Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present

Jean-Robert Pitte

The origin of the restaurant can be traced all the way back to the dawn of recorded history. The business of selling prepared food began when peasants and artisans were forced to leave home for days at a time in order to sell their goods at markets and fairs. While they were away, they had to eat while meeting with friends and business associates. As cities grew, the number and diversity of restaurants increased, and the restaurant remains primarily an urban phenomenon. Nevertheless, there were, even in the Roman Empire and ancient China, inns and way stations along major roads, often far from the nearest town. These were places where travelers could change horses, rest, and restore their strength by eating and drinking while keeping company with the staff and other guests.

Street Kitchens

Throughout the world, the principal type of eating establishment has always been the street kitchen, where a person can buy a precooked dish for a modest sum. They have always existed in China and still exist throughout Asia, even in industrial and postindustrial countries such as Japan. Tokyo’s yatai, or restaurants on wheels, are the best place to buy lamen and oudon soups and oden boiled in a soyor sake-based broth. These establishments fulfill an important social function: office workers, students, and businessmen can often be found exchanging pleasantries with the cook and eating together on benches protected from the street by curtains.

Street restaurants are still common in Latin America and the Middle East and Africa (the shish kebab stalls of North Africa and the maquis of Abijan, for example). And they are one of the charms of Papeete, where restaurant trucks park along the oceanfront in the evening and serve a variety of local and foreign dishes. By contrast, street kitchens have all but vanished in Europe; only a few street vendors remain, but without tables where customers can sit down to eat.

The Birth of the Modern Restaurant

If most restaurants in France are permanent rather than itinerant operations, it is probably because France was the birthplace of what we now call the restaurant, which gradually replaced an older variety of eating establishments. This happened toward the end of the eighteenth century. With the exception of inns, which were primarily for travelers, and street kitchens, described above, where in Europe at that time could one purchase a meal outside the home? Essentially in places where alcoholic beverages were sold, places equipped to serve simple, inexpensive dishes either cooked on the premises or ordered from a nearby inn or food shop, along with wine, beer, and spirits, which constituted the bulk of their business. Such tavern-restaurants existed not only in France but also in other countries. In Germany, Austria, and Alsace, Brauereien and Weinstuben served delicatessen, sauerkraut, and cheese, for example; in Spain bodegas served tapas. Greek taverns served various foods with olive oil (such as tarama, stuffed grape leaves, and green beans). English pubs served shepherd’s pie. And French tavernes and guinguettes, located outside city walls where meals were exempt from taxes, served a variety of fortifying dishes such as stews, meat with sauce, and organ meats. Certain other establishments, such as the cabarets of Paris, served only wine, however; the “blue” wines of Suresnes, Argenteuil, and Chanteloup were poured in vast quantities.

All of these places, which catered to noisy, lighthearted, occasionally disputatious crowds, were apt to serve plain and simple fare rather than more elaborate culinary creations. If a person wished to drink with friends in a more sophisticated environment, it was necessary to go to a cafe, a type of establishment that dated back to the previous century. It was in 1674 that the Neapolitan Francesco Capelli, known as “Procope,” opened the first cafe in Paris on the rue de Tournon. In 1684 Procope moved to the rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie, where a restaurant still does business under that name today. Soon, in places from Venice to Vienna, from St. Petersburg to London, cafes became bastions of the Enlightenment. Clients drank not only coffee but also tea and chocolate, and along with these exotic beverages they ate cake and sorbets.

For a genuine meal one had to look either to a good inn or to a rôtisseur or traiteur (caterer, from the Italian trattorie). In France, these two guilds, together with the charcutiers, had been granted a monopoly on all cooked meat other than pâtés (chopped meat wrapped in a pastry dough, the ancestor of today’s etymologically redundant pâté en croûte). Only common people actually ate in the traiteur’s shop, perhaps seated at a table reserved for guests in some establishments. Even a moderately well-to-do person would have preferred to order food delivered to a private home or a room at an inn or hotel or an elegant salon rented for the occasion. Wine was supplied by the tavern or inn. (This system is still common in Japan, where hot and cold dishes can be ordered by telephone at any hour of the day or night. Small neighborhood caterers depend more on these telephone orders than on their actual restaurant clientele. In any case, the premises are often tiny, with room for no more than four or five diners.)

One city in eighteenth-century Europe stands out as exceptional, however. London had a respectable number of taverns unlike those found elsewhere in Europe. These high-class, not to say luxury, establishments served dinner together with a glass of claret, sherry, or port. Their customers were gentlemen of the upper middle class and aristocracy, especially members of Parliament. Indeed, many members of the House of Lords lived primarily on their estates and kept only modest pieds-à-terre in town. With few servants they could scarcely hold sumptuous receptions in these small apartments. When the Marquis of Caraccioli visited London in 1777, he was aghast at the ways of the English aristocracy: “Country houses aside, their lodgings are poor, and nowhere can they find better food than at a tavern, to which they commonly invite foreign friends…. Is this what it means to live like a lord?”

In the 1670s one of the most celebrated London taverns was run by a Frenchman, Jean de Pontac, the son of a président of the Bordeaux parlement. He took advantage of the opportunity to dispense some of the wine produced on his father’s estate, the Château Haut-Brion, producer of one of the world’s best “clarets.”

Since the reign of Louis XIV, the cream of the French aristocracy had resided in Paris or nearby Versailles. They lived in high style in private houses (hôtels) in the Marais, the suburb Saint-Germain, and Versailles itself. The wealthiest rarely called on the services of caterers doing business with the general public. They preferred to employ their own maîtres d’hôtel and cuisiniers, paying astronomical sums for talented chefs and seeking to emulate the culinary extravagance of the court. This was the proving ground for the elaborate recipes that form the basis of French haute cuisine, which already enjoyed a considerable reputation abroad. The culinary landscape of Paris was thus already in evidence: a grand luxury cuisine beyond the reach of ordinary mortals together with a large number of food and wine shops serving more common fare, together with a few places where more sophisticated creations could be purchased (such as pâté de jambon at Leblanc’s shop on the rue de la Harpe, which in a typical year served up some 1,800 Bayonne hams). In addition to these eating establishments, there were also cafes, where one fed the spirit but not the stomach. Meanwhile, the cultivated elite kept its eyes on England. Such was the situation at the time of the Boulanger affair.

The Boulanger Affair

In 1765 a man by the name of Boulanger, also known as “Champ d’Oiseaux” or “Chantoiseau,” opened a shop near the Louvre (on either the rue des Poulies or the rue Bailleul, depending on which authority one chooses to believe). There he sold what he called restaurants or bouillons restaurants—that is, meat-based consommés intended to “restore” a person’s strength. Ever since the late Middle Ages the word restaurant had been used to describe any of a variety of rich bouillons made with chicken, beef, roots of one sort or another, onions, herbs, and, according to some recipes, spices, crystallized sugar, toasted bread, barley, butter, and even exotic ingredients such as dried rose petals, Damascus grapes, and amber. In order to entice customers into his shop, Boulanger had inscribed on his window a line from the Gospels: “Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego vos restaurabo”. He was not content simply to serve bouillon, however. He also served leg of lamb in white sauce, thereby infringing the monopoly of the caterers’ guild. The guild filed suit, which to everyone’s astonishment ended in a judgment in favor of Boulanger. It was an ominous sign for the future of the guilds, which were soon swept away in the turbulence of the French Revolution, but an encouraging one for a new profession that greatly needed it.