« The Book, The Cook, The Housewife and Her Maidservant: regional cookery books and transmission in southwest France during the 19 th century. », In D. J. Oddy y L. Petráňová (ed.), The Diffusion of Food Culture: Cookery and Food Education in Europe, Praga, Academia, 2005, pp. 120-126.
Creators: name: Duhart, Frédéric
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2005
Subjects: History of Food Consumption
History of French Cuisine
Cookbook History
Anthropology of Food
Regional Cuisine
France du Sud-Ouest
Cultural History

description: Various cookbooks are published in southwest France during the nineteenth century. The first to come out is Le cuisinier Durand [The Cookbook of Mr Durand] which is published in Nîmes in 1830. Twenty eight years later, an editor of Dax, a little town of Landes, offers local customers Le cuisinier gascon ou traité simplifié des substances alimentaires [The Gascon Cookbook or Simplified Treatise of Foods]. The opening of its title evokes among historians of Food a famous eighteenth-century book, but it is just a coincidence: this book has nothing to do with the work attributed to Prince of Dombes . The last decade of nineteenth century is a great time for the regional culinary publishing: another cookbook appears in Dax in 1893 – Le cuisinier landais [The Cookbook of Landes] – while the Editions Féret of Bordeaux put on sale five years later Le traité de cuisine bourgeoise bordelaise [The Treatise of plain Cooking of Bordeaux]. A book about Pyrenean cookery is also published by Lescher-Moutoué of Pau during this end of century (I do not know the date of publication the first edition of this book entitled La cuisine béarnaise &amp; pyrénéenne. Recueil des recettes de cuisine les plus usitées dans les basses &amp; hautes Pyrénées [The Cookery of Bearn and Pyrenees. Collection of the most common recipes of the two departments of West Pyrenees], but the second, that I shall use here, has come out in 1919). The contents of all these books are not really accounts of the old food practices, even though they can furnish precious indications to study them: they are culinary discourses. <br>
The nineteenth-century southwest France cookbooks don't describe hypothetical ‘authentic regional dishes’, as numerous prefaces of actual re-editions suggest, but pass particular ways of cooking on and are founded on specific intentions, which are oriented by professional or political visions concerning cookery, domestic economy or, more widely, social life. So, a complex process of transmission of culinary culture is in the heart of this literature which concerns in various degrees the three persons directly interested in the kitchen and the cookery: the cook, the housewife and the maidservant; to analyse these transmission processes, we need to employ a method both statistic and stylistic. The statistic approach, developed since the end of the seventies , makes it possible to characterize precisely the cookery proposed by a book: it enables us to compare the regional recipes with national cookbooks' and to estimate the importance of culinary innovations in the methods transmitted by the book (use of new foods, utensils or cooking techniques). A type of stylistic analyze, borrowed from political studies , allows us to precise our reflection about various aspects of regional cookery books like the use of dialectal words in the recipes; completed by an exam of the editorial and sociocultural context, it permits us to think about the motivations which lead to realize and to publish a regional cookbook in the nineteenth century.<br>
The culinary culture transmitted by regional cookbooks has various facets and could be studied by different ways. Here, we shall begin with a global outlook on the technical transmission, by characterizing the main lines of the cookery taught by the books; next, we shall consider two specials forms of passing on: Charles Durand or Alcide Bontou are chefs who write books to share their experience, while others cookbooks, like Le cuisinier landais, propose compilations of anonymous recipes. In the first group of books, cookery appears particularly an art, which people have to be initiated; within the second, it constitutes an element for the preservation of social order which must be inculcated in young housewives and, by them, in maidservants.