Commenting on my post on restaurants yesterday, Jeff Bell reminds us that:
Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau was pivotal to the emergence of the restaurant for it was he who first proffered bouillon broths as a restorative - restaurer in French and hence restaurant. In this way, Roze was able to circumvent the challenges of the guild to the selling of broths and sauces.
Barbara Santich tells a complementary tale in the Oxford Companion to Food:
At this time [i.e. around 1760] the word 'restaurant' meant a restorative beverage, such as a thin soup. Places supplying such foods were known as 'bouillons'. In 1765 the owner of one of these, a man by the name of Boulanger, added to his menu a dish of sheep's feet—pieds de mouton à la sauce poulette (a kind of white sauce enriched with egg yolks). He was immediately attacked by the corporation of traiteurs, who accused him of selling a ragout, a dish they considered theirs by right.
As I recalled yesterday, Boulanger was vindicated because the sheep's feet had not been cooked in the sauce—it was a sauced dish, not a ragout.
This opened the way for the establishment of a new style of eating house and, incidentally, made sheep's feet à la poulette a kind of cult dish, which even appeared on the royal table.
Restaurants in those early days served delicacies to snobs who held their noses in the air. Following up on Jeff's reference to Rebecca Spang's The Invention of the Restaurant, I found Vera Rule's amusing review in the Guardian.
Spang reveals the restaurant's first true author: Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, "friend of all the world", an entrepreneur who edited an annual business directory in which he recommended himself as the "king's restaurateur" and founder of the first "house of health". . . Roze and his followers adopted from the scientists a digestive language of "phlogistons" fermenting balefully in the gut as a response to heavy eating, particularly of meat; and of bouillons, long-simmered, thin quintessences of many carnal proteins that were promoted as a medical preparation in lieu of lumbering repasts. Chic stockpots ladled out the restoratives, or restaurants, source of the name.
From Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the era's creative consultant, Roze borrowed the concept of sensibility - the idea that the highest humans were persons of feeling, sensitive of soul, who had "visceral responses to any and all stimuli" - nervous physical reactions to "beautiful sunsets, resolute orphans, Roman ruins" or a lump of roast duck plonked on the common table at the second sitting for dinner. Truly precious Parisian souls proved their superior weak chests by sipping a teeny porcelain bowl of consommé at late hours instead of munching a hearty evening meal with the morons.
This, of course, did not last. For what immediately came to mind was another review, this time by Edmund White, writing in the New York Review of Books (pay-wall alert) of a book called Balzac's Omelette by Anka Muhlstein. White notes:
To get a good meal, in Balzac’s world, the characters must go to the provinces. There they may not have the same choice of luxurious foods but the ingredients, at least, will be fresh. In this way Balzac was a bit like us: he prized fresh food served simply. He didn’t like elaborate sauces. For him a simple dish of haricots verts could be the acme of a healthy meal, whereas a later chef, Escoffier, thought the glory of French cuisine was that no ingredients were recognizable after they’d been prepared and cooked.
Austere while writing, Balzac tended to binge eat when he had just finished a book. And his binges could be satisfied in a restaurant, which, as we just saw, catered only a few decades earlier to "precious Parisian souls". Here is Muhlman's account:
[once he’d completed a book and the proofs were sent off to the printer,] he sped to a restaurant, downed a hundred oysters as a starter, washing them down with four bottles of white wine, then ordered the rest of the meal: twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridge, a Normandy sole, not to mention extravagances like dessert and special fruit such as Comice pears, which he ate by the dozen. Once sated, he usually sent the bill to his publishers.
If there is a serious philosophical point to this, it is that the evolution of categories can bring contradictory results.
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