The Culinary Contributions of Madame Serpent
For decades, spinach was a reviled side dish on American tables, something that children (and many adults) forced themselves to eat under threat of a withheld dessert. The leafy vegetable does suffer from being both green and bitter, two of the most unendearing qualities any food can possess, but surely part of the problem was that Americans had not yet learned how to serve spinach the French way: épinards à la crème, for example, in which spinach is simmered in butter and drowned in cream, or épinards en gratin, spinach baked in cream and cheese. (If there is one rule of French cooking, it is that you can eat nearly anything if you smother it in butter, cream, and cheese.) Luckily, after well-known chefs started introducing and adapting French recipes for American audiences, spinach became a much more enjoyable addition to the family meal. Julia Child’s creamed spinach recipe, for example, remains a classic.
The French also gave Americans the various dishes denoted as “Florentine,” which always include spinach, such as the brunch staple eggs Florentine. Serving meat or fish à la Florentine is even more popular in France, which is a bit curious considering the phrase simply means “of Florence,” and yet the denizens of Florence, Italy, have no more love for spinach than anyone else. While historians claim there is no definitive explanation for the Florentine label, a good case can be made that it originates in the sixteenth century, when the woman known to history as Madame Serpent arrived in Marseille to marry the future king of France.
At the time, her name was simply Catherine de’ Medici, a fourteen-year-old member of the famous Medici family of Florence and niece of Pope Clement VII. King Francis I arranged for her to marry his second son, Henry, in 1533, as part of his never-ending intrigues to gain a larger French foothold in Italy. Unfortunately for Catherine, her uncle-pope died a year into the marriage, and she failed to conceive a child for more than a decade, decidedly lowering her value to the crown and leading her to fear that she might be set aside. She was devoted to Henry, but her husband preferred the company and political guidance of his beautiful mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Catherine languished in the shadows, forced to accept the humiliation of a very public ménage à trois with the prince and his mistress. Her quiet acceptance of the situation may have saved her in the end, as Diane, fearing Catherine could be replaced with a more demanding and alluring candidate, encouraged Henry to keep his pliable wife around. Eventually, Catherine bore Henry ten children, and after the deaths of Henry’s father and elder brother, Henry ascended the throne as Henry II in 1547 and Catherine became queen of France.
Even after becoming queen, Catherine was forced to endure her husband’s devotion to Diane de Poitiers. But this arrangement was upended when the king died of an injury sustained while jousting in 1559. Catherine exiled the royal mistress and soon became the most powerful woman in Europe, helping to rule France alongside her three young sons, who one after the other became king. (Diane died a few years later, after accidentally poisoning herself with a potion made of gold, meant to preserve her youth and beauty.)
Catherine’s eldest son, King Francis II, was only a teenager when he assumed the throne upon his father’s death (although he was already married to his childhood friend Mary, Queen of Scots). The sickly lad ruled for only a year, dying of an infection in 1560 and leaving his ten-year-old brother to rule as Charles IX. With Catherine as regent, Charles survived many years of religious turmoil in France, before dying without a male heir in 1574. The throne passed to his younger brother Henry III, who in the game of musical thrones then played in Europe had recently been made king of Poland. Returning to France, he reigned for fifteen years, the last king of the Valois dynasty, before being murdered by a Catholic friar.
This succession of young, weak kings emboldened the fractious nobility, who increasingly sparred with each other and with the foreign queen regent. Catherine only survived these three decades of dramatic power struggles because of her shrewd political wits (possibly inspired by her countryman and contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli). She remains a very divisive figure in French history, alternatively portrayed as Madame Serpent, an unscrupulous and murderous usurper, and as a formidable and clever ruler who had the best interests of her sons and of France at heart. (Not surprisingly, those who have wanted to discredit the role of women in high politics have usually advanced the former argument.) This discrepancy endures in large part because of her controversial role in one of the most horrific acts of violence in French history, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which thousands of Protestants were murdered under murky circumstances.
It was during the reign of Catherine and her three sons that France was wracked by the Wars of Religion, as the Catholic Church confronted an increasingly organized movement of French Protestants, who were known as Huguenots. It was part of an epic continental struggle between Catholics and Protestants that took several centuries to resolve, and France was a particularly bloody battleground. The Huguenots adhered to the very strict reformist doctrine of John Calvin, much like the Puritans who emerged in England. Originally a religious reform movement aimed at purifying a Christianity that had become corrupt and sclerotic, the Huguenots acquired a more overtly political character over time. By insisting that individuals could interpret scripture and achieve salvation on their own, rather than solely through the intercession of churchly representatives, the Huguenots challenged the Church’s authority and, thus, the political legitimacy of the monarchy with which it was entwined. Many noble families who had grievances against the king, or objected to the increasing centralization of monarchical power, converted to the Protestant cause, which they saw as legitimizing their opposition to the crown. Royal persecution of the Huguenots, which sometimes included burning them as heretics, only increased their religious fervor. They began organizing themselves, both politically and militarily, to resist any attacks by the Church and the monarchy. They even acquired territorial strongholds, such as the Atlantic port town of La Rochelle and the kingdom of Navarre in the Pyrenees.
After the death of her husband, Catherine initially promoted a conciliatory approach toward the competing religious factions, in the hopes of preventing all-out war. But the religious schism had become irrevocably politicized, with powerful nobles lining up on either side. The first religious massacres occurred in 1562 and then spread throughout much of France. The country dissolved into civil war, as rival nobles created their own armed forces and engaged in hideous levels of violence against each other and among the population. For nearly forty years, France was consumed by frequent episodes of religious warfare—its economy broken, its people brutalized. The promise of prosperity and progress, so evident in the first half of the 1500s, lay in ruins.
In 1572, Catherine decided on a new tactic, marrying her Catholic daughter Margaret to Henry of Navarre, a royal cousin and leading Protestant noble. The marriage was meant to symbolize the possibility of religious reconciliation and peace, but instead it inflamed an already tense situation. Staunch Catholics saw the marriage as a victory for the Protestants, and the Parisian masses—mostly Catholic, and already agitated due to a sharp increase in the price of bread—were in a rebellious spirit as hundreds of Huguenots arrived for the extravagant wedding. A few days after the wedding, Catherine apparently helped convince Charles IX that it was necessary to assassinate a few dozen Huguenot leaders in order to forestall the emergence of another Protestant rebellion. But once the killing started, violence spread throughout Paris and then the regions, with Catholics believing they had royal dispensation to slaughter Protestants. Over the next week, roughly two thousand Huguenots were murdered in Paris, and perhaps thirty thousand more in the provinces, in what became known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Any hope of religious and political reconciliation lay dead as well, and so the Wars of Religion rumbled on.
While it’s unclear exactly how much responsibility Catherine had in all this, she never expressed any remorse for the massacre, and this shocking act forms the core tale of what became known as the “Black Legend” of Catherine de’ Medici (according to which she was also a poisoner and practitioner of the black arts). No doubt, it was helpful over the years for French critics to argue that the horrific massacre was orchestrated by a depraved foreign queen, but any guilt Catherine bears must be widely shared. Still, Saint Bartholomew’s Day haunted her continuing efforts at reconciliation until her dying day, in January 1589.
In the gastronomical realm, Catherine enjoys a more popular reputation today, as she is credited with transforming French cuisine in many positive ways. Legends circulate around her like bees around honey. This includes, first and foremost, our explanation for à la Florentine. When Catherine left her home city of Florence for France, she brought with her a number of Italian chefs, confectioners, and pastry makers, who over the years introduced a number of new foods and cooking styles to the French court. At the same time, French nobles were shaking off their medieval aversion to vegetables, and they began to embrace those that were already popular in Italy. Among them was spinach, which Catherine enjoyed and made rather popular, and thus dishes with spinach came to be designated à la Florentine.
The carnage and mayhem associated with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre have rendered it one of the most infamous events of the decades-long Wars of Religion. Etching from the Nordisk familjebok (Stockholm: 1904), 999.
Catherine and her chefs also introduced broccoli and artichokes, the latter her especial favorite (according to legend, she almost died one night from indigestion after an overdose of artichoke hearts). Artichokes were thought to have aphrodisiac qualities, which no doubt also enhanced their appeal. There is still an expression today, in fact, avoir un coeur d’artichaut (to have a heart like an artichoke), which is applied to people who fall in love very quickly and indiscriminately. Artichokes became very popular all over France, and today you can cook artichokes à la Parisienne, Normande, Lyonnaise, or Provençal. Catherine is also credited with bringing to France haricot beans from the American continent, supposedly a wedding gift from her uncle, Pope Clement VII. It is a plausible tale, given that many new foods from the Americas were being introduced into Europe at this time.
Asparagus, which also became very popular in France at this time, was probably not a favorite of Catherine’s. Her love rival, Diane de Poitiers, ate it with every meal when available, as part of a strict diet of fresh vegetables intended to maintain her youth and the affection of the king.
Catherine’s Italian cooks exercised their influence in other realms as well, bringing to France the art of making macarons, frangipane, nougat, and sorbet. In fact, nearly every imaginable confection made with sugar that can somehow be linked to this time period is credited to Catherine de’ Medici and her chefs. Many of these attributions are very debatable, but it is true that at this time, sugar became the new spice. After centuries of culinary obsession with pungent spices from the Orient, sugar became the favored vehicle for flaunting one’s wealth and status. Still very expensive and difficult to acquire, it was used in dishes of all sorts, even to flavor meat and fish. Henry III, on his way home from Poland to claim the French throne, attended a feast in Venice where everything from the plates to the napkins was made of sugar, a stupendous display of opulence.
In Venice, Henry also encountered the strange piece of cutlery called the fork, and he and his mother unsuccessfully tried to introduce it to the French court. People thought that forks were a bit effeminate and impractical; spoons and knives were sufficient for coping with the dishes served at that time. Some also apparently felt that the fork would incite people to sin—didn’t it look a bit like a devil’s pitchfork? (Forks had only two tines in those days.) The Protestants may have disagreed with the Church in nearly every spiritual and worldly matter, but on this they were united: “God protect me from forks,” Martin Luther is alleged to have said.1 These concerns failed to deter Rabelais, for one, who proudly wore his only fork, bought in Italy, on his belt. Catherine suffered from association with the sinful utensil, as her critics blamed her for bringing it into France (further proof of her satanic inclinations). Thus, one often still hears the legend that Catherine is responsible for French forks, but in truth they did not really become fashionable in France until the eighteenth century.
Overall, French cooking took a very Italian turn in the sixteenth century, but it is not accurate to attribute this solely to Catherine and her chefs. As we have seen, the French nobility had become enthralled with Italian culture some decades earlier, and Catherine herself did not become an influential force at court until after her husband’s death. So the enduring tendency to credit all the new foods and tastes of this era to Catherine is a bit of a mystery.2 Less mysterious is the French embrace of the delicious foods and cooking styles of Italy, a key step in the evolution of French gastronomy into the haute cuisine of Europe it had yet to become.