Aunt Annie, in her quiet way, was so passionate about France that I couldn’t wait to live there. When I did, it was a revelation in every respect: social, political, intellectual, literary, and above all, gastronomical. I learned, to my joyful amazement, that if you avoided the student canteen with its daily special of pale green tripe, you could savor complex dishes disguised as simple fare in many of the nearby restaurants. The history of French cuisine is just that: an ever-proclaimed drive for the simple and the natural that conceals hours of trial and error before finding the formula. My late friend Julia Child offers eloquent examples of this laborious process of 10% conception and 90% perspiration in her posthumous book, My Life in France. For example, she recalls trying every one of the 200 different chicken recipes contained in the Larousse Gastronomique, and rejecting them all. At times she grew uncertain about ever finishing her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, because “Each recipe took so long, so long, to research, test, and write that I could see no end in sight” (p. 195).

The history of French cuisine is just that: an ever-proclaimed drive for the simple and the natural that conceals hours of trial and error before finding the formula.

I must admit that my first meal in a restaurant in France was far from reaching the gastronomical height that Julia enjoyed when first off the boat in Rouen in November 1948. She had an epiphany over sole meunière. I, on the other hand, in September 1959, chose to be safe and ordered a pizza. It was unrecognizable: a two-inch high crust surrounding four inches of a cheesy diameter on which two star-cross’d anchovies lay dying. As their forbears had eventually done in the seventeenth century, the French refused to follow the Italian model and fashioned their own “vision.” The Italian pizzas were as imposing as their piazzas, while the French reconceived the pie according to their intimist conception of space: compare Saint Peter’s square with La Place des Vosges.

Despite the inauspicious first repast, as a Fulbright scholar I was treated to extraordinary meals in local homes in the provincial city of Lille and across the close Belgian border. They were, to say the least, “different” from my family experiences. A series of courses, smaller portions, a more formal presentation, a choice of wines, and, above all, a wonderful orality that linked the food and the talk. Remembrance of meals past is a common theme among French convives, as is the refreshing habit of divulging personal details with friends: “se mettre à table” means both “to sit down at table” and “to open up, to confess.” As a number of French writers have said about the French at table: it’s always les mets et les mots — courses and conversation.

Le Cuisinier françois, 1654
BY La Varenne
PHOTO: Camille Sourget Librairie

Of course, not every meal inspired ecstasy. My wife and I attended a banquet for the University of Lille basketball team, for which I played center. (At 6’2” I was taller than anyone in France at that time except for General De Gaulle and he couldn’t hit the hook shot.) The main dish was undercooked quail. It evidently resented its disrespectful preparation and took out its revenge on the two of us for a couple of days.

That fateful year of 1959-60 I was occupied with finishing my PhD thesis at Princeton on the influence of Roman writers on French classical tragedy, which became my first book, Racine and Seneca. (Despite my wife’s urging, I resisted the temptation to aspire to the best-seller list by changing the title to Sex and the Single Stoic.) It was only decades later that I returned to my cultural introduction to France by analyzing the way that the great comic dramatist Molière turned food imagery into literature. Molière took good advantage of the growing interest in food preparation and service in seventeenth-century France by integrating allusions to cuisine and gastronomy in ten of his plays, from his first five-act comedy, The School for Wives (L’École des femmes) to his last, the comedy-ballet The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire). Most notably, in The Miser (L’Avare) the four soups that his chef proposes to the main character are taken textually from the four items that open the section on potages in the first modern cookbook to be published in France since the end of the Middle Ages, Le Cuisinier françois by La Varenne in 1651.

Initiating the project by marking out a comfortable space in the Reserve Book Vault of the library of the University of California at Santa Barbara where I read cookbooks from the Medieval period to the nineteenth century, I eventually spent ten years of research on anthropology, ethnology, history, sociology, literature and literary criticism. Understanding that the history of alimentation is the fundamental stuff of history itself, I investigated the choice of dishes, their preparation and cooking, service and spectacle, taste, taboo, and pleasure as precious witnesses to the march and mores of society. Since such fundamental acts had to be reflected in literature, I studied the culinary references in the work of an author who practiced his art during a period reputed to be chary of allusions to daily life. Yet, upon close examination, I found that the theater of Molière abounds in images of corporeal acts of all kinds, from eating to sex to what passed for the medical “arts” in the seventeenth century.