A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800 | 
| Author: Susan Pinkard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $32.00
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Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 75828
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 334
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0521821991
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.120944
EAN: 9780521821995
ASIN: 0521821991
Publication Date: September 29, 2008
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Book Description
Modern French habits of cooking, eating, and drinking were born in the Ancien Regime, radically breaking with culinary traditions that originated in antiquity and creating a new aesthetic. This new culinary culture saw food and wine as important links between human beings and nature. Authentic foodstuffs and simple preparations became the hallmarks of the modern style. Pinkard traces the roots and development of this culinary revolution to many different historical trends, including changes in material culture, social transformations, medical theory and practice, and the Enlightenment. Pinkard illuminates the complex cultural meaning of food in her history of the new French cooking from its origins in the 1650s through the emergence of cuisine bourgeoise and the original nouvelle cuisine in the decades before 1789. This book also discusses the evolution of culinary techniques and includes historical recipes adapted for today's kitchens.
Amazon Exclusive: Author Susan Pinkard on the French Culinary Revolution
 I wrote A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine because I am fascinated by the intersection of the routines of everyday life with the world of ideas. Eating is a universal human need; but what you eat, how you prepare it, and with whom you share it reveal a lot about who you are, what kind of society you live in, and what you believe about beauty, health, and your place in nature.
Why French food? There are a couple of answers to that question, one of which has to do with history and the other with my life.
From ancient Rome through the Renaissance, cooking all over Europe was pungent, spicy, and sweet or sweet/sour, rather like North African or Middle Eastern food is today. From Naples to London, Seville to Warsaw, cooks used local ingredients as well as imported spices to fuse layers of flavor into complex sauces that were meant to balance the elemental composition of the foods with which they were served. The point, aesthetically as well as in terms of diet, was to civilize ingredients and to render them wholesome by transforming them in the kitchen. Then, quite suddenly, French cooks broke with this ancient tradition. The aim of what was called “the delicate style” was to cook and serve ingredients in a manner that preserved the qualities with which they were endowed by nature: instead of being miraculously transformed by the cook, food was supposed to taste like what it was. In pursuit of this new aesthetic of naturalness and simplicity, cooks developed many techniques and recipes that continue to define French cuisine to this day. Indeed, the impact of the French culinary revolution reverberated far beyond the borders of France. The fact that so many of us moderns wish to eat and drink in a manner that represents the variety of nature reflects our lasting attachment to the idea of authenticity that first emerged in the kitchens of the ancien regime. Why and how had this major shift in sensibility come about? What does the culinary revolution reveal about other aspects of modern life that were also coming into focus in 17th- and 18th-century France? Those were the historical questions I set out to answer in this book.
The other reason why I decided to write about the rise of French cuisine is that I love to eat French food and I cook it almost every day. One of the enduring misconceptions about French cooking (especially in America) is that it is inherently fussy, expensive, and ridiculously rich. Although such a rococo element certainly exists, especially in fancy restaurant cooking, recipes from the cuisine bourgeoise (that is, home cooking as it has evolved in France over the past 250 years) are easy and economical to make and healthy to eat: roasted chicken with a quick deglazing sauce, inexpensive braised meats, poached fish with a little white wine, simply prepared vegetables, plain green salads, pureed soups of leeks, potatoes, and other fresh, cheap ingredients, just to name a few of my favorites. I hope that by focusing attention on the development of this aspect of the culinary tradition, my book will encourage readers to experiment with simple French foods. The historical recipes, in the appendix, are a good place to start.
--Susan Pinkard
Cook up the Enlightenment: Exclusive Recipe Excerpts from A Revolution in Taste
Click here to see authentic (and delicious!) recipes from eighteenth-century France.
• Green Butter with Leek and Parsley (Marin)
• Potage aux Herbes (Marin)
• Roasted Chicken with Bitter Orange and Garlic Deglazing Sauce (Bonnefons)
Book Description
This book traces the development of modern French habits of cooking, eating, and drinking from their roots in the Ancien Regime. Pinkard examines the interplay of material culture, social developments, medical theory, and Enlightenment thought in the development of French cooking, which culminated in the creation of a distinct culture of food and drink.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
Well, that's interesting... January 5, 2009
I've learned all kinds of things from reading this book. Digging into French cuisine requires digging into more than just the food of France. Most interesting to me was learning about how people lived and how commercially made food changed the landscape for eating in France.
This is a well written book, and nicely bound as well. My initial impression was that I had acquired a dense tome of scholarly boredom but I was quite surprised at how fun and accessible the text was.
And I've always hated French Cuisine for its air of pretentiousness.
Surprisingly interesting and easy to read December 27, 2008
When I first picked up this book and read the author's biography (PhD in modern European history, professor of history at Georgetown) and saw the endless footnotes, I feared this would be an exceedingly dry academic book. Instead, I found it to be lively and interesting. It covers the evolution of French cooking from the medieval period to the modern, told from the food and the sociopolitical context.
I walked away knowing a lot more about the evolution of cooking, as well as the origins and foundations of many dishes.
The book covers the food eaten, and how the spices and preparations used changed with different political changes, philosophical changes and economic changes. (I won't spoil what you learn by reviewing them.) It also covers how these changes that went through France were or were not reflected in other countries, for example how the England maintained a much more medieval approach to cooking and never developed the richness of cooking found in France.
The book also covers the evolution of wine production.
Then, it ends with recipes for many of the items discussed for the period from 1650-1800. I did wish there were a few medieval recipes thrown in for contrast.
Altogether, if you are a food lover or an obsessive cook, you will find this to be a surprisingly interesting read.
 A Rich Meal of French Gastronomic History December 26, 2008
This fascinating scholarly book charts the rise of French haute cuisine cooking as we now recognize it. Susan Pinkard begins the book by deflating several gastronomic urban legends, including it was not Catherine de Medici the wife of Henry II who taught the French how to cook (it would take almost another century). Indeed, the little appreciated revolution in cooking occurred because of a confluence of cultural, medical, and edible tides were changing. Susan Pinkard describes what food was like pre-17th century - an amalgam of spices, sweetness and savory that owed as much to Galenic medicine and the influence of food on health as to preferences in eating. She then describes how the societal and cultural changes contributed to raise in popularity of gout naturel and how it supplanted medieval cooking and tastes. The subject is covered in exhaustive detail, which, much like a rich meal, sometimes makes it difficult to read more than a handful of pages at one sitting. The reader will, however, be rewarded by a comprehensive view of how food and taste can change radically. Several items can make this a challenging book to read. Aside from some cookbook authors and historical individuals, there is very little human interaction in this swirl of foodstuffs. Instead, we are presented with intricate detail on food preparation techniques. Consequently, there is not a strong narrative that pulls us along. It is rather like watching stone being worn away by water and seeing what shape emerges. That being said if one truly wants to understand the evolution of cooking, this is the book to read. Also, the author has documented in great detail through extensive footnotes and bibliography. Finally, for the brave souls who want to experiment with recipes that reflect this "new" way of cooking, she has included a number of choice recipes.
Surprisingly Captivating December 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800 struck me as the title for a textbook or otherwise similarly dry and uninviting work. However, soon after I dove into this book, I found myself reading at a voracious pace, hungry not only for the detailed cuisine, but for all of the little treasures woven together within this rich account of history. I've been told since I was in third grade not to use 'well written' to describe a book in a review, but Pinkard shows the highest skill in condensing and organizing an immense amount of culinary history, ranging broader than 1650-1800 even. You will see plenty of citations on each page to remind you this is a thorough and technical text.
Despite my apprehensions, this book easily ranked up among my favorites in the genre; and it's a genre I've been reading a lot of lately. It even cleared up a few misconceptions I've had from reading some less reliable sources. In fact, Pinkard covers a lot of ground that I've had to piece together from many books. Having read this book earlier would have given me better insight regarding say the workings of the Culinary Institute of America, for example. It's a rich and engaging history that any foodie or history-buff would greatly enjoy.
A Cornucopia Of Information Generously Shared With Readers. December 23, 2008
A Cornucopia Of Information Generously Shared With Readers.
A thoroughly examined subject is focussed upon by Susan Pickard for this work that nicely utilises original documents and, although correctly academic in tone, offers a great deal upon each page that will be of interest to lay readers. The author, an instructor of history at Georgetown University, is additionally a zealous cook, as is evident throughout the book by her insightful depiction of European historical eating trends as well as by inclusion of numerous recipes dating from 1650/1800 sources. Just as the French Revolution of 1789 brought the Gallic nation toward a modern temper, author Pickard illustrates how, over 100 years prior to the storming of the Bastille, French cuisine broke away from a hidebound system of cookery that was based upon an ancient Hippocratic method of dietetics. This held that there are four vital fluids, or humours, constituting a human body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and pflegm, and all were meant to be in harmonious balance, largely through application of spices and other seasonings that would adjust these biologic properties through rendering unclassifiable the ingredients of cooked foods. Pickard describes how a surge of population during the early 17th century flowed into the suburbs of Paris, thereby impelling France's upper classes to go farther afield in search of campestral settings. As a result, they became increasingly familiar with garden-fresh ingredients for their larders, eventually leading to an increased appreciation of intrinsic flavours for their dishes instead of seeking an elimination of distinctive flavours in accord with principles established by Greek physicians of many centuries past. A favourite source for Picard's narrative is Nicolas de Bonnefons whose understanding of ingredients led to his espousal of Le Gout Natural (The Natural Taste) as outlined in his 1654 cookery book, "Les Delices de la Campagne", wherein he posits that "food should taste like what it is" (trans.). There is a profusion of food and food history data at hand within this splendid volume, and readers should be grateful that Pickard has chosen this format to share with them such items as the recipes from the "Early Modern French Kitchen", 1650/1800, that fill fifty pages; the relation, during the Enlightenment, of standards established by such philosophes as Diderot and Rousseau that would lead to a more natural mode of living, to include simpler means of food preparation, hoping therewith to elevate the common man's status; a steadily increasing part that vegetables have played in French cuisine; and a plethora of others found in the book. A very much engaging effort by Picard, it provides a useful bibliography, and a large number of detailed footnotes.
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