the french kitchen in the 1650s - cambridge university press

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CN 4

CT The French Kitchen in the 1650s

A-Head What Readers Found in La Varenne and

Bonnefons

Between the covers of Le Cuisinier françois readers found recipes that carried out the

program of delicate cooking on several fronts. There were recipes for dishes with

familiar names – such as poivrade sauce for roasted meat, teals in hippocras, and pies

of meat and fish – that were adapted in light of a culinary sensibility that preferred

straightforward flavors to complex ones scented with aromatic spices. Other dishes

used ingredients that had been unfamiliar or inaccessible to previous generations. In

addition to the large selection of vegetables previously mentioned, La Varenne

published recipes for more than forty kinds of fish and seafood, the majority of which

were saltwater varieties (older cookbooks had relied heavily on a few freshwater

species, so the presence of so many ocean fish suggests how much more

sophisticated the Paris market had become). The recipes carefully adjust cooking

methods, seasonings, and sauces to compliment the character and quality of the

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Comment [lh43]: Author: This heading feels a little unclear and imprecice. I’d suggest changing to something to the effect of “The Recipes of La Varenne and Bonnefons” or “La Varenne and Bonnefons: Innovations and Old Favorites.”

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principle ingredient – both pike and perch are prepared with sauces thickened with

butter and egg yolks, but the details of how these are concocted are unique. La

Varenne explained how to make ragouts thickened with roux, a paste of flour sautéed

in fat that was itself a recent invention, and silky sauces emulsified with butter (either

white or brown) or a combination of butter and egg yolks, precursors of modern

beurre blanc, beurre noir, and members of the hollandaise family. He also

recommended sauces that were nothing but cream reduced until it was thick enough

to coat vegetables.

Bonnefons’s books continued in this vein, with a few differences in emphasis.

His recipes for traditional favorites tended to be a bit spicier and sweeter than the

versions recommended by La Varenne, and he had a freer hand with decorations and

fancy presentations. Although he used roux to thicken ragouts, he was partial to

simple butter liaisons in well-reduced sauces for meat and fish. He liked to use egg

yolks to endow some of his cream sauces with extra richness but published no recipe

for the kind of butter and egg yolk emulsified sauces of the hollandaise type that

formed the basis of La Varenne’s reputation as a founder of the haute cuisine. If the

cooking described in Les Délices de la campagne was a less sophisticated than what

the reader found in the Cuisinier, Bonnefons made up for this by supplying his

readers with exhaustive information about ingredients and how to use them to the

best culinary advantage (a subject on which La Varenne made scattered remarks,

usually at the beginning of recipes). This aspect of Bonnefons’s work is especially

useful in grasping the link between the development of the delicate style and the

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availability of a large variety of superior products of the farm and garden. In addition,

his recipes were unusually explicit, which was probably a function of writing for an

audience of amateurs rather than culinary professionals. La Varenne, like most

culinary writers before and since, assumed that his readers already knew how to cook

and generally required information only about the details of particular recipes or

techniques that were unusual. Bonnefons made no such assumptions, spelling out

basic techniques and procedures step-by-step, a characteristic that offers a unique

window into the French kitchen of the 1650s.

The likenesses and differences between the styles of La Varenne and

Bonnefons are neatly illustrated in their recipes for pigeon bisque. At this date,

“bisque” meant a kind of potage that achieved a thickened texture by simmering in a

basin with croutons; it was considered an elegant dish that was often served on

festive occasions.1 La Varenne’s recipe was a succinct paragraph of 88 words,

increased to 123 words in the second edition of 1652, thanks to more explicit

instructions on how to truss the pigeons for poaching.2 Here is the English translation

of 1653, based on the second French edition (a relatively verbose 138 words, thanks

to the difference between French and English verbs):

ext Take young pigeons, cleanse them well and truss them up, which you shall do in making

a hole with a knife below the stomach and thrusting the legs through it. Whiten them, that is,

put them into a pot with hot water or with pot broth, and cover them well. Then put them in

the pot with a small twig of fine herbs, and fill up your pot with the best of your broths, have

a special care that it may not become black. Then dry your bread and stove it in the pigeon

broth; then take up after it is well seasoned with salt, pepper, and cloves, garnished with the

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young pigeons, cock’s combs, sweetbreads of veal, mushrooms, mutton juice, and pistachios.

Serve it up and garnish the brims of the dish with slices of lemon.3

Bonnefons took six pages to describe everything a novice – or a modern reader –

would need to know in order to achieve good results.4 He explained how to choose

which pigeons to use (the youngest available, still covered with down, if possible)

and how to poach them in plain bouillon, reserving the heads for decoration. Next

came preparation of a ragout of béatilles – the garnish of cock’s combs, sweetbreads,

and mushrooms mentioned by La Varenne. It was important, Bonnefons wrote, to

poach each of the ingredients for the béatilles separately until they were barely tender

(the sweetbreads and cock’s combs had to be cooked over very low heat, lest they

toughen up and become “fit only for feeding to the dogs”). Meanwhile, one roasted a

leg of mutton on the spit until it was rare, removed it from the fire, pricked it with a

knife, and pressed it to yield mutton juice. The most labor-intensive step was the

preparation of a Jacobine, an elaborate buttered crouton layered with minced, cooked

chicken and beef marrow seasoned with cinnamon, which Bonnefons called for

instead of the plain bread crouton specified by La Varenne. When all these separate

elements were ready, one degreased the pigeon bouillon and corrected the seasoning

by adding some of the mutton juice (which also deepened the color as well as the

flavor), a little salt, and a few drops of lemon juice (“just enough to heighten the

flavor without making it acid”). An hour or so before serving, one poured the

bouillon into a large basin, placed the Jacobine in the middle, and simmered them

slowly together until the liquid was partly absorbed and the crouton began to

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Comment [lh44]: Author: Term not found in English dictionary. Ital okay?

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disintegrate, producing the slightly sandy texture characteristic of a bisque, with

crusty bits around the edges. For the final assembly, the pigeon carcasses were

arranged on top of the Jacobine, heads resting on the rim of the basin, spices were

sprinkled over, the béatilles were added, and the dish was garnished with lemon

slices, pistachio nuts, and pomegranate seeds. Bonnefons advised very small servings

– pigeon bisque was a dish “to be tasted, not one to fill up on.”5 La Varenne’s version

would have been considerably lighter, thanks to the substitution of the plain crouton

for the Jacobine.

These recipes for pigeon bisque published in the 1650s appear to have been

adaptations of a dish that had been a favorite for generations. The presence of mutton

juice in a dish of delicate poultry, the béatilles (a combination that became popular

during the Renaissance), and the cinnamon in Bonnefons’s version suggest roots in

the cooking of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as does the use of almond milk in

La Varenne’s recipes for potage à la Jacobine and potage à la Jacobine au fromage.

Indeed, the latter bears a more than passing resemblance to the “souppe Jacobine de

chappons” described in “Du fait cuisine,” a manuscript by Master Chiquart, cook to

the duke of Savoy, which was written in the 1420s.6 Clearly cooks and eaters in mid-

seventeenth-century Paris remained attached to old favorites, even as the cutting edge

of the cuisine embraced le goût naturel.7 This was true for individual recipes, such as

pigeon bisque and potage à la Jacobine; for basic preparations, such as the liaison of

breadcrumbs that they used to thicken some of their sauces and techniques such as

blanching meats before roasting them; and for whole categories of foods, such as the







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array of fritters, wafers, and other small pastries that had already been familiar in the

fourteenth century. Similar recipes continued to appear in later editions of Le

Cuisinier françois and in the works of other French culinary writers until the early

eighteenth century. Tastes changed, but not all at once.

Interestingly, La Varenne’s versions of many dishes that bore traditional

names or featured old-fashioned ingredients were subtly altered to make them more

consistent with the delicate style. For example, his recipes for the classic sauces

meant to be served with roasted meat were less spicy and acidic than their medieval

forbears. Neither his poivrade (recommended for beef and many game birds) nor his

green sauce (suggested for lamb and pork) contained ginger or the mixture of ginger,

cinnamon, and cloves that figured in recipes for these sauces dating from the

medieval kitchen.8 Although both La Varenne and Bonnefons liked some acidity in

their sauces for meat and fish, they suggested caution, lest the taste become too sour

– a sprinkle of bitter orange or lemon juice, a drop of vinegar or verjuice sufficed.

Even when indulging in old-fashioned trompe l’oeil surprises, such as the lean dish

of “counterfeit” andouillets de veau – a mixture of puréed pumpkin, mashed

hardboiled egg yolk, and minced mushrooms formed into sausage shapes and fried –

Bonnefons stuck to herbs for seasoning.9

Some the recipes in the Cuisinier and Les Délices used flavor combinations

that had been popular in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance with techniques

that were modern. For example, the entrée of turkey with raspberries published by La

Varenne used cloves in the forcemeat with which the turkey is stuffed, while the






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