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The garçon aspires to wealth and greatness. Sometimes, in his vaulting ambition, he o’erleaps himself. Says a French student of his manners and customs: “He takes a wife and a new house, puts frills on his shirt, and inscribes his name in the National Guard. Become, in his turn, a master, he puts a hundred thousand francs’ worth of gilding, pictures, and mirrors (obtained on credit) into the establishment which he opens with unusual éclat. The public rush to his doors, and all goes well until some neighbouring café, more sumptuous still, draws the crowd away again. Then the time has arrived for him to make up his balance-sheet and pay two and a half per cent. to his creditors. What becomes of him after that? If he has protected his wife’s dowry he takes refuge in his native country, between two cabbage beds with a pond for his ducks. One day the malady of dethroned kings seizes him, and he dies of ennui in the midst of an inconsolable family. Heaven take pity on his soul! Many café waiters die without having fulfilled their dream of having an establishment of their own. The life of fatigue which they lead kills them, as a rule, towards their thirtieth year. It is thus that we have seen the greatest of them all vanish from our midst – that waiter of the Café de la Rotonde, whose ‘baoum!’ uttered in a far-resounding voice, has found so many imitators. We see him still, coffee-pot in hand, saying in a voice profound, ‘Pas de Crême?’ Alas, alas, he is dead. He died of consumption, and when he was about to expire the nurse still offered him a mixture of cod-liver oil and milk, which his doctor had prescribed. He exclaimed with his last gasp, ‘Pas de Crême?’”

CHAPTER XXVII
THE PARIS COOK

Brillat-Savarin on the Art of Cooking – The Cook and the Roaster – Cooking in the Seventeenth Century – Louis XV. – Mme de Maintenon.

FROM the Paris waiter to the Paris cook the transition is, in literary phrase, “easy and natural.” There is probably no prouder personage in the world than this artist, who knows that mankind cannot dispense with him, and who, if one were to ask him whether the revolution of his spit or of the earth on its axis were the more important, might hesitate to decide.

In that excellent comedy from the combined pens of Émile Augier and Jules Sandeau, entitled Le Gendre de M. Poirier, we see an illustration of the solemn importance which is attached by the French cook to a well-ordered menu. M. Poirier, an aspirant for social position, has married his daughter to a ruined marquis, Gaston de Nesle, whom he soon finds to be a magnificently expensive son-in-law. One day, determined to retrench, he sends for his chef and asks what he intends to prepare for dinner that day. The chef enumerates a list of some twenty costly and exquisite dishes; to which M. Poirier replies: “You will replace all that by soup, roast meat, salad, and a fruit tart.” The cook feels like a soldier required to chop wood with the sword with which he has been accustomed to cut his way to glory, and who prefers to snap that sword in two. “I resign!” exclaims the cuisinier. “No man will cook for you!” “Then I will engage a woman,” is the economist’s base rejoinder.

To pass from fiction to fact we find a very much stronger instance of the spirit of the French cook in the famous Vatel, who was so delicate on the “point of honour” that he ran a sword through his own body because the fish which should have arrived for an important dinner he was cooking did not turn up in time. This artist was first attached to the intendant Foquet, afterwards to the Prince de Condé; and he could not endure the shame of letting the king go short of one particular course in the dinner which the prince offered him at the Castle of Chantilly.

Some of the loftiest functions of the Parisian chef can be performed by no one who is not endowed with absolute genius. Training, experience, industry, will go some distance in the French culinary art; but, according to Brillat-Savarin, in his Physiologie du Goût, they would apparently never qualify a man for the sublimer functions of roasting a joint or a fowl.

“On devient cuisinier mais on naît rotisseur,” exclaims this excellent writer, who raised the art of the kitchen to the dignity of a science, and who propounds the maxims of cooking with the same gravity, the same sincerity, the same ardour as if he were laying the bases of a grand moral philosophy. “A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with but one eye,” he declared in a neat sentence which admits of only a lumbering translation.

Why a roasting-cook should require greater talent than one of his kitchen colleagues, who, for instance, like the chef spoken of by Macaulay, could make ten different dishes out of a poppy-head, is not at first sight apparent. One might imagine that the roaster required nothing but care and patience; but after the dictum of so high an authority as Brillat-Savarin, it must by the uninitiated be supposed that for the seemingly simple operation of roasting a bird or joint as it ought to be roasted, a combination of subtle qualities are requisite, just as the mere two hands of a watch need, for their due regulation, a complex system of machinery.

As roaster, or in no matter what capacity, the Paris cook had his poetic eulogist. One gastronomic versifier was wont, whilst sitting at dinner, to regard the genius who was furnishing his stomach as a divinity —

 
Un cuisinier, quand je aîne,
Me semble un être divin.
 

Another regarded his cook as a present from the sky —

 
Que je puisse toujours, après avoir diné,
Bénir le cuisinier que le ciel m’a donné!
 

The science of cooking in France was in a languid condition when Francis I. ascended the throne. The presence of ladies at his court, and the fêtes and banquets which were given, reanimated the cuisinier. It was the renaissance of the kitchen as well as of the arts; and Francis I. imported from Italy cooks as well as painters and sculptors. The Italian cooks viewed their art in a very serious light. Montaigne well portrays a typical member of their order.

“Just now,” he writes, “I was mentioning an Italian I have recently entertained, who acted as maître d’hôtel to the late Cardinal Caraffe until his death. I made him describe his duties, and he gave me a discourse on this science of the jaws with a gravity and countenance quite magisterial, precisely as if he had been engaged on some subject in theology. He indicated the different stages of appetite: that which exists after fasting, and that which remains when the first or second course has been served; the methods employed, now simply to gratify it, now to awaken and spur it; the policy with which he prepares his dishes, adorning and embellishing them so as to fascinate the eye. After that he entered upon the order of the service, full of fine and important considerations; the whole inflated with a magnificence of words such as characterises a treatise on the government of an empire.”

The luxury of gastronomy was carried to such a point in France that edicts were issued by several French kings for the purpose of restraining it; but the Italian cooks whom Catherine de Medici brought to the court of Henri II. easily contrived to vanquish the law. They formed a school and produced pupils who were destined to surpass their preceptors. Until the Revolution the profession of cook was regulated by a succession of statutes. So far back as 1260 the corporation of “goose-cooks” (geese being their most important commodity) received statutes from the provost of the merchants. Later on the name of “roasters” was given to them; and anyone not of their order who ventured to cook for the public was termed a traitor. The cooks of Paris had already been made the subject of many enactments when Louis XIV., in 1663, gave them new statutes which were registered in parliament the following year; nor was it until the Revolution that their profession became free.

In the seventeenth century the culinary art had reached a high pitch of perfection, and epicures abounded in high life, amongst princes, seigneurs, and even bishops – indeed bishops in particular. One day when a certain archbishop famed for good living, in a sense otherwise than ecclesiastical, had dined at the palace of his episcopal brother in the capital, he called his servants around him and said: “I have been dining with the archbishop of Paris; there was this and that dish, and such and such defects. Now I tell you, so that you may fall into the danger, that if you were to treat me in that fashion, you would be wishing to throw away your lives.” At the end of dinner he was accustomed to send for Maître Nicholas, his cook, and say: “Maître Nicholas, what shall we have for supper?” After supper his inquiry was: “Maître Nicholas, what shall we have for to-morrow’s dinner?” Another bishop having returned home very hungry and demanded his dinner, the episcopal cook made his appearance empty-handed. “As a bishop,” he said, “I forgive you; but if you fail to produce my supper, I shall talk to you like a man, and flatten your nose for you.”

Louis XIV. was a great gastronomist, but in the refinements of the culinary art Louis XV. eclipsed his predecessor. The artists of the kitchen were not yet in his reign paid twenty thousand francs a year, as they have since been paid in Paris; but they were petted, yielded to, and stroked down when out of temper. The cooks from Languedoc were chiefly in demand at Paris; they received very large salaries and exercised domestic despotism, the other servants of the household having to bow to their authority.

Expense was nothing when it became a question of stimulating the jaded appetite of a count or a wealthy merchant. Mercie in his “Picture of Paris” shows us a maître d’hôtel presenting the bill of fare to his aristocratic master, who throws it down disdainfully, exclaiming: “Always the same dishes! You have no imagination. These are nothing but nauseating repetitions.” “But, monseigneur, the sauces are varied.” “I tell you the whole thing is detestable, and I can no longer eat it.” “Well, monseigneur, I will prepare you a grilled boar.” “When?” “To-morrow. I will make him drink sixty bottles of champagne first. And after that I want you to eat a Jamaica turtle.” “Bravo! And when? Where is the turtle?” “In London.” “Send a courier at once: let him fetch it post-haste.” The courier is despatched, and returns with the turtle. There is a solemn conference as to the most effective way of preparing the animal; and after all kinds of processes, it appears on the table. That dish has cost a thousand crowns. Seven or eight gourmands devour it, and while they are drinking costly wines discuss the question as to how much a peasant can live on. They decide that three sous a day are enough for him, and that the inhabitants of the towns are well off if they have seventeen. Beyond these figures all is superfluity, according to the turtle-devouring economists.

The whole court of Louis XV. consisted of gourmands, loyal imitators of their sovereign. Marshal de Richelieu attached his name to various dishes, prepared for the purpose of making an epicure’s mouth water. The gay and ingenious Mme. de Pompadour invented three or four recipes which have become famous. Gastronomy, however, did not flourish at the court of Louis XVI., who was by no means fastidious in the choice of his food, and for whose robust appetite rude joints of meat amply sufficed. Coming to the Revolution, we find the culinary art injured a good deal by the arbitrary closing of the mansions of the great nobility.

Those thousand and one ruinous inventions without which courtiers, financiers, and ecclesiastics found existence impossible, were seductions for the severe Republicans. A celebrated gastronomist, Grimod de la Reynière, paints, in what he doubtless intended for very black tints, the calamity which marked the revolutionary period. “It is an unquestionable fact,” he writes, “that during the disastrous years of the Revolution not one fine turbot entered the market”; and he has thus exposed himself to Republican reproaches as to the seat of his patriotism and political sentiment being his stomach.

All the celebrities of the eighteenth century sat at the table of the la Reynières, which was more sumptuously kept than Scarron’s. There was first the grandfather, la Reynière, who died in 1754 with a napkin under his chin, suffocated by a pâté-de-foie-gras; then the father, whose dinners were better than his society, if we are to judge from the remark passed upon him by one of his guests, namely: “You can eat him; but digest him you cannot”; and finally the son, who has exercised by his pen and his stomach a considerable influence on gastronomy, and rescued French cookery from the indifference of the Revolution.

We have just mentioned the exquisite table which was kept by the inimitable Scarron. The time came, however, when his resources dwindled and the dishes laid before his distinguished guests were less numerous and less varied. The conversation of Scarron’s vivacious wife, however, the future Mme. de Maintenon, did much to atone for a poor menu. On one occasion, whilst dinner was proceeding, Scarron received a secret message from his cook – who had to prepare the meal with very spare materials – to the effect that a certain dish, usually regarded as essential, was wanting. Turning his head aside from the guests, Scarron whispered to his wife: “My dear, give them another of those charming little stories. There is no roast.”

So much for the ingenuity of a French host. The ingenuity of a French cook was perhaps never better exemplified than under the following circumstances. A rich financier was once dining at an aristocratic table where one of the courses consisted of some preparation of veal, highly gratifying to the palate. Whilst this course was being eaten one of the guests happened to say to the host: “Your epigrams, you know, are excellent.” When the financier got home he summoned his cook, told him he had just dined at a house where a ravishing dish of veal, mysteriously prepared, had been served, and directed the cuisinier to manufacture something like it, adding that he could not describe the precise nature of the dish, but that he knew it was called an “epigram.” For a moment the cook was staggered. Then a sudden inspiration came upon him, and he declared that he clearly perceived how epigrams should be prepared. Next day he invented an exquisite dish, which was destined to become famous – to his own and his master’s glory – as the “Epigramme de veau á la financière.”

It was a maxim of Brillat-Savarin’s that “the discovery of a new dish is more precious for the universe than the discovery of a new star”; and there have been plenty of illustrious diners and cooks in Paris who lived up to this lofty idea. The greatest chef who ever turned a spit was doubtless the immortal Carême, who commenced his career as maître d’hôtel to the Prince de Talleyrand. Having broken with his first master on some question of politics, he was successively employed by the Prince Regent of England, whom he quitted because George IV. did not sufficently understand the refinements of the culinary art; by the Emperor Alexander I. of Russia, whose dominions he found too cold; by Prince Bagration, who was a fine connoisseur but whose stomach was out of order; by the Prince of Wurtemberg, who had vulgar culinary tastes; and finally by an English lord, said to have been a glutton, and who was in any case choked to death with a bone. Carême was a friend of the illustrious Villeroux, famed partly as Mirabeau’s cook, but chiefly for his courage and adventures. Having sailed to the Indies, he fell into the midst of a savage race with strong gastronomic instincts, and prepared for them such delicious sauces and ragouts that they enthusiastically proclaimed him king. For several years, with a frying pan in his hand and the crown on his head, he played the dual part of cook and king. When he died he left his subjects a very precious legacy, a recipe, that is to say, for a bacon-omelette.