Peasant Origins?

[Adam Balic]

In some recent "discussions" much has been made of the peasant origins of various, now famous, dishes. The assumption has been that these dishes are based on a more primative dish of humble origins. Is there any proof for this at all? Peasants, being peasants tend to have little excess to spend on luxuries, and in my own families experience, they tend to sell the best of their crops and keep the leavings for their own consumption. Can great cuisine come from these origins? For instance the famous Bouillabaisse, a dish of humble fishmen who had to do some thing with the leavings of the daily catch? Really, if these fishermen were so damn poor, how did they afford saffron. No, saffron = no bouillabaisse

, just fish soup. Is there any reason why these dishes could not have been invented in a chefs kitchen, then be transfered back to the humble classes? Are there any other examples of dishes with suspiciously humble origins? Below is a link to some information on the history of bouillabaisse

by award winning author, Clifford A. Wright.

http://www.cliffordawright.com/history/bou...uillabaisse.htm

[Wilfrid]

Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Cookery would have some answers. From memory, I think bouillabaisse is in there, but she also has a lot of the simple, inexpensive dishes from which grander dishes "evolved". She most certainly includes cassoulet as an authentic peasant dish, but has simpler bean/pulse-based stews too.

Hey, that Clifford Wright site is interesting too.

[Adam Balic]

Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Cookery would have some answers.  From memory, I think bouillabaisse is in there, but she also has a lot of the simple, inexpensive dishes from which grander dishes "evolved".  She most certainly includes cassoulet as an authentic peasant dish, but has simpler bean/pulse-based stews too.

Hey, that Clifford Wright site is interesting too.

"Cassoulet" yeh that positively reeks of being a chef dish. OK, fine there are many varients using various ingredients (salt pork, pork rind, goose confit sausage, game, salt cod, pork cuts etc). But what is cassoulet, and how would a peasant cook it? With whatever they had to spare, inwhich case the more modern versions could just as easily be from a chef who tissied up a pretty basic bean stew and "standadized", rather then being a peasant dish as such. I can really see those peasants folding in the crust seven times.

[Wilfrid]

Bear in mind that what would be expensive for one peasant standing over there in one corner is cheap for another peasant standing over there in the other corner. The peasants who were making cassoulet were raising their own geese, and fattening the liver to sell at the market, and raising their own pigs. The meat bits of a cassoulet were practically offal, in the strict sense of leftover waste material, for these peasants. But of course no peasant is going to go out there and buy duck confit and Toulouse sausage if they don't have their own.

And as for breaking the crust, what else was there to do all day? No DVDs, no eGullet, etc.

[Adam Balic]

True, true, but could the cassoulet as we know it be said to have peasant origins or just another bean stew that the was kicking around in South-western France at the time that a chef formalized the "idea" of a cassoulet. Would not peasants have used broad beans, rather then haricots? Is that dish the ancestor or is a Spanish white bean stew the ancestor? The dish is named after the vessel it is cooked in, but this is not evidence that all cassoulet are infact CASSOULET, in much the same way that Tunisa and Morocco both have Tajine/tagine, (dishes named after the vessel again), but a Tunisian Tagine is not a TAGINE as most people would think of it and the origins of the TAGINE cannot be traced back to the Tunisian version.

[Oreganought]

True, true, but could the cassoulet as we know it be said to have peasant origins or just another bean stew that the was kicking around in South-western France at the time that a chef formalized the "idea" of a cassoulet. Would not peasants have used broad beans, rather then haricots? Is that dish the ancestor or is a Spanish white bean stew the ancestor? The dish is named after the vessel it is cooked in, but this is not evidence that all cassoulet are infact CASSOULET, in much the same way that Tunisa and Morocco both have Tajine/tagine, (dishes named after the vessel again), but a Tunisian Tagine is not a TAGINE as most people would think of it and the origins of the TAGINE cannot be traced back to the Tunisian version.

If you are prepared to admit that every chef has the right to his/her own method,every cook to their own little secret,then you must imagine cassolets receding to infinity,all different yet all alike through their marriage with the bean. But even with the bean we haven't hit bedrock.Although the cassoulet may not be as old as the globe itself,it is certainly as old as cooking;consequently, it probably didn't contain any beans. Beans are newcomers to the society of stews and casserole dishes.However,that the cassolet is a dish of the Languedoc few would deny. Yet even here a doubt creeps in.Though it may be deeply rooted to the soil of Languedoc,are we sure that the original recipe didn't come from the Moors of spain?

In which case it's ancestors would be the mutton stew made with beans that the Sarasens introduced to the inhabitants of the carcasse about 720

And since there were no kidney beans,then it must have been some other bean. One purist Senator Jean Durand,insisted that they must be from Maseres or Lavelant.Without going quite so far.let us say they must have at any rate been white beans.

No true cassoulet can be made other than in an earthenware casserole unglazed on the outside. A century ago all the cassoles in Castelnaudary were made of clay from Issel, the neibouring village.

The seniority of the Castelnaudary cassolet is thus proved and confirmed by the local Canson D'el cassolet whose refrain,roughly translated,states quite clearly:

Every place has it's favorite dishes

And boasts of its special delights

La Grasse has its plump partridge

Villasavarry for its luscious melons

Limoux its sparkling blanquette

Albi gilds its pastry rings

All towns have its crowning glory

But Castelnaudary alone has cassoulette.

The responsibility a cassoulet imposes is in proportion to the pleasure it

bestows.

The crust was the old bread that dried under fire and was submurged time after time,and a cassoulet that is years old is not unheard of,as a matter of fact was quite the norm when grande mare was responsible for the birth and death of the cassoulet.

So the story goes,but when it comes to food,who can belief the french?

[John Whiting]

A strong case has been made that the cassoulet is in fact a descendent of the cholent, the Jewish bean stew which is set to cooking so that no work need be done on the Sabbath.

As for whether the movement of culinary influence was up or down, James Bentley writes:

As the economic position of the bourgoisie improved they increasingly employed the daughters of the tenant farmers to work in their kitchens, just as the aristocracy had done before the revolution. Thus, the style of cooking also made its way back into poorer farm kitchens, but only as improvements in living standanrds allowed. _Life and Food in the Dordogne_, p 2

In other words, it was a two-way street and, with the most popular dishes, it's virtually impossible to separate the class origins of the various elements.

[Adam Balic]

A strong case has been made that the cassoulet is in fact a descendent of the cholent, the Jewish bean stew which is set to cooking so that no work need be done on the Sabbath.

As for whether the movement of culinary influence was up or down, James Bentley writes:

As the economic position of the bourgoisie improved they increasingly employed the daughters of the tenant farmers to work in their kitchens, just as the aristocracy had done before the revolution. Thus, the style of cooking also made its way back into poorer farm kitchens, but only as improvements in living standanrds allowed. _Life and Food in the Dordogne_, p 2

In other words, it was a two-way street and, with the most popular dishes, it's virtually impossible to separate the class origins of the various elements.

'xactly, so lets not hear anymore about the peasant origins of dishes, no matter how obvious or logical this theroy seems, in most cases there simply isn't any evidence to show that it is so. And as John and Oreganought have shown, origins are a complex issue. I see little mention of monastic origins of some of these dishes? I'm sure a good case could be made for this in several instances. If they are the originators of several wines and cheeses, why not other foodstuffs?

[oraklet]

wilf and adam,

these threads are perfect examples of "les detailles qui tuent". spinoffs on spinoffs. maybe it's only because i'm not very knowledgeable in cooking history, but it seems to me that the questions on the other threads were answered well enough without there being an obvious need of further threads and details en masse. interesting as they may be (and are).

i also feel that the anger on behalf of accademia could have been spared, as it has resulted in ill-placed sarcasm and patronizing. ill-placed not least because on some occasions you have yourselves been as muddleheaded as have we less enlightened, but also because it has in some cases forced some into positions that they did not, perhaps, really wish to defend.

as i see it, john whiting has been at one time levelheaded and knowing. thanks a lot!

[Steve Plotnicki]

Well I have a question about this. Wouldn't it be the case that any dish that precedes the emergence of a middle class be a peasant dish? Unless we are talking about the fancy stuff that royalty and the landed gentry ate, what other classes were there? Trades? What class of people were in the middle pre 1700 and how would their cuisine impact on anything?Otherwise Adam's point about Bouillabaisse and saffron doesn't seem to prove anything because it assumes that saffron is important for it to be an authentic BB. And maybe it is the case that peasant fisherman had saffron or maybe it was the case that saffron wasn't used until a later date and an authentic BB didn't need to have saffron prior to some date in time?

[Adam Balic]

It's a good point Steve, and difficult to answer. If we just stick to the BB example, firstly what is BB. Well, it is a fish soup (or stew, that bit doesn't matter). There are plenty of fish soups in the Med. The Med being full of water, this makes sense. OK, many parts of the Med. have a fish soups, what is special about BB that seperates it from all other fish soups. That bit goes on forever, as even the locals can't agree. But let's say the distinguishing feature of a BB is that is a fish soup made with saffron, fennel and orange peel (well, these are my choices) and it has to be made of certain fish from a particular region. Everything about this dish is OK with the peasant origin theroy except the saffron. It's just to expensive for peasants to use. So I have no problem with these peasants having a fish soup of their own, just not with saffron, and with out saffron I don't think that is can be called a BB.

The area where this soup comes from has a major trading port, it is just as likely that the dish came from an outside source (for example Venetian, traders with a history of using saffron, with fish dishes and they have their own fish soup), as to have developed locally.

Local: "hey what's that you are eating?"

Visitor: "Fish soup"

Local: "It doesn't look like fish soup"

Visitor: "Well we make it like this at home, have a taste"

Local: "Hey, that's good! What's that interesting taste?

Visitor: "Saffron"

Local: "From now on I'm going to make my fish soup with saffron"

The evidence just isn't there to surport a peasant origin, it could have many sources. Saffrom was used quite a bit by the well off as a seasoning, why could not BB be a decendent of this tradition? In all likelyhood the truth is something quite else, and BB is a fushion of several culinary traditions, one of which is regional peasant cooking. But only one.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Adam - What makes BB unique is the olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. The rest like fennel, saffron etc. is ancillary as far as I'm concerned and is really just a spicing regimen that evolved over time. Most places do not have tomatoes in their fish soup, regardless of the base of the soup. You can start in Belgium and work your way down the coast and it takes you a very long time before you get a fish soup with tomatoes.

[Adam Balic]

Steve - there is a big blue wobbly thing at the bottom of Europe full of fish, most people who make fish soup here use tomato, olive oil and garlic. The ancillary bits are what makes a BB different from all the other fish soups. Oh, and he cooking technique, that bit is important too.

But that's not important. Do you favour peasant cooking as the key origin of more developed cuisine or do you beleive that specific dishes may have evolved from a number of different sources?

[oraklet]

"Steve - there is a big blue wobbly thing at the bottom of Europe full of fish,"

and

"Do you favour peasant cooking as the key origin of more developed cuisine or do you beleive that specific dishes may have evolved from a number of different sources?"

there you go again, trying to make a caricature of true plotnickiism.

[Adam Balic]

What do you mean by "trying"?

[Priscilla]

The dish is named after the vessel it is cooked in [...]

Tunisa and Morocco both have Tajine/tagine, (dishes named after the vessel again) [...]

This would be a good topic. And then there's gratin, and casserole. Cocotte?

[Adam Balic]

The dish is named after the vessel it is cooked in [...]

Tunisa and Morocco both have Tajine/tagine, (dishes named after the vessel again) [...]

This would be a good topic. And then there's gratin, and casserole. Cocotte?

OK you post it. Also "Marmite" springs to mind.

[Wilfrid]

I mistakenly gave the sub-title of Elisabeth Luard's book on European peasant cooking in an earlier post. The correct title is The Rich Tradition. It's an excellent reference book as well as being a collection of recipes, although I now read it more critically - the eGullet effect - and I do have some reservations about what she classes as "peasant cookery". it occurs to me that, if you are going to offer a comprehensive view of such a subject, you need to explain what you think a peasant is. Oh well, a good food writer, but now I want her to be a socio-economic historian too.

Anyway, Luard does indeed give bouillabaisse, but also offers some less sumptuous fish stews - for example, a French "one eyed" bouillabaisse for fishermen with a disappointing catch. Similarly, while she gives the classic cassoulet, she also describes simpler dish like the Spanish cocido and the Belgian brown beans with bacon. Since she orders dishes by main ingredient, rather than by nationality, it's possible to trace some interesting cross-border similarities.

I thought it would be responsive to earlier questions to see what she identified as British peasant dishes. It's quite a list. I'm afraid some of her selections are somewhat arbitrary (she gives scrambled eggs as a British peasant dish, and omelettes as French), and I am sceptical about classing the great British roasts, with traditional accompaniments, as peasant dishes in any strict sense.

Here's a partial list, though. By citing it, I do not vouch for it, although I wouldn't provide it if I thought it was worthless:

Oatmeal-rolled trout or herring

Stoved herrings (spatchcocked and grilled)

Jellied eels

Carragheen winkles (a winkle stew)

Cockle pie

Potted shrimps

Kippers (hot-smoked herrings)

Smoked salmon

Smoked haddock

Cock-a-leekie

Brawn

Raised pork pie

Black pudding

Sausages and mash

Hams - dry salt or honey cured, boiled or baked

Bacon

Salted brisket and silverside of beef

Boiled beef with dumplings

Irish stew

Barley "Scotch" broth

Cawl

Lancashire Hot Pot

Boiled mutton with caper sauce

Haggis

Pig haggis

Marrow bones

Cottage pie

Shepherd's pie

Oxtail soup

Pease pudding

Oatmeal porridge

Brose

Oatmeal jelly

Steak and kidney pudding

Venison pasty

Cornish pasty

Boxty

Colcannon

Laverbread

Carragheen pudding (seaweed)

Welsh rarebit

Clotted cream

Sorry, I gave up before going through all the desserts.

[srhcb]

Is there any reason why these dishes could not have been invented in a chefs kitchen, then be transfered back to the humble classes?

There were probably very few of what we would call chefs. And the far more common cooks, (and the chefs too for that matter), were just trained peasants?

[Adam Balic]

Sorry, yes it would be better to say "cooks", rather then chef (I had my mind on the 19th C. when I wrote that). Cooks as trained peasants? Well, maybe we should define what people mean by "peasant". I would go with Eric Wolf's definition:

"...rural cultivators whose surpluses are transferred to a dominant group of rulers that uses the surpluses both to underwrite its own standard of living and to distribute the remainder to groups in society that do not farm but must be fed for their specific goods and services in turn."

So I don't think that a cook is a peasant.

[Wilfrid]

Here's a link to a description of tasty French peasant fayre.

[Adam Balic]

"........chopped straw mixed with earth, of which they composed a food which cannot be called bread.". Never a truer word spoken, contempory British would call this a "Brick". Hell, what do they know about cooking though? . 'course, this is what those Frenchies were doing when they weren't folding in the casseolet crust seven times.

[oraklet]

that was scary reading, the link. but weren't these times of war (against england)? things must have been equally scary in northern england and scotland during the rose wars(?).

anyway, i see that now the term peasant has been defined for us. thanks. this leads me to try to do my own summing up on the periods in question.

1) peasants in france were in a poor state up till the revolution. at this time, france was the center of grande cuisine (or whatever it should be called).

2) post-revolution peasants became farmers (well, not all, but most, it seems). state bureaucrats spread all over the country. development of cuisine grande mere/haute cuisine/gastronomie/restaurants.

3) in england the opposite social development took place during late 17th c. and first half of 18th c. traditional farmers cuisine more or less devastated (?). haute cuisine in upper class homes/restaurants/clubs

4) victorian era, england. how can you enjoy food with a stiff upper lip?

as usual with my summaries, this is most unscientifical and unacademical, but it deals fairly, i think, with both plotnickian theories and the detailed research of a number of highly qualified academicians.

am i in for some spanking?

[oraklet]

wasn't the rose wars, was it?

[Adam Balic]

So the peasants had from 1792 on wards to develope their cuisine so that it could be picked up by chefs in the mid-nineteenth century? Gosh, those guys must have been really smoking, to be the source of all those dishes of peasant origin.

The War of the Roses? No, that was a couple of hundred years to early for that.