I am in the middle of The Passionate Epicure, a 1924 food novel by Marcel Rouf concerning a gourmet by the name of Mr. Dodin-Bouffant.
The novel raises an interesting, cross-genre question for me. I don't have The Lord of the Rings in front of me, but I remember that Bilbo is renowned for having a particularly good table. Dodin-Bouffant, in the book, is thought to be one of the foremost gourmands in France, and that reputation is not for writing or speaking about food, but for the food at home, and his discerning taste in wine and produce.
But in neither case does the gourmand in question actually cook any food. Far from it - most of The Passionate Epicure is about the process of replacing Dodin-Bouffant's deceased chef, a process that goes so poorly that Dodin-Bouffant is almost left with what Rouf paints as a terrible choice between the great gourmand donning the whites and cooking himself, or going to the mediocre restaurant in town. So from what precisely does Dodin-Bouffant's culinary reputation emanate? Picking really good cooks? Making exorbitant criticisms of others chefs? Menu design? (as to this last, the only really famous chapter of The Passionate Epicure is an account of a meal served by Dodin-Bouffant to a travelling European prince).
Why am I writing about this? Because, of course, I would like to have a culinary reputation of Dodin-Bouffant's kind, in my own small way. But the modern model of that is of a highly skilled home cook - read, Richard Olney. It intrigues me that for a man, at least, that model is of fairly recent vintage, and it has replaced an odd form of food mastery.
6/18/2009
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4 comments:
"It intrigues me that for a man, at least, that model is of fairly recent vintage, and it has replaced an odd form of food mastery."
I think it's class rather than gender based -- great hostesses were known for having great cooks, not for ever setting foot in the kitchens themselves. Now that middle and even upper class people cook their own food for most meals consumed at home, having the skills to produce the great meals is relevant to one's reputation, because otherwise one must be eating a lot of substandard food.
In countries where servants are still common, the mistress of the home must be able to have a discerning palate to know whether her servants are doing a good job (as well as having the managerial skills to simultaneously browbeat them into working hard, without causing them to leave in a huff), but she isn't expected to be chopping vegetables or stirring pots herself. My mother had no idea how to cook when she got married, because she was from an upper-middle class family that always had servants cook. It was a huge change for her to get married to my dad (who was poor and had just finished his studies) and to be expected to cook well. There was a lot of burned rice before she became the excellent cook she is today.
Also, as I recall Bilbo did do his own cooking, at least in The Hobbit. Remember the big, unwanted tea party at the beginning? The book mentions that Bilbo had baked the seed cakes.
Did the gourmands who Brillat-Savarin praises in the Physiology of Taste cook their own food? Of course not! A gourmand is praised for his ability to discern the superior preparation of food (and to fund same), not his ability to prepare it himself.
An amusing riff on this can be found in Rex Stout's Too Many Cooks (though there are unfortunately a few dated racial attitudes, unsurprising in a book published in 1938). It's a quick and pleasant read I think you might well enjoy.
Sarah - But that's my point. The Dodin-Bouffant type of gourmand, I guess, has been replaced by people like "ulterior epicure" (google him - an kind of extreme case to my mind). The "home" gourmand is quite different now. He or she prides him or herself on his or her own preparation of food at home.
I mean, part of this is obviously a story about the development of restaurants and the ease of transport. But Dodin-Bouffant disdains even the great restaurants of Geneva, as he travels there.
I think leisure and technology are implicated here. I have a book of old middle-class French recipes and I almost faint of exhaustion reading through them sometimes. Cooking used to take so very much longer and involve a whole lot more brute unpleasant labor. I think most people nowadays would consider even an afternoon spent preparing a meal to be a substantial investment and do not think of cooking as exercise. Hence, now a person professing to be interested in gourmandise can, in theory, prepare much of his own ambitious food at home, and it seems a little odd if he doesn't unless he's so high up the socioeconomic ladder that it's presumed he only spends two nights a week at home.
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