Food for Thought: Episode 1

You’re listening to Death in Numbers, a podcast created by the Humanities Media Project and
the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Today, we crack open two cookbooks to ask the question, when did French cuisine become synonymous
with fine dining?
I’m Amy Vidar, a graduate student interested in recovering women’s narratives and different languages
and different cultures. And I’m Carolyn Baabda. And I like looking at old cookbooks
in archives to think about women’s literacy across time. Today, our episode explores the
question, a question that we often ask each other, which is how can collaboration impact the
success of a project? How can a learning benefit from shared labor? Our first
episode in the series. Food for Thought examines how food writing shapes cultural transmission.
We analyze material objects from Archives of knowledge. Today’s story takes us all
the way back to sixteen fifty one. And that’s to the publication of lulay cuisine
You France Soir or The French Cook, a cookbook by France Soir Pier.
The lover in this cookbook established modern French cuisine and helped launch the home
cook in his preface lover and writes Dear reader and recompense. All I would
ask of you is that my book Be for You as pleasurable as it is a useful, pleasurable and
useful. That’s a pretty shocking concept for a 17th century reader that cooking
could be fun. And the wording of this preface, whoever read signals that this
book is designed to encourage cooking to be a lesar activity rather than
a book that is only helpful for professional cooks. Cooking is a hobby as a hobby. That’s
fun. What changes with Lovgren and those that follow him is access.
Before the sixteen hundreds cooking was a carefully protected set of skills monitored by guilds.
And guilds are really like labor unions today and that they regulate numerous trades. But
unlike today, these trades tended to be passed on by oral tradition. That means there wasn’t
a rulebook for how you were supposed to do your job. Rather, you had to watch
someone do their job for a very long time in order to know the specific guidelines
for your position. Guilds also did other things like organized apprenticeships so they
would set you up with somebody to learn from. They standardize membership, so they made it clear what
the rules were of your trade. They encourage collaboration and they also helped people
get jobs because trades had these complex social rules about what you could
and couldn’t do. Socio economic status. So how much money you had also really
limited how far you could go in your career. So it’s important to note Lovgren was a commoner,
so he started as an apprentice in a local kitchen. But something crazy happened. He eventually rose
to the rank of kitchen clerk. This meant that he was responsible for an entire aristocratic household’s
food service. We’re talking about a lot of food and a lot of people.
And this is before appliances were invented. Good note. And this is just
exceptional all the way around because the role of kitchen clerk was traditionally reserved for nobility and Lungren’s
humble roots. An unprecedented success inspired him to share this passion with the
general public. He made it. Why shouldn’t other people make it in placing this acquired
knowledge into a sustainable and replicable form in a printed book? varane
was really doing something special. He was giving his professional secrets to an open marketplace.
And this was pretty scandalous to share these secrets without the permission of a guild. He
made friends, then he made some enemies. So the French cook. This cookbook contains over 800
recipes divided by courses, soups and broths starters. Second course and small dishes.
This is really quite startling. If you’re opening up this book and all you’ve known before are mediæval recipe collections
because they often bundles together medicinal cures and homemade remedies right alongside the recipes.
This led to the line between potion and putting being really thin. That’s right. You could find things
like how to improve your acne alongside, how to make a soup for dinner. Mm hmm. Tasty. The other thing
that Love Runs Cookbook did is really indicated a shift from cooking for sustenance.
And instead, he really emphasized how cooking should be a development of flavors. He
eliminated these overly complex preparations and instead really wanted people to make reasonable
meals that were worth eating. He made cooking accessible by doing
dishes like omelets and biscuits and teaching readers to build flavor civilians and sauces like base smell.
He helped transition France away from the Italian style of cooking that had predominated before. And
so one of the things he did is he took local ingredients like Charlotte’s and onions, and he made
those really the foundation of French dishes. You could find them in France. And so you might as well be cooking with
them, but we’re really getting ahead of ourselves. lapper ends legacy both relies
on his place in history and the relationship between cookbooks and the history of print.
You might be familiar with cookbooks, whether you grew up with well of copies of a family favorite. Maybe Betty
Crocker splattered with coffee, perhaps wine. Let’s be serious. Or have admired them
at a distance. You can pick a cookbook out of a lineup, right? Today, cookbooks are hefty.
There are usually oversized volumes. People tend to leave them as art books on those coffee room tables.
We really don’t use them per say for cooking that we might not want to splash them with coffee or wine is
going to admire them. And usually they have those beautifully staged high resolution food
shots where it makes everything look so delightful. But food books really weren’t always
designed to be these glamorous art books. That’s right. Early cookbooks were limited by
technology. So photography did not exist in 16 51. And
instead, what they did for images were use things like a woodcuts and eventually engravings
to show readers the types of dishes they might be preparing. That’s right. There really were limitations.
But even so, these books were bestsellers. As the curator of the British Library explains
about the book we’re talking about, within seventy five years of its publication, the French cook had been reprinted
the book was marketed to every private family, even the husbandman or laboring man
wheresoever. The English tongue is or maybe used considering England’s status
at the time as the cultural backwater of Western Europe. The rapid arrival of Laverne’s book to England
signals its interest beyond its original context. Long after Love runs death, the
French cook remained an international bestseller, which was a pretty big deal. French cooks had turned
to Laverne’s manual for instruction and inspiration, and they continued doing so until the French Revolution
in 1789. Because of the unsettling events of that
revolutionary moment, people moved from the countryside into Paris. Things changed
and they were seeking work after this and they were left without the kind of family structure that had fed
them up to this point. So what did you do if you didn’t have a mom or a clerk
who was there to make you dinner? Well, what happened was chefs had migrated as well into
the city and they began opening these things called restaurants for the first time,
the novel concept of a restaurant aimed to replicate the experience of a family style meal
in this increasingly consumer culture of the eighteen hundreds. The idea of restaurants quickly spread
across the Atlantic. The first restaurant, Olaf Hall says, opened in Boston and 1794
for the duration of the 18th and 19th centuries. The concept of professional chefs remained predominantly
masculine. Meanwhile, the responsibility to feed the masses increasingly fell to women.
That’s right. So while professional chefs got to be men, women were left with feeding their seven
children and as they took on this primarily. Stick duty, which was neither skilled
nor paid labor. I’ll remind you, it became very evident that as the world became more
industrialized, really alternating periods of technological advancement and having these significant
violent conflicts, that meant that cooking really had to be something that prioritized expediency.
You had to get meals on the table and you also had to prioritize nutrition. You know, you wanted to feed
your children. And that was far more important than having a sit down seven course meal.
Since I’ve been their cookbook, you know, something to kind of compare with. Yeah. Turning
the everyday chore of cooking back into an educational but nonetheless pleasurable experience.
This is the paradox we’ve been talking about since we began. How do we make cooking pleasurable? And yet something
that is elevated fun, you might say, was going to prove challenging,
especially once we got to 1950s America. It’s right. We’ve time traveled a bit. The postwar generation,
especially in America, was enamored with modern culinary marvels, convenient
and cost effective processed food. Think of those frozen TV dinners and all the things you can make with gelatin
and time saving kitchen appliances like refrigerators and hand-held mixers. Enter
Julia Child, one of the authors of the other French cookbook On Our Table today, Mastering
the Art of French Cooking. Welcome to the French chef. I’m Julia Child. Whether
known from a well-loved family volume of her books or from her recent Hollywood treatment
by Meryl Streep in Julie and Julia, Julia Child remains a beloved food icon in
modern day America. Kitchens even in the Smithsonian. And she is not French,
which is really important, right? Julia Child is an American who helped introduce the idea
of gourmet cooking for modern audiences rather than settling for just convenience.
What you can throw in a microwave or stick in an oven? She advocated for cooking as a meticulous
process that allowed room for error and really fostered hospitality. And by that
we mean if you fell down, you got back up again. She revived interest and taste over
function and preached the value of simple local ingredients in order to develop flavors
that really had the sense of care and attention for your guests, she said. 30
minutes the table kind of girl. No, no, 30 minute with Rachael Ray. When you cook something from
her cookbook, you feel proud of yourself. That’s quite the accomplishment. To get through all of the steps that might be
surprising to learn that child did not develop an interest in cooking from a young age. Part of this delay
can be attributed the fact that her parents employed a house cook, much like growing up back in
the 17th century. Cooking was outsourced, so she didn’t really have the nostalgia of cooking
alongside family members. She wasn’t a sous chef for her mother like I was for mine. Instead,
her interest in food was rooted in the warm relationship she had with her husband Paul
and the cultural opportunities afforded to her by his career in the Foreign Service. Side
note. Maybe she was a spy. We don’t know. Julia Child was a spy. Let’s just say
she was a spy. Paul and Julia traveled around quite a bit and in fact, they were at one point stationed
in Paris, at which point child decided she would attend Le Cordon Blue. She was bored.
She had nothing to do. Why not learn how to cook? Shortly after she met chefs Simca Beck
and Louise at Bertold at the circlet Dig Armitt, a culinary club for women in Paris.
Childs eventual bestseller draw inspiration from her close friendships with these women and the time
they shared in the kitchen. So it’s important to know previous to meeting child back in, Bertold
had wanted to write this French cookbook for English speakers, but they really lacked the language skills to execute
this cultural project well. And so in 1952, after enjoying
their time cooking together in the kitchen, they decided they would start a new project. They called it juat
Gaumont or the School of the Three Gaumont. It was an informal school, if you will,
and it was held in Julia Child’s Kitchen. This school was designed for American women who were living
in Paris and wanted to learn about French cuisine. It seems like it was mostly an opportunities
for women to get around and cook and eat really good food and drink wine. Although the lessons stopped
in 1953 when Child moved to Marseilles, their collaboration was the foundation
for the seven hundred and thirty four page Encyclopaedic Cookbook published
in 1961, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In effect, the trio had managed
to translate the collaborative kitchen environment that had been developed over centuries in France
for home cooks, and they translated it for readers across the world. They found a way to make this
systematic text, like we said, 734 pages, an order
to train the next generation of home cooks. And really what this did was continue the cultural exchange
that Lovgren had begun in sixteen fifty one. Perhaps then it really shouldn’t be a surprise
that child owned two editions of Lovgren, including 1712. Copy.
The French cook and it can be found in her collection of five thousand cookbooks,
all of which you can see if you go to the Slusser in your library at Harvard. Once again, a chef’s
decision to share her knowledge with the world using the medium of a book inspired
generations to attempt professional skills from the comfort of their home kitchen. Rapidly
mastering the art of French cooking was translated into numerous languages, including Finnish, Danish,
Chinese and Spanish. In fact, a second volume was ordered for 1970. Of course,
not all translations went smoothly. Perhaps the most controversial translation was into British English.
Now I know you’re thinking how can you translate a book from English into English? In a letter dated
November 6 nineteen seventy five editor Carol Brown Janeway recalled
Julia has always been very dissatisfied with what British editors did. They entirely
changed the layout of the book, which reduced to nonsense Julia’s whole method of teaching
recipes. That’s right. They had managed to destroy the project. That child had
so carefully crafted. So for the second translation of the second volume,
letters between child and her editor Judith Jones reveal that British editors were only
allowed to convert measurements and ingredient terms. They had to remain faithful to the original
layout and text while there were translation issues in print. Her
approachable method was easily adapted into different mediums like television. Child signed
on for a cooking show, The French Chef, which premiered in 1963. The show lasted
a decade, attracting fans who appreciated child’s let’s call it unfiltered
style. Back then, live television was not on delay. So when child made a mistake,
the film kept growing. So she dropped a chicken. She has had to pick it up and keep on cooking.
Her recipes were also printed and other publications. A 1970
McCaul’s The First Magazine for Women purchased rights to serialised selected recipes
from mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume 2. However, they weren’t allowed
to print that French bread recipe. This recipe really was sacrosanct for a child.
She wanted to keep it for herself. French bread, like Gaul itself, is divided
into three parts. You’ll have the making of the dough. Then
you have the forming of the loaves and finally the baking.
And I’m going to go into the first part. First, making something as iconic as French bread approachable
for American cooks was about more than just the recipe for back Bertold and child
in the end. It was about inviting American cooks to experience French culture in their home
and its continuing legacy. Mastering the art of French cooking invites its reader to cook and
share a cultural experience in community. When Beck passed away in 1990, one
child reminisced. We were like sisters. We were a pair of cooking nuts.
She was a wonderful and generous friend. We called her last soup, our friend says, because
she was so French. Today, French cuisine remains synonymous not only with fine
dining, but also with traditions fostered in kitchens over the past four centuries. For many
Americans, French cooking conjures the image of a statuesque and boisterous child,
but it can often forget her French collaborators along the way. It’s also important to remember how
a child was building upon Laverne’s contributions to modern tastes and habits.
Whether that was the desire to cook locally, obsess over building flavors, places,
the beginning of the textual revolution of our taste buds just a bit earlier, by a bit we
mean for centuries. So the next time you make a base smell or offoreign in
season vegetable friendly to your local, don’t just reach for one book. Think about
another instead. Julia certainly did.
This has been Death in Numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project in the College
of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. We are
Amy Vidar and Caroline Barnett. Notes for the show, including links and photos can be found
on our Web site. Humanity’s Media Project Dauth Our theme music
is enthusiast by Tourre’s. Thank you for listening.