During the pandemic I decided to read Larousse Gastronomique from start to finish, and I did. What fun. The 1200-page tome is considered by many to be the greatest culinary encyclopedia ever assembled. Along with over four thousand recipes, there are many thousands of fascinating culinary factoids, a few of which I will share with you now.
Cockaigne
A mythical land of plenty, where men live happily without working and there is an abundance of everything. The myth, which is found in Germany and Italy, is particularly deeply rooted in Flemish tradition and dates back to a time when the specter of famine often became reality. In the legend the lucky man arrives at the land of plenty by traveling through a tunnel cut into a mountain of buckwheat flour; there he discovers a roasted pig walking about with a carving knife in its belly, a table covered with pies and tarts, hedges made of sausages, etc. and roast pigeons drop into his mouth.
Colisée (Le)
A huge establishment for entertainment that was built in 1770 near the present Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It catered to thousands of people and contained four cafes, several dance halls, an ornamental lake, shopping arcades, a restaurant with a fixed-price menu, and small indoor gardens. This leisure complex proved to be highly successful at first – Marie Antoinette went there twice! Eventually, it attracted too few people, and this, together with poor management, caused it to become bankrupt in 1780. It was demolished, and a road was named after it.
Duval (Pierre-Louis)
French butcher (born Montlhéry, 1811; died Paris, 1870) He supplied the Tuileries kitchens and owned several retail butcher’s shops in Paris. In 1860 he had the idea of creating a number of small restaurants serving a single dish – boiled beef and consommé – at a fixed price. The first ‘bouillon’, in the Rue de Montesquieu, was soon followed by a dozen others.
His son Alexandre successfully developed the chain of restaurants and made an immense fortune. A well-known figure of Parisian life nicknamed ‘Godefroi de Bouillon’ by humorists of the time, he composed a Marche de petites bonnes in honor of his waitresses, who all wore a coif of white tulle and, for the first time, replaced the traditional garçons in restaurants.
Fork fourchette
An implement usually made of metal with two, thee, or four prongs on the end of a handle, used at table either for lifting food to the mouth or for serving food. Forks are also used in the kitchen for turning food in cooking, etc.
The fork has a very ancient origin and is mentioned in the Old Testament. It was first used as a ritual instrument to grip pieces of meat destined for sacrifices; later it was used in the kitchen. According to the 11th-century Italian scholar Damiani, forks were introduced into Venice by a Byzantine princess and then spread throughout Italy. But it was Henry III of France who first introduced to the French the custom of using a two-pronged fork at the table.
restaurant
An establishment where meals are served between set hours, either from a fixed menu or a la carte. The word appeared in the 16th century and meant at first “a food which restores” (from restaurer, to restore), and was used more specifically for a rich highly flavored soup capable of restoring lost strength. The 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin referred to chocolate, red meat, and consommé as restaurants. From this sense, which survived until the 19th century, the word developed the meaning of “an establishment specializing in the sale of restorative foods.”
Until the late 18th century, the only places for ordinary people to eat out were inns and taverns. In about 1765, a Parisian “bouillon-seller’ named Boulanger wrote on his sign: “Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods”, with a motto in dog Latin: Venite ad me omnes qui stomach laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos (Come unto me, all you whose stomachs are aching, and I will restore you.) This was the first restaurant in the modern sense of the term.
One beneficial effect of the Revolution was that the abolition of the guilds and their privileges made it easier to open a restaurant. The first to take advantage of the situation were the cooks and servants from the great houses whose aristocratic owners had fled. Moreover, the arrival in Paris of numerous provincials who had no family in the capital created a pool of faithful customers, augmented by journalists and businessmen. The general feeling of wellbeing under the Directory, following such a chaotic period, coupled with the chance of enjoying the delights of the table hitherto reserved for the rich, created an atmosphere in which restaurants became an established institution.
Neal, a man in his late forties, is walking barefoot on a vast beach with his sixteen-year-old daughter Emily, who is barefoot, too. The day is sunny and warm, the ocean barely audible in the distance.
Neal: Could there be a more beautiful
day?
Emily: A few feathery white clouds
in the sky would be nice. Break up the monotony of the blue.
Neal: Ah yes. Celestial art drifting
across the cerulean.
Emily: Hey Papa?
Neal: Yes, my darling daughter?
Emily: Do you ever miss Mama?
Neal: I did for a time, and then one
day I realized I didn’t miss her anymore. I still think about her, but I don’t
miss her. Do you?
Emily: I’m sometimes keenly aware she
isn’t here, but I wouldn’t say I still miss her.
Neal: Why did you ask?
Emily: I wonder why you don’t find a
new partner. I thought maybe it was because you still felt wedded to Mama.
Neal: I don’t think so. I think I
don’t find a new partner because I’ve never
looked for a partner. Your mother, as you know, pursued me, and I think something
like that would probably have to happen again. Someone else initiating the
proceedings. I’m formidably shy.
Emily: I know. (muses) I wish I
could marry you and never have to leave when I get older.
Neal: You can live with me as long
as you want, and you don’t have to marry me.
Emily: We are kind of married
already. We just don’t sleep together.
Neal: We’re best friends.
Emily: True, but just so you know… I
have kind of fallen in love with
someone at school. Two someones actually. A boy and a girl. Well… he’s really a
young man and she’s really a young woman.
Neal: And are they also kind of in
love with each other?
Emily: No. They don’t know each
other. But they’re both kind of in love with me.
Neal: Well that’s nice.
Emily: You would be okay with me
being in a relationship with a woman?
Neal: Sure. I want you to be happy.
Just so long as she isn’t a mass murderer or a Republican.
Emily: In some ways it’s much easier
being in love with a woman. For one thing, we don’t have to worry about getting
pregnant.
Neal: Oh. Are you…
Emily: Not yet. But we’re talking
about it.
Neal: You and the young woman?
Emily: And the young man. We’re all
sixteen. It’s what sixteen-year-olds obsess about, among other things. It’s
what all the songs we listen to are about, all the books we read, movies we
see, etcetera. I don’t know if that was true when you were sixteen, but it’s true
now.
Neal: And you’re up to speed on the
whole getting-pregnant not-getting-pregnant… system?
Emily: Yes, I’m well up to speed on
that system.
Neal: Good. So… let me know if you
need money for supplies or…
Emily: (laughs) Supplies? You make
it sound like I’m going on an expedition.
Neal: You know what I mean. If you
want to consult a doctor about birth control. I’m happy to help in any way I can.
Emily: I was thinking of getting an
implant. No fuss no muss. No worry about forgetting to take the pill. Etcetera.
Neal: Well okay. Shall I make you an
appointment?
Emily: I kind of already did.
Neal: Kind of?
Emily: Did.
Neal: With Dr. Ornstein?
Emily: No, at the women’s health
clinic.
Neal: Great. And I really do appreciate
you telling me about this.
Emily: Isn’t that why you brought me
here today? To talk about this?
Neal: No. Not… specifically.
Emily: Specifically? That’s…
perplexing. And by the way, are we going somewhere or just meandering?
Neal: (laughs) One of the great philosophical
questions. Along with: What are we doing here? What is our purpose? Is there
any meaning to life? And is there meandering after death?
Emily: At my age I’m more interested
in being in love and being loved and stuff like that. So if you didn’t bring me
here today to review the facts of life, why did
you bring me here today?
Neal: What do you mean? We come to
the beach all the time. Why does this feel like I brought you here for some
special purpose? Maybe we came here because… we came here.
Emily: Papa, you are so transparent to me. I always know when
you have something important you want to talk about.
Neal: Well I don’t know if it’s that important, but it is something I’ve
wanted to tell you for a very long time.
Emily: (stops walking) What?
Neal: How we chose your name?
Emily: Mama already told me. I’m
named after her favorite poet Emily Dickinson.
Neal: Actually that’s not who you’re
named after.
Emily: (taken aback) Seriously? You
waited until I was sixteen to tell me I wasn’t named after Emily Dickinson,
after I’ve told everyone I’ve ever known I’m named after her?
Neal: Your mother asked me not to
tell you, but after she was gone I decided I would. And I was just about to tell you when you bought not
one but two Emily Dickinson
sweatshirts and spent months on that big school project writing fifty poems in
the style of Emily Dickinson, and you dressed up as Emily Dickinson, and you
did your hair like Emily Dickinson, and you made those videos of you being Emily Dickinson reading her poems,
and so… I just let it go.
Emily: This is upsetting, Papa. Why
are you telling me now?
Neal: I’m not sure. Maybe I sensed
you were becoming a sexual being and… I don’t know. I just wanted to set the
record straight before any more time passed. And I might not have said anything
about it today if you hadn’t brought up the whole meandering issue.
Emily: (sits down on the sand) So
tell me.
Neal
takes a piece of paper out of his back pocket.
Emily: You wrote a speech?
Neal: I copied something out of a
book to read to you.
Emily: Is this book the source of my
name? The true source?
Neal: Yes.
Emily: What’s the book?
Neal: Larousse Gastronomique.
Emily: That big fat cookbook?
Neal: Larousse Gastronomique is far more than a cookbook. It is an
encyclopedia of the history of cuisine, specifically French cuisine.
Emily: I’m named after a French Emily?
Neal: Yes.
Emily: Well that’s not so bad.
Unless she was some horrible queen or countess, and even that would be kind of
cool.
Neal: I don’t actually know what she
was.
Emily: Oh great. I’m named after
somebody you know nothing about?
Neal: I know you’re named after
somebody who happens to have the same first name as Emily Dickinson.
Emily: Read the cookbook excerpt.
Neal: But first I want to set the
scene.
Emily: Which scene?
Neal: The moment when we chose your
name.
Emily: Fine. Set the scene.
Neal: So your mother and I had been
married for five months. She was eight months pregnant with you.
Emily: She got pregnant before you
got married? No one ever told me that either. How do you know I’m yours?
Neal: You have my nose.
Emily: (laughs) I certainly do. Go
on.
Neal: So we were sitting on the sofa
together one evening and your mother was having cocoa and I was reading aloud
to her from Larousse Gastronomique.
Emily: How romantic.
Neal: It was, actually. Food is a very
sensual subject.
Emily: Did you do this a lot? Read
to her from the big fat cookbook?
Neal: We read aloud to each other every
item in Larousse from A to Z. It took
us three years. We finished when you were two and a half. You liked to sit at
your little table and draw with your crayons while we read aloud from the book.
Emily: That’s so sweet. I guess it
is kind of romantic. So read the thing you brought.
Neal: Well we had gotten to the Cs
on that fateful night, and I came upon the entry for conversation.
Emily: You mean like what we’re
having now? People talking to each other?
Neal: Yes and no. So… (reads) conversation a small
pastry with an almond filling. According to the Dictionnaire de
l’Academie des gastronomes, they were created at the end of the 18th
century, taking their name from the title of a popular work, Les
Conversations d’Emilie, by Mm d’Epinay (1774) They consist of covered puff
pastry tartlets filled with a rum-flavoured frangipane or with almond cream and
topped by a layer of royal icing. The tartlets are decorated with thin bands of
pastries crisscrossed over the top.
Emily: I’m named after a
tartlet?
Neal: You’re named after
Emilie from the popular work Les
Conversations d’Emilie. Your mother heard that title and said, “Oh honey, if
we have a girl, let’s name her Emily. I love that name.”
Emily: (gets up) And she
loves that name because she loved Emily Dickinson’s poetry, so really the title
of that ancient novel or whatever it was just reminded her of how much she
liked the name. So I’m not really
named after that particular Emilie but after all Emilys including Emily Dickinson.
Neal: Except not really.
Emily: Why not really?
Neal: Your mother…
(hesitates)
Emily: Tell me.
Neal: Didn’t love Emily
Dickinson’s poems.
Emily: But she told me
she did.
Neal: She told you she loved
Emily Dickinson. She identified with her as an unrecognized poet, as Dickinson
was unrecognized until after her death. But your mother didn’t like Dickinson’s poems. They were too rhymey for her.
Emily: Rhyming was the
style of the time when Emily Dickinson was alive.
Neal: I know.
Emily: So whose poems did Mama love?
Neal: Denise Levertov. Philip
Whalen. Sylvia Plath. e.e. Cummings.
Emily: Maybe I’ll change
my name to Denise Cummings or e.e. Plath.
Neal: Emily is a lovely
name.
Emily: I appreciate your
telling me the truth, Papa. I like the truth. And I have no regrets about my
Emily Dickinson phase. I was only eleven and it was a way of staying connected
to Mama even if Mama found Emily Dickinson too rhymey, which is not even a real
word.
Neal: Ryhmish?
Emily: You’re an ass.
Make it up to me somehow.
Neal: Shall we go to
Chico’s for fish & chips?
Emily: Yes, and then I
will forgive you for not telling me sooner.
Neal: I don’t think you
were ready until now. Or I wasn’t ready. Or something.
They set off together across the sand.
Emily: I think it was
more about you not being ready than me not being ready.
Neal: I think you’re
right.
Emily: You don’t have to
agree with everything I say. I won’t bite you.
Neal: So tell me about
these people you’re in love with.
Emily: I’m not quite ready
to tell you about them. I’m waiting to see if the infatuation lasts more than a
couple weeks.
Neal: I remember.
Emily: What do you
remember?
Neal: The fleeting
nature of infatuation when I was sixteen.
Emily: It’s
disconcerting how fleeting it can be. One day I’m insanely in love with
someone, the next day I find them repulsive.
