FAMILY AND FOOD DURING FRENCH REVOLUTION

Family relationships and educational opportunities were transformed during the revolution in order to give a measure of equality to those oppressed by paternalistic and despotic heads of households as well as by a controlling religious educational system.

THE OLD REGIME

Members of noble families did not engage in demeaning manual work or serve someone of inferior rank. Honor for the high-born meant keeping one’s word and paying one’s debts (usually from gambling) to one’s peers or superiors, although money owed to subordinates such as shopkeepers was not a matter of concern. 1 Fidelity to the king, to the family name, and to one’s calling—be it the military or the church—was what mattered.

Most men, noble or not, thought it reasonable that marriage, often a union of property and influence, should allow for a mistress, and it was normal for men of noble birth and money, from the king down, to have other women. Wealthy bourgeois agreed, as did the men of the lower classes, although the latter could not afford it. Similar privileges were not extended to their wives, whose infidelity could cause unwanted gossip and problems with the inheritance of property if she became pregnant.

Royal decrees and local laws and customs strengthened paternal controlover marriage, defended its indissolubility, criminalized female adultery, and fostered the exclusion of illegitimate children from inheritance and civil status. An infamous weapon in the hands of the master of the household was access to lettres de cachet that facilitated the imprisonment of rebellious children or wives, or anyone else who crossed a superior by word, pen, or deed.

The ideals of an aristocratic woman were similar to those of her husband: while some women had personal ambitions such as writing, charity work, or creative art, the primary goal of most was to defend the honor of her family and to look after the interests of her husband and children. Such a woman often married early, sometimes as young as age 13, and she understood that her duty was to create the best social affiliations possible for her new family. She did not personally raise the children; a wealthy house might have as many as 40 servants—the more the better for prestigious enhancement.

Maintaining the right kind of friends was also expected of the wife, and this could be accomplished through establishing a salon or finding a high-placed position in the royal palace. Parents inculcated their children with their values of honor, duty, and opulence as a sign of distinction. Conspicuous consumption was the mark of a nobleman, although any overt reference to money was considered bourgeois.

BOURGEOIS FAMILIES

Unlike the nobility, the bourgeoisie was without political power and was often considered grasping and greedy. The bourgeoisie was not a homogeneous group but existed on many levels: lawyers, physicians, surgeons, licensed dentists, architects, students from good families, engineers, writers, administrators, clerks, and teachers were distinguished by their education and training. Here, too, however, there were differences. Physicians, for example, looked down on surgeons, lawyers scorned clerks, and, indeed, most professionals felt superior to someone below them.

The commercial bourgeoisie included merchants and master artisans of many kinds (e.g., wigmakers, jewelers, furniture makers), heads of trade corporations, and industrialists and manufacturers.

They invested in real estate, from which they derived rental income, and those who owned their own homes usually passed them along to the next generation, but all were distinguished from their employees by station and income. Part of their daily lives was taken up by attending councilmeetings, organizing annual fairs, helping to provide relief for the poor, and other community projects. Unlike the aristocrats, they placed emphasis on thrift and hard work; retirement was practically unknown. Children were educated in the parish clergy schools or by private tutors. Male offspring of such families generally followed the occupation of the father, while girls were taught the social graces and how to run a household.

In a big city such as Paris, intermarriage was common among people in the same business or profession. Families established solid networks in the district where they lived and worked. Through such connections, their children found employment.

WAGE EARNERS AND PEASANTS

Among the lower echelons of society, which generally lived in the poorer quarters of the cities or in country hamlets, laborers and poor peasants found it difficult to raise a family to the standards anywhere near the level of the bourgeoisie, but family connections were also important. In the city, a tanner might take on his nephews as apprentices, the shoemaker or mason his sons, son-in-law, or grandchildren. Booksellers or printers hired their relatives, and even the women of the markets had family members who lived nearby and worked shining shoes, cleaning sewers, or carrying coal or water. Parts of the city with close ties of kinship and occupation were not unlike villages in which one could find family support in rough times. Those in the low-income brackets often lacked the means to supply the essentials for a wife and children, and some children never saw the inside of a school. Country life often demanded the services of children on the farm, and education came second.

In all cases, noble, bourgeois, or worker, paternal absolutism ruled the family. The hierarchy of both state and household was thought to be ordained by nature and by God. Church sermons depicting women as seducers, beginning with Eve, emphasized the intrinsic superiority of man over woman, parent over child, and these assumptions formed the cultural framework of everyday life within the family.

MARRIAGE

Marriage fell under the legal jurisdiction of the church, and divorce was prohibited. When a wedding took place, the local church was decorated, bells tolled, and everyone attended the festivities. The bride wore a white dress and a wreath of orange blossoms and brought a dowry that might consist of money or a piece of land if her family was well off; for a peasant girl it might just be some bed sheets, towels, perhaps some furniture or cooking utensils. The dowry she brought to the marriage was controlled by the husband.

While the aristocracy could marry off their children at a tender age, or at least promise them to a suitable partner, the children of the commoner or peasant married relatively late in life—men when they were about 28, women at about 25. Peasants and the poor working class had to wait until the man had established himself in some manner so that he could support a wife and family. A peasant couple might have to wait for a death in the village to marry, since good land was limited.

The father exercised full authority in the home, and the wife was expected to be docile and submissive. She was not allowed to own property in her own right unless so defined in the marriage agreement or to enter into private contracts without her husband’s consent. He could discipline her by corporal punishment or verbal abuse without fear of rebuke from the authorities or the church. Children who remained under their father’s roof could be forbidden to marry and forced to work. Some observers compared them to slaves.

WIDOWS AND DEATH

If young men or women managed to remain in good health until about age 25, they had a good chance of living on into old age, or about 60. Accidents on the job and fatal epidemic illnesses were frequent enough, but the greatest killer of men of all classes was war. As a result, widows were common and represented about 1 person in 10 of the population. About all a poor widow could count on was the return of her dowry (if it had not been squandered), and a roof over her head. Some widows had small children, which made their lives a constant struggle. Their options might come down to accepting charity from the parish church or from neighbors. If they had adult children, help might come from them. In the country, they could supplement their meals by collecting scraps missed in the harvest or by gathering wild fruit and berries.

A last resort for the aged country widow was to move to a large city and live and beg on the streets; such a woman would probably soon die in a charity hospital. If she was lucky and owned a piece of property or something else of value, she might exchange it, when she was too old to work, for a room in a nunnery where she could live out her remaining years.

Class and family lineage were clearly visible at funerals and at burial sites. Commoners were interred in the churchyard, for a price, or else in the communal cemetery in or near the city, with neither a coffin nor a monument. Those people with noble status or wealth were interred in stone coffins within a niche in the wall or the floor of the church itself.

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES IN THE FAMILY

Household politics and the broader political system of absolutism were mutually reinforcing. Critics of the old regime, such as litigating wives, philosophers of the Enlightenment, reform-minded lawyers, and bourgeois feminist novelists, condemned both domestic and state despotism.

Since the principles of justice and equality applied to the state after 1789, many believed that the same precepts should apply to the family. The revolutionaries recognized the central position of the family as the elemental building block, the basis for social order, and argued that children raised with republican ideals were likely to become good patriots.

The Constituent and Legislative Assemblies often deliberated the nature of marriage and the secularization of civil recordkeeping. A law passed on September 20, 1792, replaced the sacrament of marriage with a civil contract that dispensed with the services of a priest and the church. It was necessary only to post an announcement outside the Town Hall, and the marriage could take place. The couple then appeared before a functionary in a tricolor sash who muttered a few legal words, finishing with “You are married.” Unlike earlier wedded couples, the newlyweds were told that if things did not work out, they had the alternative of divorce. Within the space of a few weeks, the representatives had moved swiftly to curtail arranged marriages, reduce parental authority, and legalize divorce. In large cities, 20 or 30 marriages would often take place at one time in a group ceremony.

Under the old regime, marriage as an indissoluble union had not been questioned. The abrupt change in custom demonstrated the antireligious nature of the revolutionary movement and its belief in personal freedom. Married couples who desired to break their marriage bonds for any reason could do so and just as easily remarry. Causes for divorce usually revolved around incompatibility, abandonment, and cruelty, and more women than men seem to have initiated the process. Citizenness Van Houten, anxious to extricate herself from an unhappy situation, decried her arranged marriage to a “quick-tempered, vexatious, stupid, dirty, and lazy husband... with the most absolute inability in business matters.” 2 Large notices in the rooms where the vows of fidelity were exchanged bore the title “Laws of Marriage and Divorce.” Both the poison and the antidote were clearly stated and dispensed by the same office. 3

Primogeniture (the right of the eldest son to inherit all land and titles) prevailed under the old regime, but this was abolished early in 1790 so that all children should inherit equally. In November 1793, illegitimate children were granted the same rights of inheritance if they could provide proof of their father’s identity. The law was made retroactive to July 1789, but by 1796 the retroactive condition was removed, although the principle of equality for all children regardless of sex, legitimacy, or age was kept intact. 4

For those offspring who, for lack of money were not able to marry and begin a family until parents were too old and feeble to continue working, parents could sign over their property to the heir with the written stipulation that the parents would be taken care of for the rest of their lives. If a woman inherited the property and then married, her husband was expected to take her family name, and she retained legal rights over the inheritance.

In 1790, the National Assembly established a new institution to deal with family disputes, setting up temporary, local arbitration courts known as family tribunals (tribunaux de famille) . Family members in conflict each chose two arbitrators (often other members of the family or friends) to adjudicate their disagreements and make rulings on matters such as divorce, division of inheritance, and parent-child disputes. Appointed by the litigants themselves, these temporary family courts made justice accessible, affordable, and intimate. In 1796, these councils were suppressed, however. Further edicts lowered the age of adulthood to 21, established the principle of compulsory education throughout the country, and abolished lettres de cachet.

The laws on divorce, egalitarian inheritance, and parental authority also raised questions about the subordination of wives and daughters. It was difficult for the revolutionaries to rid themselves of long-held views that women belonged at home, and they continued to maintain that women could best show their republicanism by being good mothers. They should strive to please their men and introduce republican morality in their children, while husbands displayed their patriotism as soldiers and public citizens. Almost everyone envisioned distinct but complementary roles for men and women in the new state. This view was not without its detractors, however. Long-established ideas on docile republican mothers and wives were opposed by advocates for equality between married couples, who supported greater independence, power, and control over property for women.

It was also a fact that France needed to increase its population, since the number of young men in particular was declining as they marched off to become cannon fodder. Banners carried by processions of patriotic women through the streets of Paris declared: “Citizens, give children to the Patrie! Their happiness is assured!” 5

In the late 1790s and early 1800s, as the political mood shifted toward the right, the courts once again tightened the boundaries around families, curtailing, for example, revolutionary promises to illegitimate children, who now lost the right of inheritance. Under Napoleon, divorce was more difficult to obtain, especially for women. A husband could sue for divorce from an adulterous wife, but a wife could seek divorce against the husband’s wishes only if he maintained a mistress in the family house. In 1816, under the restoration monarchy, divorce was abolished altogether.

FOOD

Comparing English food to French, Arthur Young found to his surprise the best roast beef not at home in England but in Paris. 6 He also spoke about the astonishing variety given to any dish by French cooks through their rich sauces, which gave vegetables a flavor lacking in boiled English greens. In France, at least four dishes were presented at meals (for every one dish in England), and a modest or small French table was incomparably better than its English equivalent. In addition, in France, every dinner included dessert, large or small, even if it consisted only of an apple or a bunch of grapes. No meal was complete without it.

Describing the dining process in high society, Young said that a servant stood beside the chair when the wine was served and added to it the desired amount of water. A separate glass was set out for each variety of drink. As for table linen, he considered the French linen cleaner than the English. To dine without a napkin (serviette) would be bizarre to a Frenchman, but in England, at an upper-class table, this item would often be missing. 7

By the mid-eighteenth century, a small meal, the déjeuner, consisting of at least café au lait or plain milk and bread or rolls and butter had spread across all classes. Workers and others whose days began early had their déjeuner (breaking the overnight fast) about nine in the morning. More substantial meals at this hour included cheese and fruit and, on occasion, meat. It seems likely that they took something lighter and earlier, and this became known as the “little breakfast” or le petit déjeuner.

In 1799, Madame de Genlis wrote a phrasebook for upper-class travelers in which she gave the names for quite a large variety of foods consumed at breakfast, including drinks (tea, chocolate, coffee), butter, breads (wheat, milk, black rye), eggs, cream, sugar (powdered, lump, sugar candy), salt (coarse or fine), pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, mustard, anchovies, capers, chopped herbs, radishes, cheese (soft, cream, gruyère, gloucester, dutch, or parmesan), artichokes, sausages, ham, bacon, cold meats (veal, mutton) for sandwiches, fruits (lemons, oranges), biscuits, cakes, jams, almond milk, oysters, wine, beer, pastries, and so on.

Chocolate had been introduced into France in the previous century, brought to Europe from the Americas by the Spaniards. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was being regularly served at Versailles, and courtiers might be invited to chocolat du régent (breakfast of chocolate with the king). Marie-Antoinette usually had a light breakfast consisting of café au lait or chocolate, along with a special kind of Viennese bread. Another drink taken at breakfast was bavaroise, a mixture of tea and maidenhair syrup; however, tea (introduced in France in the mid-seventeenth century) was never popular and was generally considered a remedy for indigestion.

By far the most popular drink for all classes and in all households was coffee, after 1750 almost always taken to start the day. It was to be found not only in coffee shops but also in markets, and it was sold on the streets. Cafes sprang up in Paris and became the place for fashionable men to meet, as well as refuges for poor people, who used them as shelters. In 1782, Mercier wrote:

"There are men, who arrive at the café at ten in the morning and do not leave until eleven at night [the compulsory closing time, supervised by the police]; they dine on a cup of coffee with milk, and sup on Bavarian cream [a mixture of syrup, sugar, milk, and sometimes tea]." 8

In the provinces, coffee was not so welcome. In Limoges, for example, coffee was drunk as a medicine. Equivalent to coffee houses were chocolate houses that served chocolate with vanilla, sugar, and cinnamon. By midcentury, this drink was added to the breakfast, although wine and brandy were still consumed at the same time by many workers.

In 1788, as cookbooks began to appear, a gourmet made a list of France’s best gastronomic foods. It included turkey with truffles from the Périgord, pâté de foie gras from Toulouse, partridge pâtés from Nérac, fresh tunny pâtés from Toulon, skylarks from Pézénas, woodcock from the Dombes, capons from the Cux, hams from Bayonne, and cooked tongue from Vierzon. 9

A typical dinner for members of the royal family and the elite class before the revolution comprised a first course ( entrée) of one or more soups and plates of roasted or stewed meat, served along with similar dishes of poultry or seafood. The second (main) course contained the largest dishes of meat and poultry, accompanied by various vegetables and salad, and this was followed by the third course, comprising cheese, fruit, pastries, and often pâtés.

When the royal family was confined in Paris under guard, members were permitted to take with them 12 servants, including a head cook and his assistant, a scullion, a turnspit, a steward and his assistant, a boy, a keeper of the plate, and 3 waiters. 10 While imprisoned, the royals enjoyed a breakfast that included coffee, chocolate, thick cream, cold syrup, barley water, butter, fruit, rolls, loaves, powdered and lump sugar, and salt.

For dinner there were three soups and three courses consisting (on non-fast days) of four entrees of meat, two roasts, and one side dish. For dessertthere were pears, other fruit, jam, butter, sugar, oil, champagne, rolls, and wines from Bordeaux, Malvoise, and Madeira. Whatever they left was eaten by the servants. Supper again comprised three soups and three courses consisting of two roasts and four or five side dishes. On fast days, supper was composed of four nonmeat entrées. 11 Dessert was the same as for dinner except that there was also coffee.

By 1793, affluent Parisians were eating dinner around three or four o’clock. It included soup, lamb or cold beef, beet salad, fish (such as sole or skate), turnips, potatoes, and, on occasion, a ham omelet. Dessert included fruit (such as apples or pears) or cherries in brandy, cheese, and jam.

The diet of the peasants had little in common with that of the wealthy. Even though many people raised animals, these were used mostly for milk, cheese, and wool; the peasants and farmers could not afford to eat them, and they were not permitted to kill any game animals as these were reserved for the aristocrats. Hence, before the revolution, the poor ate practically no meat. Instead, a kind of gruel made from boiled grain formed the center of their diet, especially in winter. Some eggs, fruit, or vegetables were consumed at home, but the best produce was taken to be sold in the markets. Encouraged by the government, people began eating more potatoes, one of the principal healthy food items of the rural population. Whereas grain was threatened with destruction in wartime and from natural causes such as hail, causing great hardship, the potato, growing below ground, was not exposed to such devastation, and by 1787 it had become a staple food for country people. 12

A bourgeois wife of a future deputy to the Convention from the Drôme area kept an account book. For a dinner in honor of Robespierre in early 1793, she recorded her purchases, along with the prices for that day. 13 A laborer’s daily wage at the time would barely pay for two loaves of bread. Prices: milk and cream, 14 sous; 2 loaves, 24 sous; vegetables, 6 sous; salad, 10 sous; oil, 2 sous; vinegar, 12 sous; pepper, 5 sous; cheese, 1 soul; cider, 18 sous; a fat pullet, 8 livres 10 sous;

During the five years between 1790 and 1795, rampant inflation left many people begging, seeking charity, and starving. After 1795, prices continued to rise at a rapid rate doubling, tripling, and more. 14

During the five years between 1790 and 1795, rampant inflation left many people begging, seeking charity, and starving. After 1795, prices continued to rise at a rapid rate doubling, tripling, and more. 14

Parisians believed they had the right to cheap, good bread, and throughout the eighteenth century the greatest concern of wage earners, small businessmen, artisans, and housewives was the availability of bread at a reasonable cost. Concerns about bread appeared in all correspondence of the period and whenever prices threatened to rise, there was much disquiet and agitation, sometimes leading to violence.

To a large extent, farmers’ fields determined the diet of the rural population, since the staple, bread, had to be made from whatever grains were grown locally. If it was wheat, then whether the wheat was hard or soft, large- or small-grained, gray or yellowish in color, and even if it had begun to sprout just before the harvest, locals simply worked with whatever they had. And if instead they grew rye, or rye and wheat mixed (a common combination), or barley, that was what they used to make their bread.

Once the wheat and rye were harvested, they were sent to the miller, who returned it in the form of white grain flour. Breads were divided into categories based on the degree to which the bran and the germ had been sifted out of the flour. The coarser the bread, the bigger the loaf; the whiter the bread, the smaller the loaf. Wafers and pastries were made with the finest white flour, created in a labor-intensive process.

In some places, such as Brittany and Normandy, flour ground from buckwheat, known as blé noir (black wheat), was also made into a cheaper and inferior bread that was usually eaten by the poor. Another source of flour was the chestnut; this was used to make biscuits.

Watkin Tench, a British naval prisoner of war, in a letter sent from Quimper, Brittany, on April 4, 1795, describes the local bread as being gritty and of poor quality. It tasted of small sandy particles, a result of both the softness of the grindstones and the grain’s being insufficiently washed after being trodden out by the oxen. (Thrashing was not employed in this region.) 15

A poor man’s bread was also made of barley and rye and, sometimes, of oats and millet. Rice did not perform as well in France as in other countries. It was eaten by the wealthy on occasion, cooked in milk, and sometimes it was imported from places such as Egypt to feed the poor. Hospitals often supplied rice to their inmates, and the military found rye useful at times to feed the troops. In Paris, food distributed to the poor by the church often contained rice mixed with mashed-up carrots, pumpkin, and turnips boiled in water. Cheap bread made of rice and mixed with millet was also distributed to the needy.

After the great hailstorm that destroyed much of the harvest around the Paris basin in July 1788 and the concomitant bad weather in large areas of the country that resulted in bad harvests, most of the population of France would have been happy with a crust of bread. In this period of brutal and widespread famine, the marquis de Ferrières-Marsay mentions in a letter to his wife a light repast he had on April 26, 1789 as: “six courses, more like hors d’oeuvres than anything, and including black puddings, sausages, pâtés, a couple of joints of meat, two roast fowls, four kinds of sweet, two mixed salads.” 16 Not everyone went hungry!

During the periodic shortages of bread, French women had an alternate source of nutritious food in the mushroom. They grew them in cellars with a little sand and horse manure and in abandoned quarries around the cities. Asparagus also was a food of value and vitamins—the tips mixed with egg yolks and truffles were a delicacy. Some people believed in the aphrodisiac properties of asparagus.

The diet of the peasant was generally poor in vitamins and protein. Travelers reported that farm families in the high Pyrenees lived almost exclusively on a thin porridge of milk, barley, or oats. Sheep were too precious to eat, as in other regions. In Brittany, cider, rye bread, hard cheese, curds, and whey were staples of the diet. In Anjou, white bread, fresh butter and jam, wine, and even liqueurs were a daily source of nourishment.

The sources of water were rivers, streams, and wells. In Paris, water from the Seine, supposed to be healthy, was distributed and sold by about 20,000 water carriers throughout the city. The carriers delivered two buckets of water, even to the top floors of buildings, for two sous a load. It was a miserable wage and very hard work. Most Parisians, it can be assumed, drank unclean water, and foreigners loathed its taste. It was said that it was still better than that from the wells found along the left bank. There was also celery water, fennel water, divine water, coffee water, and a bewildering host of others. The various flavored waters came mostly from Montpellier. 17 By the time of the revolution, however, for those who could pay the price, purified water was available thanks to a process established by the Perrier brothers.

Although the practice of distilling spirits goes back a long way, the making of alcohol from grain and the production of brandy, discovered in the sixteenth century, were well entrenched in French drinking habits by the eighteenth. For many years, brandy was used as medicine to treat plague, gout, and other ailments, but eighteenth-century Paris imbibed an array of alcoholic concoctions—some fruit based, some composed of sugar, and rum called “Barbados” waters. Brandy was made from plums, pears, apples, and cherries and was produced wherever these could be grown.

Much brandy was made in the south, as was cognac, which came from the area around the town of that name. What had been once a luxury and a medicine became an everyday amenity. Liqueurs such as anisette (from anis) and absinthe were popular. Calvados, made in Normandy from apples, was enjoyed as a regional drink. Beer was not as popular as wine, which was the favored drink and was often watered down.

With the coming of the revolution, chefs who had previously worked in aristocratic houses now found themselves unemployed, and, while some of them chose to go into exile, some entered the service of the Parisian bourgeoisie; others opened restaurants. The redeployment of these master chefs contributed to the spread of grande cuisine.

Up to the eighteenth century, the word “restaurant” had signified a curative bouillon “restorant,” or something that would strengthen and restore a person. Before that time, the only choice had been between the not-very-pleasant taverns (where more was drunk than eaten) and the purchase of food that had been prepared by a professional caterer.

The first person to actually use the name “restaurant” as we know it was a M. Boulanger, among whose clients was Diderot. From this time on, restaurants began to multiply; establishments included the Frères Provençaux (who introduced regional cuisine to Paris in 1782), le Grand Véfour, in 1788, and Véry, in 1790. For the client, the introduction of restaurants was advantageous: the menu was at a fixed price, the food was good, and you could eat at your own pace in company of your choosing. At that time it was possible to dine in a fairly good restaurant for less than 30 sous. Less expensive places served soup, boiled beef, an entrée, and a small glass of wine for about 10 sous.

Inns might offer a table d’hôte, cramming together a lot of hungry people at the same table, When the meal was ready, the guests dug in, arguing and grabbing the choicest bits of food. Such crowded and low-quality places were frequented mainly by impecunious students, artists, and traveling merchants.

When Napoleon came to power, in spite of not being a gourmand, he kept at his table all the splendor necessary to affirm his power in the eyes of French or foreign dignitaries. In fact, eating for him was an obligation, to be accomplished with utmost haste. Talleyrand, who was responsible for diplomacy under Napoleon, employed one of the most talented chefs of the period, Antonin Carêm, a perfectionist who codified French cuisine and even studied architecture and engraving in order to improve his layer cakes.

To meet the nation’s military needs, France under Napoleon saw the development of new industries. For instance, because of the English continental blockade, cane sugar from the Caribbean was replaced by beet sugar that could be processed at home. Also, wishing to give his soldiers food that would last and remain edible in faraway battlefields, Napoleon organized a competition in 1795 to find a solution to this problem; the winner was Nicolas Appert, who invented the process of conserving food by heating it in a sealed jar. Subsequently named official supplier to the army and benefactor of humanity, Appert saw his canning invention copied with great commercial success in England and America.

Up to this time, those involved in cuisine were considered practitioners— professionals who gave recipes and technical counsel, be it doctors who treated dietary problems or writers who celebrated the pleasure of eating well. As a result, some special literature was produced, and two major figures—Grimod de la Reynière and Brillat-Savarin—began what was to be known as the art of gastronomy. In 1803, Grimod published l’Almanach des gourmands, which contained the latest culinary creations, selected by juries, making it the ancestor of today’s food guides and cookbooks.

SAMPLE RECIPES

ECONOMICAL SOUP FOR THE POOR

Cook 2 bushels of potatoes, peel and purée them, then put in a pot.
Add 12 pounds of bread, cut in slices
1 quarter of a bushel of onions
1/2 pound salt
1/2 pound of lard cut in small pieces (or grease, or butter)
30 pints water*
Frozen potatoes can be used if reduced in powder before putting them into the pot with the other ingredients.

(Affiches au Dauphiné. Almanach de 1789).

*In the recipe, this is written as 30 pints. The French old measure pinte is .93 liter, or roughly a quart. Today, the pint is half a quart.

SAVOY CAKE

4 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon minced crystallized orange blossom (or other flowers) (optional)
1 tablespoon flaked almonds
100 g crystallized sugar
1 tablespoon minced pistachios
1 tablespoon crystallized lemon peel, finely chopped
200 g sieved flour
zest of a lime

Put the eggs on one of the scales, and on the other (scale) put the powdered sugar; the weight of the eggs should equal that of the sugar. Next, remove the sugar leaving half the eggs which should equal the weight of the flour to be used.

Separate the whites and yolks and beat the whites as hard as possible. Then put in the yolks and continue beating.

Add the sugar, followed by the flour, lime zest and a few leaves of chopped, candied orange blossom, if available.

Butter a mold or casserole and empty the mixture into it, sprinkling over it a few lightly caramelized finely chopped almonds and pistachios and the glazed lemon peel.

Cook in a moderate oven for an hour and a half. Remove from the oven and take it out of the mold and if it is a good color, serve it. Alternatively you can cover it with a white icing, or glaze it with a little syrup and sprinkle small pellets of multicolored decorating sugar over.

Serve for dessert.

Vincent La Chapelle, Le Cuisinier moderne (1742), 2. 186–87.

NOTES

1. The archbishop of Narbonne, for example, had a princely income of 400,000
francs, but when he fled the country for safer ground, he left a debt of 1.8 million francs. See Madame de la Tour du Pin, 315.
2. Quoted from Desan, 102.
3. Robiquet, 78.
4. Hunt (1992), 40; McPhee, 200.
5. Robiquet, 81.
6. Young, 306.
7. Even “a journeyman carpenter in France has his napkin as regularly as his fork; and at an inn, the fi lle [waitress] always lays a clean one to every cover that is spread in the kitchen, for the lowest order of pedestrian travellers.” Ibid., 307.
8. L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1782), vol. I, 228–29, in Braudel, 260.
9. L.-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1782), vol. XI, 345–46, in Braudel, 187–88.
10. Dr. John Moore, “Journal during Residence in France” (1793), in Tannahill, 6, where he gives an account of the last few months of 1792—a time when there were few foreigners remaining in Paris.
11. Louis XVI fasted; his family did not.
12. Braudel, 169–70.
13. See Robiquet, 112, for more detail.
14. Ibid., 202–4.
15. Tench, 82.
16. Robiquet, 19.
17. Braudel, 246

By James A. Anderson in "Daily Life During the French Revolution", Greenwood Press, USA, 2007, excerpts pp.103-116. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.