeo Sacchi (known as Il Platina), even though only about a quarter of the text is devoted to recipes, because the author was recognized as an authority on culinary matters by his contemporaries. This was made quite clear in 1584 when Jean Ruelle’s widow published the book in Paris under the title Grand Cuisinier de B. Platine.

2. From 1539 on, the book and author were more commonly referred to as Baptiste Platine de Cremonne, De l’honneste volupté.

3. The works in this series are rarely dated. Nevertheless, with the invaluable assistance of the late Brigitte Moreau, former conservator of the depository of the Bibliothèque Nationale, we have been able to establish the following chronology: in about 1536 a Petit Traicte auquel verrez la maniere de faire cuisine was printed for Pierre Sergent, who, in about 1538, added to this brief pamphlet of 133 recipes 200 additional recipes and brought it out under the new title Livre de cuysine très utille et proufitable. None of these new recipes can be found in the medieval treatises, but two or three years later more than 150 medieval recipes were added to the text (some in place of more recent recipes) to create La Fleur de toute cuysine, which sometime around 1542 was renamed Le Grand Cuisinier de toute cuisine.

4. Because the recipes make up less than half the text, however, and because, in contrast to the case of the Platina, we have found no evidence that contemporaries took Le Thresor to be anything other than a book on dietetics, we have not included it in our list of cookbooks.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following is a selected list of first editions of cookbooks for the period 1480–1800. Brackets indicate attributions.

1486 Taillevent [?]. Cj Apres Sen Suyt le Viandier. Paris [?]. Caillot [?].

1505 Platine (pseud. Bartolomeo Sacchi). Platyne en françoys. Lyon: François Fradin.

1538 Petit Traicte auquel verrez la maniere de faire cuisine. Paris: Pierre Sergent [?].

1542 (La) Fleur de toute cuysine (renamed Le Grand Cuisinier de toute cuisine). Paris: Pierre Sergent.

1545 Petit Traicte contenant la maniere pour faire […] confitures […]. Paris: Jehan Longis.

1555 Nostradamus. Excellent et Moult Utile Opuscule. Lyons: Antoine Volant.

1651 La Varenne. Le Cuisinier françois. Paris: Pierre David.

1653 Le Patsissier françois. Paris: Jean Gaillard.

1654 [Bonnefons, Nicolas de.] Les Délices de la campagne. Paris: Pierre Des Hayes.

1656 Lune, Pierre de. La Cuisinier. Paris: Pierre David.