TY - JOUR
AU - Albala, Ken
AB - Abstract Culinary styles through history follow a recurring and predictable pattern shifting from complexity to simplicity and then back again. Each new aesthetic nonetheless incorporates elements, either ingredients, techniques or modes of service, from its immediate predecessor, such that the process is more dialectical than strictly oppositional. This article provides numerous concrete examples drawn from cookbooks and gastronomic literature which illustrate this complex pattern of evolution, driven largely by the process of social emulation though also influenced by economic trends, trade and the business of selling food. I propose in this article a unified theory of culinary evolution. I will attempt to explain why there appears to be a recurring oscillation between two fundamentally opposed aesthetic approaches to food. On the one hand, there are periods which favour elite cooking dominated by professional chefs, featuring exclusive, intellectualized recipes made with exotic ingredients and complex, often scientific techniques. Also typical are dishes made of one ingredient disguised as something else. On the other hand, there are periods which favour simple rustic fare based on traditional, native techniques and prepared without fuss or excessive garnish. Such food is considered honest, down to earth or ‘natural’. As descriptive terms for each approach, the following antonyms capture various aspects of this opposition: ornate versus simple, exotic versus local, professional versus homemade, sophisticated versus honest, innovative versus traditional, artificial versus natural, formal versus casual, elitist versus populist, daring and challenging food versus comfort food. In these respective periods practitioners are referred to as either chef or cook, and cooking itself is considered either an art or a craft. These same polarities hold true for all the arts, music and literature. Furthermore, never is any given period entirely dominated by a single set of aesthetic values. There are always plain and fancy restaurants, elite and homespun cookbooks and recipes. But I argue that styles do tend to lean heavily in one direction or the other, in recognizable patterns that can be designated as distinct stylistic periods, just as they are in the other arts. There are always, as would be expected, minority voices bucking the general trend, naturalistic practitioners during times of great artifice, and vice versa. Nonetheless a dominant aesthetic pervades each period, in professional and home kitchens, cookbooks, gastronomic literature and even products devised by the food industries. These polarities are easily recognized at various points throughout history, most notably our own, as we have been gradually leaving a period of formal, elitist, perhaps even obscurantist dining in the era of so-called molecular gastronomy and have entered a phase of do-it-yourself, homespun, local and traditional nose-to-tail cooking. Although it may be tempting to align these distinct periods to economic trends, they do not always match neatly in chronological terms. There is no doubt that in booming economies formal dining and extravagance dominates, and in years of economic slump, when it appears unseemly to spend a fortune on a meal in a fancy restaurant, the simple aesthetic comes forward. Nonetheless, this would imply that taste and style merely react to levels of expendable income. I argue, on the contrary, that the oscillation between these poles has an internal logic more dependent on social emulation and an inherent tendency for styles to ‘burn out’ after becoming too popular and accessible, when they no longer confer distinction. As for the timing of these switches in taste, nowadays it may be as short as a decade or so; earlier in the twentieth century it seems to have taken several decades; and many centuries ago it took perhaps three or four hundred years for styles to shift. The rate of change is entirely linked to the speed and effectiveness of communication and, like everything else, fashions change more rapidly today because we learn about trends more quickly and tire of them equally swiftly. Styles do not merely replace each other in random order either. Each opposition in a sense incorporates elements of its polar opposite, so that something entirely new is created, in a process that appears to be dialectical. A recent example illustrates this point nicely. Until recently Ferran Adrià was experimenting with his techno-emotional cooking, highly intellectual deconstructions, in-jokes depending on the diner's knowledge of food – and, of course, it was extremely elitist and expensive. To him the provenance of ingredients was not important. This cuisine could be replicated anywhere with centrifuges, alginates and CO2 canisters. And, of course, it was. Many of the secrets were let out of the bag when Nathan Myhrvold published Modernist Cuisine. This style suddenly began to seem clichéd and hackneyed. When anyone can purchase a home molecular gastronomy kit or liquid nitrogen to make olive oil ice cream, the allure suddenly fades among the cognoscenti. El Bulli not only closed its doors in July 2011, but the cooking literally became a museum exhibition in London in the summer of 2013 at Somerset House. Adrià's successors needed a different spin reflecting the new aesthetic Zeitgeist and this was supplied by René Redzepi at Noma who foraged for local ingredients, made reference to native traditions and casualized the service. Almost all the temples of molecular cuisine also opened scaled-down bistros. But notice, high-tech machines are still used at Noma; in a sense this latest iteration of experimental cuisine is the synthesis of what were two diametrically opposed aesthetics. Another curious phenomenon, which attests to the degree in which this is a dialectical process, is how certain features seem to recur in every other period. If we look at what is happening now in terms of local, sustainable, natural, organic, traditional, health-conscious, real food, there are distinct parallels in the hippy era or counterculture cuisine of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. This is simply because many of those values were co-opted by the food industry and spun into products marketed as ‘all natural’ and additive free. 1 They became a regular part of most people's daily food; that is, until someone realized that there was nothing natural about these products at all, and devised an even more natural alternative (whatever that term means). This is important for two reasons: first, because this phenomenon is not restricted to fine dining alone, but affects consumption at every level of society. Moreover, sometimes elite fashions trickle down, but sometimes popular tastes ferment and bubble upward as well. Second, this dialectical process explains why history appears to repeat itself; or rather, the aesthetic is never precisely the same – perhaps it is best to say that history has a distinct echo (or, as misattributed to Mark Twain, history rhymes). So our preoccupations today bear a striking resemblance to those of the nineteen-sixties, which in turn resemble those of the early twentieth century and the natural food movement in the era of Kellogg, which are in fascinating ways similar to Sylvester Graham's ideas in the early nineteenth century, or to Thomas Tryon's in the seventeenth century. I am describing here the historical gastronomic echo – or perhaps burp is a better metaphor. To flesh out this theory, some concrete examples will be apposite. We should again keep in mind that the shift is gradual and never entirely in one direction or another. Nor is it true that cookbooks accurately reveal what people actually ate, although they do reflect values and aspirations. It is safe to say that there are periods when one style dominates. The sophisticated, intellectualized, elitist, historicist periods in which cooking is considered an art and the practitioner a heroic creative genius include the late middle ages or international Gothic at the time of Taillevent, 2 the Mannerist style of the sixteenth century with chefs like Bartolomeo Scappi, 3 the Victorian era roughly from Carême 4 to Escoffier, 5 and the molecular gastronomy era. It is not coincidental that each of these produces its own celebrity chefs, who often become well known through best-selling cookbooks. Each of these is followed by a period of radical shift in taste (radical in every sense of that word, both in returning to the roots of cooking, and ironically in eating radishes), which is decidedly simpler, less affected and artificial, more closely tied to locality and tradition. It often claims to be healthier and more natural as well. Victorian culinary frippery and exoticism was replaced by the solid Arts and Crafts in home cooking. Mannerism was replaced by the more direct and less spice obsessed early Baroque of the seventeenth century. The balanced and rational cuisine of classical Greece was replaced by Hellenistic and Roman extravagance. Every generation defines itself in opposition to its predecessors, so there is a predictable progression from one aesthetic to the other. The best example to start with is drawn from classical antiquity. There exist only two extensive culinary texts from the ancient West, but they illustrate this process well. The first is Archestratus' Hedypatheia or Life of Luxury which survives mostly in fragments within Athenaeus' Deipnosophists, compiled several centuries later. 6 Nonetheless, from Archestratus' text, mostly about fish, we get a distinct culinary aesthetic. For Archestratus it was not the complexity of cooking or innovation that most impresses, but rather the quality and freshness of ingredients in their pristine state, and cooking them simply, without so much fuss, to emphasize their natural flavours. For example, speaking of the amia, probably a kind of bonito, he instructs his pupil Moschus just to wrap it simply in fig leaves with a sprinkle of oregano and to cook it gently on the embers of a fire – no cheese or fancy nonsense, which would only ruin the flavour of the fish. This is a connoisseurship not based on wealth or extravagance (though perhaps a hefty travel budget to find the best ingredients) but rather on an appreciation for food in its pure unadulterated form. He similarly speaks of barley: ‘the best to get hold of and the finest of all, cleanly bolted from barley with a good grain, is in Lesbos, in the wave-surrounded breast of famous Eresos. It is whiter than snow from the sky: if the gods eat barley groats then Hermes must come and buy it for them from there’. There could not possibly be a starker contrast in the cookbook attributed to Apicius, the first-century gastronome. 7 The text was probably compiled in the fourth or fifth century, but it does seem to reflect taste in this earlier period since its recipes are mentioned in many other contemporary texts and are associated with Apicius – dishes like dormice dipped in honey and sprinkled with poppy seeds, flamingos' tongues, sows' wombs. In brief, this was a cooking dependent on exotic rarities from the far-flung corners of the empire, a multitude of contrasting flavours, combinations of honey, fish sauce, vinegar and pepper that would have provided a riot of taste sensations for seriously jaded Roman palates. Imperial cooking continued to grow in complexity precisely because there was a great deal of social mobility and nouveaux riches were constantly imitating their social superiors, the patrician class. Petronius' Satyricon8 is precisely about this process, in which the former slave Trimalchio earns a fortune, tries to pass as a man of taste by throwing a wild dinner party and ends up making a complete fool of himself. My favourite part is when the diners slice open a pig and out tumbles a pile of cooked sausages and black puddings. The story is Petronius' warning to upstarts. I mention it here precisely because it reveals the engine that drives culinary innovation. When you have exhausted every possible exotic ingredient, exploited every new technology, devised so many novel dishes with sophisticated in-jokes (like Trimalchio's zodiac of dishes, with kidneys for Gemini, beef for Taurus, mullet for Pisces, etc.), when you have laid out such a perverse quantity of food in numerous courses, where do you go from there? The new sophistication that maintains social distinction is simplicity, appreciating rustic, homespun, honest and unaffected food without a lot of fuss or excessive seasoning. This is exactly what the poet Juvenal suggests in his Satire XI 9 when he tells a friend to forget about extravagant dinner parties of the kind that reduced Apicius to poverty, and invites him instead to his country estate where they will dine on very different fare: Here's what we're going to have, things we can't get in a market. From a field I own near Tivoli – this you can count on – The fattest kid in the flock, and the tenderest, one who has never learned about grass, nor dared to nibble the twigs of the willow, With more milk in him than blood; and mountain asparagus gathered by my foreman's wife, after she's finished weaving. Then there will be fresh eggs, great big ones, warm from the nest. With straw wisps stuck on the shells, and we'll cook the chickens that laid them. Obviously this is a reactionary statement within Roman culture and does not represent the dominant aesthetic of the period. But it is a good illustration of how influence from the bottom up constitutes a new kind of sophistication that maintains social distance. You need your own land and leisure to appreciate these kinds of simple rustic joys, but importantly most people would not understand the appeal – until this becomes the dominant style and complexity comes in once again. In the subsequent examples I think this is exactly what happened. Next, another excellent example hails from the mid sixteenth century when the cooking aesthetic was very similar to developments in the other arts. This period has been described as Mannerist. The term denotes that the balanced rational spaces, mathematical perspective, and accurate anatomical musculature of the Renaissance gave way to exactly the opposite: illogical space, exaggerated musculature and fantasies, and extremely sophisticated and obscure references that are intended to titillate only those in the know. Think of Parmigianino, Giulio Romano, Bronzino. 10 Exactly the same taste governs cooking from the fifteen-twenties to the middle of the century. Exotic and rare ingredients like coral and pearls make their way into cooking, as well as a kind of polyphony of flavours. Sugar and cinnamon end up on practically every dish and butter is used with an incredibly profligate hand for the first time in history. Little elegant pastries abound, filled with unlikely ingredients; pies, one including tuna eyeballs; and the number of courses in a banquet swells to a dozen, with a good score of dishes in each, and lasting twelve hours or more. The most representative Mannerist cookbook is the Banchetti of Cristophoro di Messisbugo in Ferrara, printed in 1549, 11 but contemporary cookbooks like the Livre fort excellent, the Proper Newe Book of Cokerye and Iodoco Willich's Ars Magirica also reflect this Mannerist aesthetic. 12 To understand these cookbooks, I think it is important to note that they normally come from relatively minor courts, not major powerhouses like Madrid or Paris. In a sense they are trying their hardest to show off; in the case of Messisbugo, with the sheer volume of food but also with ingenious twists on ingredients. For example, one ingredient might appear in a different guise in every single course: eels in a pie, in a soup, in a salad, in gelatine, in a pudding, roasted, boiled, etc. Each one would be seasoned with a different set of spices, cooked with a different implement, or done in such a way as to pique the curiosity of the diners who are able to ‘get’ the in-jokes. It is all about displaying the ingenuity of the chef, whose portrait always graces the opening pages. This style pushes cooking to its absolute culinary limit, with such extraordinary sophistication and sometimes perversity that there is really nowhere else to go. After the publication of Bartolomeo Scappi's massive encyclopaedic Opera in 1570, I think that is exactly the case. Other factors had an influence. The Council of Trent had a decidedly sobering effect. Interestingly Italian authors turn to topics like banquet management and carving after this. In the early seventeenth century an entirely new aesthetic of simplification appears, not, as is often claimed in culinary histories, in France at first, but in Spain. Spain in general was less profligate than Italy, but the Baroque cookbooks of the early seventeenth century begin to move away from the heavily spiced, sweet and sour concoctions of the previous century. The most important cookbook of this time is Francisco Martìnez Montiño's Arte de Cozina of 1611. 13 The author says specifically in his prologue that what has been written lately in other cookbooks is absolutely terrible. Here he means Diego Granado's pirated translation of Scappi. He believes that the pies contain a mishmash of ingredients – chestnuts, figs and truffles, combinations of flavours that do not go together, like sour ingredients with milk or cheese. So he has decided to write a new cookbook with proper pairing of flavours. The author does indeed have a light hand with spices, in ways that anticipate the so-called revolution in taste that takes place several decades later in France with La Varenne. In any case, this early Baroque cookery constitutes an oscillation in the direction of simple foods that taste like themselves, sauces that are based on the main ingredient rather than contrast with it. I would say that the heightened emotional intensity and focus is much the same as in Baroque painting, especially Caravaggio and Velázquez. In the paintings the use of light and shadow and dramatic composition helps the viewer to pinpoint the important action. In much the same way highlighting one particular flavour in a dish, accented subtly with other flavours, helps the diner to appreciate and concentrate on the main ingredient. There is a passage where Martìnez Montiño describes making chorizo sausages and he says the seasoning should be very subtle: ‘Eating them cooked, there should be so little vinegar that that you can't sense it before eating them’. 14 Another example of this opposition, from a completely different era, is a Victorian cookbook, Mrs. A. B. Marshall's Cookery Book published in 1888. 15 It captures well the obsession with what I like to call frou-frou in this period, a preoccupation with decoration for its own sake, even a horror vacui. Mrs. Marshall recommends dishes simply for their ‘daintiness’ and elegant presentation. She is also a shameless social aspirant. The dishes are named for nobles like the Rothschilds or labelled ‘royale’. As Nicola Humble puts it, ‘Mrs. Marshall mercilessly tweaks and decorates her individually portioned food, and includes many recipes for food disguised as other food’. 16 She uses fancy aspic moulds to form swans, fussy dishes meant to be admired rather than taste good. Every dish is primped with little coloured piped rosettes, mousselines or gold leaf as decoration. She even invented new dishes, perverse concoctions with bizarre combinations of flavour. This is food not only as spectacle, but dishes that will especially appeal to social climbers who want to show off. Most interestingly Mrs. Marshall also sold equipment and colourings, and her own brand of curry powder, so people could purchase social status and then impress their guests at dinner parties. There was no way that this kind of cooking could last, especially when it became mass produced and was sold commercially. Within a single generation a dramatic change of style is evident in other cookbooks, even within those that had undergone multiple editions. For example, the preface of the second edition of Arthur Kenney-Herbert's Common Sense Cookery for English Households reads: During the period that has elapsed since the first edition of this book was published, the Art of Cookery has advanced, and Fashion, which always influences administration of the table, has changed. People of taste now expect a short but carefully thought-out menu, simplicity in the treatment of the dishes of which it is composed, soups and sauces neither overpowered with loaded wines nor adulterated with ready-made specialities, and entrées without the colourings and frippery which in the earlier nineties gained favour with many who knew no better. 17 That is, the nouveaux riches of the gilded era, who had money but no real taste, had by 1905 come to tone down their vulgarity, and forced the author practically to rewrite the book, as he himself claims. On the topic of garnishing, the author is adamant that there is a difference between it and ornamentation, with the latter to be condemned as useless, a ‘high-class device squeezed out of a bag in diverse colours, to be scraped off the thing that it adorns, and left on the side of the plate untasted’. 18 His use of the term ‘high-class’ obviously points to social pretension – no member of this class would describe their own food this way. But his larger point is that garnishes should be an integral part of the dish; they are functional, but should not be excessive; and the quality of the ingredients they are made of is just as important as the main ingredient of the dish. The aesthetic, as in the Arts and Crafts style, is for integrity of material, utility and practicality. Interest in food was integral to many Arts and Crafts thinkers. Think of the passages in William Morris's News from Nowhere where, as a time traveller, he imagines the transformation of London years after a revolution in the nineteen-seventies. 19 Along the banks of the Thames, now devoid of hideous factories, the protagonist notices salmon nets, well-tended gardens and attractive houses. The breakfast he enjoys in one of them includes fresh unadorned strawberries and ‘bread [which] was particularly good, and was of several different kinds, from the big, rather close, dark-coloured, sweet tasting farmhouse loaf, which was most to my liking’. Fresh food appears in market scenes, including baskets of fresh fruit. Of course the people are healthy, robust and attractive on such a simple wholesome diet. Very interestingly the great American furniture-maker of this period, Gustav Stickley, also ran a farm in New Jersey where students could go from the city to learn how to plant vegetables. People could visit, see the plants and animals and eat a meal prepared with the local produce – a remarkable echo down to the present. Another excellent example of this gastronomic polarity comes from Italy in the early modern era. Here the situation is complicated by the fact that Italians, specifically in the kingdom of Naples, did not follow French fashion in the late seventeenth century but did in the later eighteenth. However, two cookbooks, both written in Naples, beautifully exemplify the shift I am describing. The first is Antonio Latini's Lo scalco alla moderna published in two parts in the sixteen-nineties. 20 It is a perfect example of late Baroque cooking, when ornamentation (in food as in wigs) became absolutely perverse. The fashion of the day was grand elaborate presentations mounted on platters, as well as perfumed food, especially with musk and ambergris. The use of garnishes, with ingredients like cockscombs, testicles, bone marrow and gooseberries, borders on the ridiculous. Take, for example, a recipe for veal's head, which is boned and garnished with herbs and flowers, but not before being filled with a stuffing consisting of beaten veal flesh, little mouthfuls of sweetbreads, slices of prosciutto, sausages, poultry livers, egg yolks, grated cheese, mozzarella, cream, pieces of veal tongue, eyes and cooked brains, bits of kidney, truffles, pine nuts, candied citron, spices, mostaccioli biscuits, marjoram, and a perfumed rose or orange water. This is all half cooked then roasted in an oven, moistened with cream, and sprinkled with sugar, lemon juice or various other seasonings. Clearly more is better here. The idea is to titillate every sense with a barrage of stimuli. The more exotic the ingredients the better. It is also worth mentioning that Latini wrote the very first recipe using the exotic tomato. Let us contrast this with Il cuoco galante by Vincenzo Corrado, published a century later in 1786. 21 Corrado was partly influenced by the French fashion for simplification, paring down recipes so that they taste like themselves rather than extraneous flavourings, which in France was called nouvelle cuisine in the mid eighteenth century. But he also introduces simple local dishes. There is still the stuffed veal's head with several different cooking options, but the ingredients have been radically cut back, maybe to include only truffles, mushrooms and herbs. Another version uses grated parmesan, raw eggs, tarragon and parsley. The idea is to accentuate rather than obscure the flavour of the main ingredient. Another version parboils the head, roasts it and serves it simply with agresta (verjuice). To use a musical metaphor, the flavours here harmonize, much like music in the era of Mozart, rather than create counterpoint, as in the Baroque. The same could be said for the neoclassical architecture of the period; order and balance and reason, with spare embellishment, as contrasted to the Baroque riot of swags, putti with trumpets, curlicued doodads and frou-frou. Most interestingly Corrado has an entire section devoted to Il vitto pitagorico, meaning vegetarian fare, both for fasting days but also in the interest of health: ‘There is no doubt that this diet seems more natural for man, and that the use of meat is harmful’. 22 A book of the same name, advocating vegetarianism, had been published a few years earlier by Antonio Cocchi. It is a recurring feature of the simple, natural diet phase to pay greater attention to vegetables and sometimes directly to advocate vegetarianism. Think of the era of Kellogg or the nineteen-sixties again. To show that these shifts in aesthetics do not merely revolve around elite tables, nor are they only about complexity versus simplicity, I would like to offer another example drawn from more recent history, highlighting the contrast between two populist cookbooks that I think capture the spirit of their respective eras. The first was published in 1951 by a woman named Poppy Cannon. The entire premise of the book is that everything could be cooked using the contents of cans. It is called The Can-Opener Cookbook. 23 And it was not meant to be simple food, quite the opposite. In the introduction the author claims there will be ‘complicated specialties’ and that, ‘armed with a can opener, I become the artist-cook, the master, the creative chef’. The book is entirely for women who want to throw impressive dinner parties to reflect their bourgeois values but do not have the time to do all the prep work – so the can comes to the rescue. These are not quick or easy, though; they are primped and garnished in a way that I would argue does the same as the Baroque dishes above. (Note, interestingly, the convergence of hair styles too.) For example, in the introduction Cannon says that a simple can of meatballs in gravy can become Kofta-Ka-Kari by adding curry powder, a well-crushed clove of garlic, dried parsley, thyme, marjoram and rosemary. Heat and serve inside a ring of cooked rice, decorated prettily with French fried onions (another excellent canned speciality) – and pass the chutney please, and as many other curry accompaniments as are handy: crisp, crushed bacon, coarsely chopped nuts, India relish, grated coconut, chopped hard-boiled eggs, green onion, green pepper. 24 Most importantly the cookbook is entirely about social aspiration, throwing ‘company dinners’ for the boss so that your husband can land that promotion. And that means exotic international meals, garnished with wild abandon, and using modern science (in this case canning) to speed the whole process along. In some of the recipes it seems that Cannon consciously looks back to the Victorian era, for example Finnan Haddie Delmonico, ‘one of the most famous dishes of the Gay Nineties’, uses canned finnan haddie, condensed cream of mushroom soup, eggs, parsley and tabasco sauce – all simply heated together in a chafing dish. It is no wonder that the children of this generation wanted to cook from scratch, and use whole fresh ingredients without preservatives and additives. Fast forward twenty-five years to the hippie generation, to Molly Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook.25 There is not a can or convenience food in sight, not an ounce of meat anywhere. Here are rustic vegetable soups, green leafy salads, sauces based on tofu, chutneys that do not come from a jar, home-made breads and a whole slew of vegetarian main courses. This was righteous, earnest and wholesome fare, for a generation that had come to distrust mass-produced corporate food; and, of course, it was part of an entire counter-culture ideology, which I would argue bubbled up to become at least in part mainstream. Mass-produced health food sold this aesthetic, ironically dialectically combining two complete opposites, creating something entirely new. We have seen the same process today with organic food. What started as small scale and anti-corporate morphed into the opposite, so that organic, bagged designer salad is all produced in one valley in California by a few huge companies. Walmart is now the largest supplier of organic vegetables and if you carefully scour the snack aisles you will find products like organic Cheetos. It is not merely that corporations will sell whatever anyone will buy, but that in a real sense the aesthetic and ethic of organic food has permeated the popular consciousness. It was exactly the same process when Kellogg's whole-grained health food became mass-produced breakfast cereals, or when the fashion for rustic raw salads caught on in the era of John Evelyn, who composed a whole book on them, the Acetaria, at the end of the seventeenth century. 26 Perhaps no author better recognizes these shifts in taste and their dialectical nature than François Marin in his Dons de Comus of 1739. 27 In the preface, written by two Jesuit priests Pierre Brumoy and G. H. Bougeant, it is mentioned that while twenty years earlier people followed what is called the ‘cuisine ancienne’, a decided shift in taste had taken place, ushering in ‘modern cuisine’: ‘Modern Cuisine is established on the foundations of the ancient, but with less fuss, less pomp, and with as much variety, but more simple, more honest, and perhaps even more wise. Ancient cuisine was very complicated, to an extraordinary degree’. They then go on to compare cooking to chemistry, describing how flavours are reduced to their essences and then mixed together, in the same way that painters make colours homogeneous, or as in music – ‘une harmonie de tous les gouts réunis ensemble’. This aesthetic seems to have captured the public attention. Dining becomes more intimate, fewer courses are presented, spices are definitively banished from savoury courses in a process that had only begun with La Varenne, and likewise sugar is only found in desserts. Reduced stocks based on the main ingredient replace sauces with contrasting flavours and a profusion of garnishes. This trend finds its logical conclusion a few decades later with the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's treatise on natural education entitled Emile. 28 In it he has his young pupil run barefoot, learning directly from nature rather than from books. Most importantly, he is fed simple rustic food – bread and cheese, fruits and vegetables – rather than pastries and delicacies that will ruin his health. Rousseau says ‘it is only the French who do not know how to eat, since so special an art is required to make dishes edible for them’. At one level Rousseau inspires the entire Romantic movement but equally a new approach to food, an aesthetic that ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man’ – which includes cooking. The continual oscillation between these two aesthetic extremes is partly the result of styles becoming tired, clichéd or overwrought, and this is true of the complex as well as the simple approach to food. It also stems from a need to maintain social distinction and taste, and once a style becomes too popular chefs need to reinvent cuisine, sometimes with their own creative innovations, but at other times by effecting a return to traditional cookery, which is why culinary styles do seem to echo through the ages. Footnotes 1 See W. J. Belasco , Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, 1966–88 ( New York , 1989 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 2 The Viandier of Taillevent: an Edition of All Extent Manuscripts , ed. T. Scully ( Ottawa , 1988 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 3 Bartolomeo Scappi , Opera ( Venice , 1570 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 4 M. A. Carême , L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle (5 vols., Paris , 1833 –47). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 5 G. A. Escoffier , Le Guide Culinaire (4th edn., Paris , 1921 ); Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC G. A. Escoffier , Memories of My Life , trans. L. Escoffier ( New York , 1997 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 6 Archestratus , The Life of Luxury: Europe's Oldest Cookery Book , trans. J. Wilkins and S. Hill ( Totnes , 1994 ); Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Athenaeus , The Learned Banqueters , trans. S. D. Olson (8 vols., Cambridge, Mass. , 2007 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 7 Apicius , trans. C. Grocock and S. Grainger ( Totnes , 2006 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 8 Petronius , The Satyricon and the Fragments , trans. J. P. Sullivan ( Harmondsworth , 1965 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 9 Juvenal , The Sixteen Satires , trans. P. Green ( Harmondsworth , 1998 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 10 J. K. G. Shearman , Mannerism ( Harmondsworth , 1967 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 11 Cristophoro di Messisbugo, Banchetti ( Ferrara , 1549 ). 12 Livre fort excellent de cuisine ( Lyons , 1542 ); A Proper Newe Book of Cokerye (1545?); Iodoco Willich , Ars Magirica ( Zurich , 1563 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 13 Francisco Martìnez Montiño , Arte de Cozina ( Madrid , 1611 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 14 Martìnez Montiño , p. 202 . 15 A. B. Marshall , Mrs. A. B. Marshall's Cookery Book ( 1887 ). 16 N. Humble , Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food ( 2005 ), p. 21 . 17 A. R. Kenney-Herbert , Common Sense Cookery for English Households ( 1905 ), introduction. 18 Kenney-Herbert , p. 87 . 19 W. Morris , News from Nowhere, and Selected Writings and Designs , ed. A. Briggs ( 1986 ). 20 Antonio Latini , Lo scalco alla moderna ( Naples , 1692 , 1694; repr. Lodi, 1993). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 21 Vincenzo Corrado , Il cuoco galante ( Naples , 1786 ; repr. Bologna, 1990). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 22 Corrado , Il cuoco galante , p. 125 . See also Vincenzo Corrado , Del cibo pitagorico ( Naples , 1781 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 23 P. Cannon , The Can-Opener Cookbook ( New York , 1952 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 24 Cannon , p. 2 . 25 M. Katzen , The Moosewood Cookbook (rev. edn., Berkeley, Calif. , 1992 ). Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 26 John Evelyn , Acetaria: a Discourse of Sallets ( 1699 ; repr. Totnes, 1996). 27 F. 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TI - Toward a historical dialectic of culinary styles
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/1468-2281.12073
DA - 2014-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/toward-a-historical-dialectic-of-culinary-styles-8AMx0ISTLF
SP - 581
EP - 590
VL - 87
IS - 238
DP - DeepDyve
ER -