Peasant Origins?

[Wilfrid]

Steve, I'm saying that if your statistically-based assertion is true, it is what logicians call "trivially true". Wilfrid will immediately grasp what I'm getting at.

Just to live up to the promise, John means that the most dominant cuisine will of course be the source of most dishes on such a list. By definition. That doesn't tell us anything other than that it's the most dominant cuisine, and certainly nothing about its merit. One day, American cooking may occupy such a position, maybe because it's great, but perhaps more likely because of global Americanization, whether you think that's a good thing or not.

[John Whiting]

Thank you, Wilfrid. I knew you could put it more accurately and succinctly than I. (No irony here)

[Jinmyo]

Wilfrid's so dreamy.

[Adam Balic]

Part One

I find the arguments here very hard to understand, because I honestly struggle to follow, from sentence to sentence, whether we are discussing peasants in the true sense or ordinary working families, whether we are discussing home cooks or restaurant chefs, and who we are talking about when we say that people "preferred" one cuisine to another.

Yes, I tried to define this so that some basis for an informed discussion could be made. A "peasant" is a very diferent kettle of fish to the working class of the 19th C. I think that this is important, as if we are going to discuss the importance of humble roots in grand cuisine then the conclusions that are drawn would be very different depending on what group was chosen.

[Wilfrid]

"I was always of the understanding that the French revolution took place because the peasants and commoners were getting a raw deal from the monarchy. The royals were coming onto what commoners felt were "their land" and poaching game etc. Whether they actually owned the land, or had some type of sharecropping or landlease type of agreement I don't know. But I do remember reading somewhere that they were unhappy with the split, and that is one of the main things that propelled the revolution forward. To the contrary in Britain there wasn't an uprising against the enclosure laws. For some reasons the Brits who had traditionally farmed the land on a sharecropping arrangement queued up to live in the slums of the big cities without kitchens."

As ever, your understanding is wrong, and thank you for another rude remark about the British

History 101:

The French revolution was fomented by the bourgeoisie, not the urban poor or the peasantry (a fair summary of the sequence of events can be found here.

The British landowning and mercantile classes had overthrown their absolute monarchy more than a century before the French revolution, first in the Civil War of the 1640s, and for good in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. Thereafter, and to the present day, Britain (or the UK) has had a government of king or queen in parliament with lords and commons.

There was massive social unrest in Britain during the period of the industrial revolution, culminating in the bloody years under Lord Liverpool's goverment in the 1820s. But a cohesive national revolutionary impulse never developed - the "bourgeoisie", and indeed many among the lower classes, were not doing so badly. You'll search far and wide to find examples of genuinely agrarian-led revolutions. The reforming governments of the 1830s and 1840s expanded the franchise, ensured a degree of civil liberty, and in effect created conditions in which Britain was one of the few European natons not to experience a revolution in 1848.

As we have seen previously, France remained under the domination of repressive, absolutist monarchs and emperors until around the 1870s, and only much later made significant expansions of the franchise.

[John Whiting]

You'll search far and wide to find examples of genuinely agrarian-led revolutions.

And I doubt if you'll be successful. There may be some tiny countries, but I know of no major ones.

[Wilfrid]

Unless you believe Chairman Mao. That's what I thought John, but I try to avoid being dogmatic about such things - gives me a better chance of being right.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid - Well just dealing with your response first, why were the French the only horse in the race?

[Wilfrid]

Do you mean they weren't or do you mean you've already forgotten how they came to be?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid - Two things. I've already forgotten. But that doesn't matter. If the food they made tasted bad, it would have been rejected regardless of how many horses there were. Ultimately I don't see how regardless of what evidence anyone puts forth, it doesn't supplant the theory that people liked the way the food tasted.

[Wilfrid]

That's not a theory. It's an obvious fact - as long as you don't spoil it by saying everyone liked the way the food tasted. What it's not, however you dress it up, is a convincing historical explanation of how French food achieved its professional dominance. If that's what you think it is.

insert puzzled emoticon like this

[Wilfrid]

We've left peasant cookery, of course, but let me just summarize where I think we are:

Steve, if I understand you, you're saying: forget about techniques and ingredients and all the details, the simple reason why French cuisine became pre-eminent among important classes in British society in the nineteenth century was that it tasted good.

I say that's wrong. It may have tasted out of this world, but the reason it achieved pre-eminence as Britain's high class, professionally produced, fine dining cuisine, is that the whole notion of this style of dining came from France, along with the food. The availability of French chefs to work in Britain gave huge impetus to the process. There was no alternative fine dining tradition, either home grown or available from overseas - Mennell is quite explicit about this, and he argues further that the success of French cuisine "decapitated" British cuisine; it removed any incentive to develop a high fashion version of indigenous cooking, at least until the late twentieth century.

[John Whiting]

We seem to have forgotten that all across Europe (and elsewhere), until well into the 20th century peasant "cuisine" was mostly a desperate effort to survive on what little food was available. Agonizing hunger was the norm. French peasants in the Perigord, for instance, often subsisted through the winter on mouldy chestnuts and little else.

In a passage I've quoted elsewhere, historian Rachel Lauden points out that much of the "cuisine du terroir" that became fashionable a few decades ago had to be artfully extrapolated from the bare subsistence of peasant poverty, with a few bougeois flourishes added to make it more interesting. Only rarely and in certain areas was there enough plentitude to allow for the exercise of creative imagination.

[Steve Plotnicki]

In my returning the Davidson book to Nach Waxman, we spoke about this topic. He immediately offered as a reason for French culinary dominance as the book written by La Varenne being translated into English in the year 1653. In the edition of "The French Cook" published by Southover Press in 2001. Philip and Mary Hyman (the same source Davidson used for his bouillabaisse research) wrote the introduction.

The introduction states that several important cookbooks were published in France in the 1540's, and then reprinted in the beginning of the 17th century. But no new collection of recipes appeared until La Varenne's Cusinier Francais in 1651. They go on to say that is spite of the hiatus in cookery books, a number of techniques were developed in the first half of the 17th century including ragouts and bisques and that they were referred to as "modern." These dishes were absent from the books printed in the 1540's, but the first recipe in La Varenne's book is Bisque de Pigeneaux (can you imagine they were making those delicious bisques back then ) and that there are no fewer than 70 ragouts!

While they go on to say that La Varenne can't be credited with inventing the new cuisine, he is the first to have set them down in writing. He is quoted as saying "During a whole ten years employment in your house, I have found the secret how to make meats ready neatly and daintily....I think, that the publique ought to recieve the profit of this experience of mine, to the end that it may owe you all the utility, which it will recieve thereby." The Hymans take these words to mean that prior to arriving in his master's kitchen, he was not acquainted with the secrets of how to cook in that manner.

Another important fact was that it took only two years for the book to be translated into English, 1651 to 1653. And Nach said there is a theory being that the book was originally written for other cooks in his position and this was reconstituted as being for the "publique" when it was printed in English. I wish I could reprint the whole introduction here as it is so relevent to this discussion. But terms like bouquet garni, au natural, au bleu, a la mode, oeufs ala neige, omelet, caramel, and entire spicing regimens all appear for the first time in English.

So this left Nach and I to try and figure out what happened between 1540 and 1651 that this great cooking technique was developed. The Hyman's do not have a theory. There are a few wars but they don't believe enough to interupt the development of a cuisine. But clearly the great French cookery we rely on today happened in that 110 year period. There also seem to have been unauthorized variations of the book printed in German and Italian around that time.

That leaves the unanswered question to be, is there inherently something better about French cuisine that made it evolve during that period. And to

that end I have been sent me off to the New York Medical School library which supposedly has the best culinary library in the country. But I'm afraid this will have to wait until I return from holiday.

[Wilfrid]

Yes, I cited the publication of La Varenne in English on the thread about French cuisine - which is maybe where we should be discussing this. Two questions. Although La Varenne was a milestone, my understanding is that the foundations of a recognizably modern French gastronomy were laid in the 1730s, when writers like La Chappelle (actually published first in English) and Menon established basic building blocks like the fonds system. Did that develop not consign La Varenne to the status of a historical curiosity?

Second, why do you think important things were happening between 1540 and 1653? I just don't quite follow. I agree, La Varenne-ian cuisine may not have sprung fully formed into existence as his book came off the press, but why wasn't it a recent development? Why must it have been developing over the previous century and a half?

This is all interesting factual stuff, but I'm a bit vague about what, if anything, we're discussing now.

[bushey]

Steve P - When you do make it to the New York Medical Library are you going to be looking for culinary volumes that fill in the gap of those 110 year, hoping it will shed some light on how people were thinking about and approaching food? (And why do you suppose the best culinary library is at a medical school?)

Sounds like a fascinating outing. Wish I had the time to join you on a research field trip, though I think you should extend your search to books on the history and culture of that period. I would suspect that trade routes, feudal alliances and the Crusades are all involved somehow.

[Wilfrid]

A couple of days browing through this lot might help too.

Oh and here's the Academy of Medicine collection:

"Margaret Barclay Wilson Collection on Food and Cookery

Over 5,000 volumes and approximately the same number of pamphlets which document the history of cookery, gastronomy, nutrition and dietetics in the Western world. The materials appear in over 20 languages and range in date from A.D. 900 to the present. "

Steve, have you thought of endowing a research scholarship in the subject? You could make yourself the first fellow!

[wingding]

I may be saying something[more simply]that has been said previously,but who do you all think was doing the cooking in the homes of the wealthy centuries ago?Dan Barber?I'd think that the house cooks brought their way of cooking with them,and having access to better shopping and better kitchens,refined some of these dishes

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid - It isn't my assumption, it's the Hyman's assumption. They draw a huge inference from the fact that during those 110 years these techniques and recipes suddenly appear. They weren't there in 1540, why are they all codified in 1651. From no ragouts to 70? And to paraphrase them, much of the strategy of French technique as we know it today appears for the first time in La Varenne's book. And they clearly appear for the first time in English in 1653. But they make no assumption as to whether the evolution took place in 1542 or 1649. Just that it happened during that 100 years.

Nach postulated a theory of a class of super servents who were in the employ of nobility who could lead a life of leisure. That the recipes that La Varenne codified were a culmination of how household chefs cooked for the French aristocracy. Two things must be relevent here. There must have been a competition as to whose chefs made the "fanciest" food. But there also must have been a spirit of comraderie amongst the chefs in sharing secrets. And indeed La Varenne, who undoubtably was a great self promoter, wrote the recipes down so he could achieve fame amongst his peers.

I think we are trying to nail down what made those French guys cook so good, and how much of it is driven by indiginous peasant cuisine. Or maybe the word peasant is a red herring and indiginous will suffice? Another part of our conversation was the use of acid in food and the French being replete with wine, and then at some point tomatoes, incorporated acid into their cooking and that allowed the food to have a certain texture and velvety quality to it that the foods of other countries didn't have. Anyway it is just a theory.

Bushey - I don't suppose the best culinary library is at a medical school, it's been told to me. I can guess that it arises from food being considered medicinal once upon a time. What was the la Cointe book called, La Cuisine de la Sante? But I'm sure my field trip will be most enlightening, especially since I haven't been in a library in nearly 300 years.

[jaybee]

I supose that cooking for the family and cooking for customers or employers produced very different results. Peasant cooking, which by definition, was for the family and extended family was meant to make use of ingredients available at least cost and yet be filling, satisfying and nutritious. There was little motive or incentive to "upgrade" a dish with more expensive or esoteric ingredients or more time-consuming processes, except for festivals and celebrations.

Cooking for recompense, either as a restaurant cook or as a chef for wealthy family is where the incentive to move away from peasant recipes is greatest. The person selling meals wishes to attract customers (custom-ers, meaning people who come back as a matter of custom). To do so, he strove to create dishes that would stir their imaginations and excite them. He could aford to spend more on special ingredients, if he built the cost into his pricing. The chef for the wealthy was incented to expand his repertoire to keep his job and win the affection of the family. He also represented them in their social circle, and had a responsibility to make them look good to their high flying peers.

So when we discuss peasant dishes as the origins of certain popular haute cuisine dishes, we need to recognize the influence of the movement from home-prepared food for the peasants to the out-of-home prepared food for wealthy travelers and the rich.

Now if that sounds like I just made it all up, I did. But it seems to make sense to me.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilf - If you have a few hours one morning or afternoon, you should come with me to the medical school library and we will poke around for the answer. Then we can go have lunch at El Paso Taqueria which is around the corner. It's one of the cities better Mexican joints.

[oraklet]

steve,

"the use of acid in food and the French being replete with wine, and then at some point tomatoes, incorporated acid into their cooking and that allowed the food to have a certain texture and velvety quality to it that the foods of other countries didn't have."

heureka! or as you have said many times: "it tastes better."

[Adam Balic]

Have fun Steve, wish I could join you! While you are there you might like to look up "Catherine de Medici" and "Scappi". Varenne? Actually, some of his recipes were very interesting, post-medieval stuff. But, not much to do with modern French cooking and even less to do with French peasant cooking, which I thought were the cornerstone of French cuisine and why it is so great?

[oraklet]

hey, how about talking about farmers instead of peasants? makes more sense in the light of the last several hundred posts on these matters.

[Adam Balic]

OK you define the distiction between peasant and farmer so everybody knows what is is being discussed. I assume you mean post-revolution, or do you have information on the period before this?