“There is more to a dinner than dishes.”

Twenty years ago, when I told people that I was a burgeoning culinary historian, I was often met with a quizzical look: why study the “history” of cooking? Haven’t we reached such a pinnacle of gastronomic perfection that the culinary past seemed. . .  well, just that: distant, drearily bland, and irrelevant.

People have always had different palates, different foodstuffs, different technologies, and different ideas of healthy eating. Before there was canning and refrigeration to preserve food, there was curing, drying and fermenting. Before railroads, trucks, and airplanes transported food quickly, sailing ships and camel caravans traversed great distances to supply exotics to the privileged. Before gas, electric, and microwave ovens cooked food with the turn of a dial or push of a finger, or before water flowed by twisting a tap, cooks arduously hauled wood, coal, dung, and buckets of water, sometimes multiple times each day.

I harbor no misty nostalgia for the past. Too many hardships and too many inequities afflicted too many of the world’s peoples (and still do, in too many places).  I am grateful for my appliances and for the fact that modern antibiotics cure a strep throat: I need not rely on nineteenth century cookbooks’ “invalid cookery” or the vagaries of humoral medicine. Nonetheless, much from the past can enhance our present. The “renaissance” of artisanal foods, aspects of organic and sustainable  agriculture, culinary whimsies like the turducken,  or even questions about which fork to use at a fancy dinner, suggest that we have more in common with our forebears than the dismissive assumption that culinary history and the arts of the table are little more than entertaining diversions.

One of my favorite culinary writers is the early nineteenth century Parisian, Grimod de la Reynière, who challenged attitudes and changed the French language by naming his early nineteenth century gazette Almanach des Gourmands. When Grimod started his Almanach, there was no word in French for the cultured appreciation of food: the word gourmet applied only to those knowledgeable about wine. The Catholic Church, still a dominant cultural, as well as religious, institution in France labeled gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins, and, in Catholic doctrine, it could mean not only one who ate too much or too greedily, but also one who ate too expensively or with too much discernment. French dictionaries of the time were more focused in the definition of gluttony, but le glouton and le gourmand were synonyms for those who ate ravenously and indiscriminately. Indeed, the only term for one who appreciated food was le friand, but that term was freighted with elitism.  Le friand ate lightly, delicately, in small mouthfuls, carefully avoiding any suggestion of overindulgence. So deeply ingrained was this underlying Catholic fear of the pleasures of food that, in every edition through the eighth, issued in 1932, of the authoritative Dictionnaire de l’académie française, the guardians of the language contrasted the gourmand with the friand: “il n’est pas gourmand, mais il est friand.” Through Grimod’s subversive naming of his Almanach, he brought attention to a cultural shift, giving a socially acceptable name to those who ate lustily, enthusiastically, but with discernment.

In explaining why the dinner table matters, Grimod wrote,

The culinary arts are a huge field, the borders of which are constantly being pushed back by every man who makes them the object of serious study or profound thought. These arts embrace all three realms of nature, and the four corners of the globe, all  questions of moral philosophy and all societal considerations as well. Everything comes within their scope, more or less directly, and if they may seem superficial, it is only to vulgar minds who see no more to a kitchen than saucepans and no more to a dinner than dishes.

Grimod’s language may be archaic, but he anticipates some of the current discourses in food studies. I hope to contribute to the field by exploring the interplay of food, drink, etiquette, and material culture, with the occasional dash of policy and politics, as these cannot be divorced from the act of eating.

The need to eat unites us, yet how we eat, and how we create bonds over meals, will vary according to our culture. Mealtime rhythms help define who we are. How we eat, and what we choose to eat, reverberates beyond our personal experiences. The table influences us ever day, and we, in turn, influence the table’s culture every time we eat, whether with fingers, forks, or chopsticks.

________________________________________

Still Life with Peahen, Pieter Claesz , 1627

The gastronome at his desk, image from the first issue of Almanach des Gourmands (1803).