Livres en bouche: cinq siècles d'art culinaire français
Review by Barbara Santich
Livres en bouche: cinq siècles d'art culinaire français (Paris: Bibliothèque de France, Hermann, 2001), 251 pp.
Livres en bouche: cinq siècles d'art culinaire français was the title of a recent exhibition of French cookbooks (and related material) from the thirteenth to the early nineteenth century, at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris — regrettably, I missed it by about ten weeks. The next best thing to being there — and in some ways, even better — is to peruse the catalogue, also entitled Livres en bouche, loosely translatable as Table talk: five centuries of French culinary art.
The contributors to the catalogue — including Jean-Claude Bonnet, Alberto Capatti, Jean-Louis Flandrin, Philip and Mary Hyman, Bruno Laurioux, Silvano Serventi — are all distinguished scholars and specialists in French culinary history, treated here both chronologically and thematically (under such headings as Food supply; Table manners; Dietetics), in accordance with the 245 items in the exhibition. Most were books but supplementing these were paintings, samples of decorative art, menus and advertisements. For all the manuscripts and cookbooks on display, the catalogue gives a comprehensive description including bibliographic details and references to modern editions and scholarly articles where relevant. It is amply illustrated with reproductions of book frontispieces and title pages, medieval illuminations and still-life paintings.
In addition to the expected "livres de cuisine" — recipe books and manuscripts — the exhibition featured other texts of great interest to the culinary historian, such as the Tacuinum Sanitatis printed in Strasbourg in 1531 and a sixteenth-century "book of secrets" containing all the information the maîtresse de maison would need to know: how to remove oil stains, how to prevent gout, how to make fruit jellies and fruit pastes. A life of Saint Herring (published about 1510) relates how Saint Herring was delivered to the port of Dieppe and eaten there in a tavern, roast with garlic, while his brothers went to Paris where they were smoked, eaten with watercress, vinegar and mustard, cooked with onions or made into a pie. La cuisine des pauvres (1772) gave recipes for times of famine, such as bread made with potatoes. In Paris, however, fortunate citizens could patronise the confiserie Au Fidel Berger, whose 1772 poster advertised cherries in eau-de-vie, six kinds of chocolate, violet-scented cachous, orange-blossom syrup and toffee-d pistachios. The final item of the exhibition was a list of products sold in about 1812 by the Hôtel des Américains, magasin de Provence; according to Grimod de la Reynière this was not only the best shop in Paris but in the whole of Europe.
The fact that the text is in French limits the usefulness of the catalogue in Australia, but the images themselves tell a story, and for anyone researching French culinary history the references will be invaluable.
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