La Dame de Beauté and the Mushroom Mystery
Mushroom hunting, or la chasse aux champignons, is a serious and often competitive endeavor in France. Many people go every fall like clockwork, carefully guarding the location of their best mushroom patches. (If you see someone out in the woods with a flashlight in the wee hours in September, they are probably not disposing of some criminal evidence, just trying to get their share of mushroom treasure.) There are several thousand varieties of wild mushrooms in France, but most are poisonous, like the calice de la mort (death cap) mushroom, a single one of which can kill you. Luckily, French pharmacists are trained to identify poisonous mushrooms, so if you pick up some souvenir fungi on your woodland picnic, you can pop into your local pharmacie afterward and find out whether they are safe to eat.
French people also love to eat the indisputably harmless varieties of cultivated mushrooms, such as champignons de Paris (commonly known as button mushrooms), the most popular mushroom variety in the world. They are called de Paris because after the formal cultivation of mushrooms began in France in the 1600s, Paris and the surrounding regions became a popular production site. This includes the eastern Loire Valley, which is lined with hundreds of miles of caves, the scars of extensive quarrying for the beautiful white stone used to build the Loire’s fabulous châteaus and cities. These ghostly caverns have been transformed into all sorts of subterranean attractions—you can stay in a four-star troglodyte hotel, dine in an underground restaurant, or even live in a cave dwelling year-round—but most delicious of all are the mushroom caves, from which tons of handpicked mushrooms emerge every year. In the small but very charming town of Le Puy-Notre-Dame near Saumur, for example, you can visit a family-run mushroom cave and learn about the history of Loire mushroom culture (and, of course, buy some mushrooms for the road). The even larger Musée du Champignon in nearby Saint-Hilaire-Saint-Florent offers several levels of underground mushroom exploration and frequent tasting events.
It cannot be said that mushrooms were always a popular element of French cuisine. They could kill you, after all, and until relatively recently they only grew in the wild, so they were an unpredictable harvest. Their earthiness placed them low on the medieval food hierarchy, and they were thought to produce unhealthy humors. But mushrooms grew increasingly popular beginning in the sixteenth century, and Louis XIV’s taste for them cemented their status in French cuisine a century later. The father of modern agronomy, Olivier de Serres, pioneered methods of cultivating mushrooms in the seventeenth century, which made them a more favorable crop. So by the time the great Auguste Escoffier published his Le Guide culinaire, one of the bibles of French gastronomy, in 1903, it was not surprising that he included a number of decadent mushroom dishes. Interestingly, a number of them include the name Agnès Sorel: there is the classic Velouté Agnès Sorel, a gorgeous cream soup of mushrooms and chicken, as well as Suprême de Volaille Agnès Sorel, a rich dish of chicken, mushrooms, and ox tongue in Madeira sauce. Escoffier enjoyed naming his dishes after famous women; his Peach Melba, for example, was named after the famous singer Dame Nellie Melba. But who was Agnès Sorel? What did she have to do with mushrooms? As it happens, the first question is not too difficult, and the answer helps reveal how the Hundred Years’ War finally came to an end. The second question, however, is a bit more complicated.
As France and England staggered into the final phase of the Hundred Years’ War, things looked rather gloomy for Charles, the disinherited dauphin holed up in Bourges in the Loire Valley. The English and their Burgundian allies held Paris and the northern half of France, and it appeared entirely unlikely that Charles would ever claim the throne he had been born to. He seemed to lack the usual kingly qualities, being neither particularly charismatic nor intelligent. He began to doubt his own legitimacy and seemed very indolent and discouraged. In the end, it took two diametrically opposed women to transform this mopey little king of Bourges into Charles VII (Charles the Victorious), who went on to rule France for nearly forty years. The first of these women, Saint Joan of Arc, is one of the most famous figures in history. But the second woman, our Agnès de Sorel, remains little known outside France today. Her scandalous relationship with the king made her notorious in her own time, and facilitated her lasting mark on French gastronomy. If Joan of Arc was a saint, Agnès de Sorel was the devil in the flesh.
Briefly, for those who skipped their history lessons, Joan of Arc was a young girl who claimed to hear the voices of saints telling her to help Charles, the dauphin, reconquer his kingdom. Although the French people were deeply religious at that time, and firmly believed that France was God’s chosen kingdom, it shows just how desperate Charles’s cause was that Joan was believed to be an actual messenger of God. Yet they were rewarded for their faith: in 1429, a French army with Joan at its head drove the English away from Orléans, the last French-held city north of the Loire. Joan claimed victory in nine of the thirteen military engagements that followed; several dozen towns surrendered to her without a fight, so daunting was her reputation. Finally, she secured the city of Reims, the traditional coronation site for the French kings, and fulfilled her sacred mission by seeing the dauphin crowned as Charles VII.
Unfortunately for Joan, she was captured by the Burgundians the following year and then ransomed by the English, who burned her as a witch in 1431 in Rouen. Unlike many French heroic figures, Joan is not much celebrated in the gastronomic realm—perhaps unsurprisingly, as a warrior-saint with highly ascetic tendencies.
Joan helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the French. The Burgundians eventually abandoned the English and allied themselves with Charles, who recaptured Paris in 1436. Successful campaigns were fought in both Normandy and Gascony, reclaiming French towns and territory. Then in 1444, fighting was suspended for five years by the Truce of Tours. It was during this time that Agnès de Sorel appeared on the historical stage.
Agnès was probably born in 1422, to a family of minor nobility. In 1443, she caught the king’s attention at court, and Charles was immediately smitten with the young woman. It seems the king found his court a bit dull, and Agnès’s beauty, intelligence, and wit enlivened it immensely. Pope Pius II, a great chronicler of events in his day, wrote of Charles and Agnès: “He fell so much in love that he could not even spend an hour without her. Whether at table, in bed, at council, she was always by his side.”1 (Charles’s queen, Marie of Anjou, was busy bearing and raising their fourteen children.) Charles remained devoted to Agnès until her death, showering her with wealth, and she became the first official mistress of a French king. Most notably, he endowed her with a royal castle near Vincennes named Château de Beauté, and she thus acquired the moniker la Dame de Beauté (the lady of beauty).
The king’s public recognition of his mistress was hugely scandalous, and Agnès only enhanced her notoriety with her penchant for daring fashions that often left her magnificent bosom exposed. In the most famous portrait of Agnès, by Jean Fouquet, she is depicted as the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus, one breast exposed as if about to nurse him. The “breastfeeding Madonna” was a popular artistic trope at the time, and the choice of Agnès as model was justified by her reputation as the most beautiful woman in France. But it was still quite an insult to the queen, who would normally have been associated with Mary, the “queen of heaven.”
Yet Agnès was much more than a source of scandal. She was a natural diplomat, said to have used her charm and wit to help the king navigate his fractious court. She took full advantage of her official status, establishing a template for the subtle exercise of power that a number of future royal mistresses would draw upon. She has been credited with transforming Charles from a lackluster king into the more vigorous and accomplished monarch who tamed the nobility and successfully reformed the French state. And according to some accounts of the time, it was Agnès who encouraged the king to renew his war against the English by telling him that when she was a young girl, an astrologer had predicted that she would be loved by the most valiant and courageous king of Christendom—and how could that be Charles, when he allowed the English to continue to occupy French territory? Perhaps Agnès was meant to be the consort of the English king instead.
Whatever the accuracy of this vignette, it is true that war resumed in 1449. The following year, Charles reclaimed Normandy, as the French outperformed the English in the gradual transition to gunpowder and cannons in warfare. The last hurdle was the conquest of Gascony, the territory in western France at the heart of so many decades of bloodshed. But finally, in 1453, after the French victory in the Battle of Castillon and the surrender of Bordeaux, the Hundred Years’ War came to an end.2 England retained Calais, but otherwise France was the clear victor, both in terms of territory reclaimed and the much more powerful monarchy that emerged. France was becoming an ever-larger and more centralized state, with the crown levying taxes across the whole of French territory and using those taxes to field a professional army.
Unfortunately, Agnès never saw the end of the conflict. In 1450, she died under suspicious circumstances, shortly after the birth of her fourth child. At the time, many thought she was poisoned—perhaps even by the resentful heir to the king, the future Louis XI. (According to one persistent legend, the dauphin took advantage of her love for pain d’épices, or gingerbread, and slyly poisoned a slice.) Indeed, recent scientific research on the remains of Agnès show that she died of mercury poisoning, at such high levels that the dosage was unlikely to have been medicinal.3 The culprit, however, remains a mystery.
Agnès’s short but dramatic life ensured her long-lasting fame, at least in her native France. And it is perhaps not very surprising that her name should be attached to charming and decadent dishes by chefs such as Escoffier, especially given her own attention to the art of culinary seduction. Agnès was known as a gourmand and spent considerable time in the kitchen. She hired renowned chefs and organized sumptuous feasts in the Château de Beauté. She is credited with inventing two enduring dishes, Agnès Sorel timbales (minced chicken and truffles in pastry, served with Madeira sauce) and woodcock salmis (roasted woodcock with a sauce of cognac, red wine, truffles, and mushrooms).
However, there is no evidence she created or even ate the numerous other dishes that bear her name today—and even more curious, there is no apparent reason why all of these dishes include mushrooms. Nothing indicates that Agnès was a special fan of mushrooms, which were not very popular at that time.
Yet there is no doubt that the addition of mushrooms to these particular recipes, already suffused with cognac and cream and wine, gives the dishes a warm, earthy depth of deliciousness. And it cannot be denied that mushrooms inspire a lusty enthusiasm among the French people, whether they acquire their favorites in dim forests, quiet caves, or bustling markets. So perhaps the association of mushrooms and la Dame de Beauté is an apt one, another example of how even common foods are elevated in France to superlative realms of appreciation.