The etymology of the term—the law (nomos) of the stomach (gastro)—presumably refers to a biological fact, but the law of the stomach in France legislates much more than what actually enters the digestive tract. It bespeaks the normative nature of French foodways that so strikes foreigners. At some level, everyone acknowledges the rules, regulations, and hierarchies that make eating in France at its best a distinctive experience. However much culinary dissidents may flout these rules, few can afford to ignore the laws of gastronomy. As an emblem of French civilization, cuisine ranks right up there with cathedrals and châteaux, recognized by citizen and visitor alike as somehow intrinsically French. Not without reason did that superlatively French writer, Marcel Proust, identify his great novel with a cathedral on the one hand and a sculptural beef in aspic on the other. Moreover, the recognition obtains whether or not the cathedral is actually visited or the great meal consumed. Each belongs to the national heritage.
But what makes Proust’s beef dish French? How did it get to be part of that heritage? How does it differ from the boiled beef that is a staple all over the world? Why does food loom larger in the cultural landscape of the French, if in fact it does? True, French elites have invested heavily in culinary affairs at least since the seventeenth century; to what extent have these official resources moved down the social scale and out to the country as a whole? What does French cuisine “do” for France? Why has this tradition not become just another vestige of the Ancien Régime, such as Versailles or the châteaux of the Loire Valley, visited for their distance from life today? Finally, what future does our assertively postmodern era hold in store for distinctive cuisines, French along with many others? How do the cooks and chefs, these artisans of the everyday, cope with contemporary pressures of globalization, internationalization, rationalization, democratization?
These questions led to this book. The ensuing answers have turned up less in the particulars of French culinary history than in an ideal that accounts for the extraordinary vitality of this cultural product and its position in French culture. As anthropologists have long known, foodways set societies apart from one another. The French can invoke a vast number of regional specialties, from Roquefort cheese to foie gras, but they are hardly alone. Americans, too, can turn out a sizable list of culinary products defined by place—from New York bagels to North Carolina barbecue, New England clam chowder to southern fried chicken, scrapple from Philadelphia, and on and on. These foods, anchored in place, lay the foundations of regional cuisines—the culinary practices defined and enriched, and also limited, by local products and producers. A truly national cuisine is something else again. A modern phenomenon, a national cuisine is part and parcel of the nation-state that emerged in the West during the nineteenth century. As a culinary system both different from and greater than the sum of its regional parts, French cuisine materialized across a tumultuous century of political, social, and cultural revolutions. Cuisine supplied one building block—a crucial one—for a national identity in the making, for it encouraged the French to see themselves through this distinctive lens as both different and superior. Moreover, this form of Frenchness compelled all the more because, unlike Bastille Day or “La Marseillaise,” it was not an artifact of official decree. The power of French culinarity comes from its reach into daily life. Not that regional cuisines disappeared. On the contrary, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw their integration in a French culinary landscape where they became what they still are: vital components in the intellectual and cultural construct of French cuisine, a lively type for the relationship of the regional parts to the national whole.
An illustration from a guidebook of the mid-nineteenth century cleverly captures the status of cuisine as national cultural good. The tour of Parisian dining in Eugène Briffault’s jocular Paris à table (1846) takes us to a familiar Parisian monument, the Panthéon. Begun as a church in the mid-eighteenth century, this imposing edifice served the French Revolution as a final resting place for its great men, Voltaire and Rousseau most notable among them. Paris à table shifted these priorities. In place of the imposing classical dome, a giant oven-chef bestrides the frieze. With a kitchen knife stuck in his apron and two sauté pans dangling in front, the monumental chef sports two forks as arms, one of which brandishes a giant skimming ladle. A steaming stew pot–face grins under the pot-cover hat, from which stringy vegetable tops stick out like unruly hair. The inscription on the monument conveys the redirected expression of patriotic gratitude: replacing the “Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie reconnaissante” of the original—To Great Men the Grateful Country—this version of the Panthéon proclaims “À la Cuisine la Patrie reconnaissante”—To Cuisine, the Grateful Country.
Lentil Carrot Avocado Salad
