ON THE

RISE AND PROGRESS

OF

COOKERY.

Μεγα σώμα, μεγάλη σοφίη.

"Great mouth, great understanding."-A Greek Proverb, quoted by HEDERICHUS. Verbo σωμα.

"Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else."DR. JOHNSON.

THE Art of Cookery, says Montaigne, is as old as the world. If we give credit to the Jew, El Bassum, a learned commentator of the Talmud, the mess of pottage for which Esau sold his birth-right had been dressed by some great postdiluvian cook, whose name El Bassum could never discover, though he spent fifteen years in the enquiry. We may, however, console ourselves for this misfortune, by remembering that Fabricius, in his Greek library, quotes at least a hundred epic poems, written before the Iliad, whose authors will be ever unknown to us. It is not our intention to describe the culinary art, as it has existed among different nations; we shall not display the torch of cookery, sinking into obscurity, and again rising with double lustre, participating in the progress and deterioration of human reason-consoling the Carthaginians (whom Plutarch describes as great eaters) for the loss of their liberty-Corinth for the destruction of her museum-and Rome for the oppression of her Emperors.

Let us only remark here the constant care of Providence, in raising men capable of consoling nations in grief, by burying in oblivion the loss of their arts, and the tyranny exercised over their reason, together with the truth of the system of compensations, circumstantially detailed in the writings of the Materialist, Bonnet, and of which the honour of invention has in our own time been attributed to Mons. Azais.

It appears that the science of Cookery was in a very inferior state, under the first and second race of the French Kings-Gregory of Tours has preserved the account of a repast of French warriors, at which, in this refined age, we should be absolutely astounded. According to Eginhard, Charlemagne lived poorly, and ate but little-however, this trait of resemblance in Charlemagne and Napoleon, the modern Eginhards have forgotten in their comparison of these two great men. Philippe le Bel was hardly half an hour at table, and Francis I. thought more of women than-of eating and drinking; nevertheless, it was under this gallant Monarch that the science of gastronomy took rise in France. The innovation which Luther had made in human reason was extended even to the kitchen. A learned writer has given long details of the influence of the Reformation on the study of ancient languages, religion, archaiology, history, the law of nations, and has not said a word on the influence which this religious schism had upon Cookery, though it was immense.

Hardly had the Monk of Wittemberg agitated the moral world, when every one began to study the ancients, the fathers of the church, the councils, and the scriptures. The Catholics, whose intellect had hitherto remained

uncultivated, committed to memory the writings of the moralists of Rome and Athens, and the poesy of Homer and Virgil; read their bible, in order to oppose to these novel seductions of language and art (the fruitful instruments of the Reformation) the not less efficacious means of enchantment and proselytism. Hence arose an ob stinate struggle between the two rival religions, in order to hasten or oppose the reign of these new ideas. A struggle began at school, to be continued at table inter pocula et scyphos. It was at table that the Protestants and Catholics gained proselytes to their cause.

Luther had more than one cook amongst his disciples, as is affirmed by Hess*; and there is no room for doubt, when we see the Reformer ordain tailors, smiths, masons, tanners, journeymen printers, and send them to places where parsons are wanted, to read printed sermons. Whosoever doubts this may consult the Banquet de Théo, dule, by Starch.

It was not in Germany alone that the Reformation exerted her influence over the science of Cookery. De Thou, exiled from his country, to escape the dreadful spectacle of the massacre of the Protestants, himself relates the succulent repasts which he made in Italy, a country, which, though she had made the first return to the cultivation of poetry and the arts, yet made classical sauces, long after the Germans.

Few have heard the name of GONTHIER D'ANDERNACH! Yet he is one of those stars which shone in the Reformation, and may be compared with Eichhorn, Schultens, Kennicott, Semler, Schroek, Munter, Wachler, and all

* Recueils destinés à l'histoire des églises et de la Réformation en Suisse.

those great men whom M. de Villers quotes with admiration, in his learned dissertation. What Bacon was to philosophy, Dante and Petrarch to poetry, Michael Angelo and Raphael to painting, Columbus and Gama to geography, Copernicus and Galileo to astronomy, Gonthier was in France to the art of cookery.

Before him, their code of eating was formed only of loose scraps picked up here and there; the names of dishes were strange and barbarous, like the dishes themselves. Can it be credited, that the most witty and inventive nation has not one single sauce that can be called its own; it borrows its dishes and their names from other countries. No written precepts, nothing but inconsistent receipts, which fathers have transmitted to their children, who will again hand them down to their own posterity, and which all will date from the very origin of the world, because then their antiquity is the only criterion that fixes their rank in the public estimation.

At length, Gonthier appeared, to raise the culinary edifice, as Descartes, a century after him, raised that of philosophy. Both introduced doubt-the one in the moral, the other in the physical world. Descartes, considering our conscience as the point from which every philosophical enquiry ought to begin, regenerated the understanding, and destroyed that unintelligible empiricism, which was the bane of human reason. Gonthier, establishing the nervous glands as the sovereign judges at table, overturned the whole scaffolding of bromatological traditions, the sad inheritance of past ages. Gonthier is the father of cookery, as Descartes, of French philosophy. If the latter has given rise to geniuses, like Spinosa, Mallebranche, and Locke; the former has been

followed by a posterity of artists, whose names and talents will never be forgotten. Who has not heard of d'Alégre, Souvent, Richant, and Mézelier? It is said that Gonthier, in less than ten years, invented seven cullises, nine ragoûts, thirty-one sauces, and twenty-one soups; but who can assert that Descartes has discovered as many facts! In the history of Gonthier, every page should be read; but could we say as much for an historian or a novelist? We know nothing of Gonthier's last moments; whether he was burnt at the stake for having conformed to the doctrines of the Reformation, or whether he died a natural death; whether poor or rich, in exile, or in his own country. Concerning this we have recurred in vain for information to that crowd of pedants, who have so circumstantially described the quarrels of Ramus and the University, the violent, and sometimes bloody battles of the Realists and Nominals,-the combat of Empiricism and Spiritualism; all those foolish disputes of the sixteenth century, which paved the way for philosophic doubt, but which, in reality, were fit only to abridge the already too short duration of human life. Motion was created; nothing was able to stop it henceforth; the world could not return to its original chaos.

A woman opened the gates of an enlightened age; it was Catherine, the daughter of the celebrated Lorenzo de Medici, niece of Leo the Tenth, then in all the bloom of beauty. Accompanied by a troop of perfumers, painters, astrologers, poets, and cooks, she crosses the Alps, and whilst Bullan planned the Tuileries, Berini recovered from oblivion those sauces which, for many ages, had been lost. Endowed with all the gifts of fortune, the mother and the wife of kings, nature had also gifted her