A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800
Book DescriptionModern French habits of cooking, eating, and drinking were born in the Ancièn Regime, radically breaking with culinary traditions that originated in antiquity and creating a new aesthetic. This new culinary culture saw food and wine as important links between human beings and nature. Authentic foodstuffs and simple preparations became the hallmarks of the modern style. Pinkard traces the roots and development of this culinary revolution to many different historical trends, including changes in material culture, social transformations, medical theory and practice, and the Enlightenment. Pinkard illuminates the complex cultural meaning of food in her history of the new French cooking from its origins in the 1650s through the emergence of cuisine bourgeoise and the original nouvelle cuisine in the decades before 1789. This book also discusses the evolution of culinary techniques and includes historical recipes adapted for today's kitchens.Amazon Exclusive: Author Susan Pinkard on the French Culinary RevolutionI wroteA Revolution in Taste:  The Rise of French Cuisinebecause I am fascinated by the intersection of the routines of everyday life with the world of ideas.  Eating is a universal human need;  but what you eat, how you prepare it, and with whom you share it reveal a lot about who you are, what kind of society you live in, and what you believe about beauty, health, and your place in nature.Why French food?  There are a couple of answers to that question, one of which has to do with history and the other with my life.From ancient Rome through the Renaissance, cooking all over Europe was pungent, spicy, and sweet or sweet/sour, rather like North African or Middle Eastern food is today.  From Naples to London, Seville to Warsaw, cooks used local ingredients as well as imported spices to fuse layers of flavor into complex sauces that were meant to balance the elemental composition of the foods with which they were served.  The point, aesthetically as well as in terms of diet, was to civilize ingredients and to render them wholesome by transforming them in the kitchen.  Then, quite suddenly, French cooks broke with this ancient tradition.   The aim of what was called “the delicate style” was to cook and serve ingredients in a manner that preserved the qualities with which they were endowed by nature:  instead of being miraculously transformed by the cook, food was supposed to taste like what it was.  In pursuit of this new aesthetic of naturalness and simplicity, cooks developed many techniques and recipes that continue to define French cuisine to this day.  Indeed, the impact of the French culinary revolution reverberated far beyond the borders of France.  The fact that so many of us moderns wish to eat and drink in a manner that represents the variety of nature reflects our lasting attachment to the idea of authenticity that first emerged in the kitchens of the ancien régime.  Why and how had this major shift in sensibility come about?    What does the culinary revolution reveal about other aspects of modern life that were also coming into focus in 17th- and 18th-century France?  Those were the historical questions I set out to answer in this book.The other reason why I decided to write about the rise of French cuisine is that I love to eat French food and I cook it almost every day.  One of the enduring misconceptions about French cooking (especially in America) is that it is inherently fussy, expensive, and ridiculously rich.  Although such a rococo element certainly exists, especially in fancy restaurant cooking, recipes from the cuisine bourgeoise (that is, home cooking as it has evolved in France over the past 250 years) are easy and economical to make and healthy to eat:  roasted chicken with a quick deglazing sauce, inexpensive braised meats, poached fish with a little white wine, simply prepared vegetables, plain green salads, puréed soups of leeks, potatoes, and other fresh, cheap ingredients, just to name a few of my favorites.   I hope that by focusing attention on the development of this aspect of  the culinary tradition, my book will encourage readers to experiment with simple French foods.  The historical recipes, in the appendix, are a good place to start.--Susan PinkardCook up the Enlightenment:  Exclusive Recipe Excerpts fromA Revolution in TasteClick here to see authentic (and delicious!) recipesfrom eighteenth-century France.• Green Butter with Leek and Parsley (Marin)• Potage aux Herbes (Marin)• Roasted Chicken with Bitter Orange and Garlic Deglazing Sauce (Bonnefons)