Cora Millet-Robinet, her Maison rustique des dames, and her advice on feeding servants in French rural households in the nineteenth century

This is the text of a short address I gave to the Institut Européen d'Histoire et des Cultures de l'Alimentation (IEHCA) at their second international conference on food history and food studies held at the University of Tours in 2017. Contributions to this conference are timed to last no longer than 20–30 minutes, and there is no need to write them up later on. Hence this text lacks footnotes and references.

Bust of Cora Millet-Robinet, by her brother Stéphane Robinet

I wish to speak about Cora Elisabeth Millet-Robinet and her great work Maison rustique des dames, first published in 1845. In the first place because I have just completed a translation into English of the first volume of that book, relating to the household and the kitchen, and secondly, because her name is seldom in evidence in discussions of nineteenth-century French cuisine bourgeoise even though her manual was widely used, widely sold and much respected. Georges Vicaire remarked, at the end of the century, ‘This work has become an absolute classic and is a complete small encyclopedia of great utility to many housewives. The culinary part is very important and takes up, without any other matter, a good half of the first volume.’ Although several scholars, most notably the American Valerie Lastinger, have drawn on Mme Millet-Robinet’s writings for evidence regarding childcare, breastfeeding, and women’s education, not much attention has been paid to her cookery, perhaps because it is less impressive than that of culinary specialists such as Viard, Audot, Carême, and other famous names. Yet her recipes, although quite simple and often old-fashioned, are important evidence of the sort of cooking that went on in countless French farmhouses whose occupants would never have dreamt of cooking from Viard or Dubois in a month of Sundays. Viard, she said, ‘suggests recipes for some dishes of such sophisticated luxury that I could not possibly mention them here without ignoring the constraints I have set myself.’ This ignorance of Millet-Robinet extends to the wider French public. Many are able to nod their heads in appreciation of Grimod de la Reynière or Brillat-Savarin, but their eyes glaze over at a mention of Cora Millet-Robinet. In the modern media, I note, she does not even rate an entry in the French Wikipedia.

Yet the Maison rustique des dames had considerable success and was read and used in social circles far wider than its ostensible audience of farmers’ wives. The historian Georges-Henri Bousquet observed that ‘My grandmother Bousquet, who settled in the Batignolles district of Paris after her marriage in 1868, possessed it, although she certainly had nothing to do with the rural economy.’ He goes on, ‘all the generation of a certain age … remember the book perfectly.’ Appearing in 1845, it went through twenty editions until the First World War and was then revised by Mme Babet-Charton in the 1920s for a new lease of life that meant the Bibliothèque Nationale recorded its last copy as dated 1944.

Cora Robinet was born in Paris in 1798 to parents who had been involved in business in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, soon to become Haiti. Her father was born in Mâcon and was variously described as a merchant’s agent and stockbroker; her mother was member of a large Nantes mercantile family with extensive interests in Saint-Domingue. We know little of Cora’s upbringing or education but may presume her family had good connections in Paris and were serious in their approach to life by reference to Cora’s elder brother Stéphane Robinet who was sent away for his education in Germany and was then placed, through family contacts, with important scientific laboratories headed by Antoine-François de Fourcroy and Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin. Stéphane was a significant public chemist and pharmacist, a founder of the Journal de chimie médicale in 1825 and an intimate of the group surrounding the publishing house of the Maison rustique du 19eme siècle.

In 1823, Cora married her mother’s brother, her uncle François Millet. He was a military man, working in the commissariat, the intendance militaire. He had served in the commissaire des guerres in the Peninsular War and after the Restoration had transferred to the new commissariat, as well as holding the office of secretary and chef de bureau of the Legion of Honour. On demobilisation in 1815, he had become very interested in agriculture and particularly in its improvement and reform, corresponding at length with Mathieu de Dombasle and other agricultural improvers. He had bought a small estate in Poitou, to which the family migrated after his marriage in 1823, while he himself continued as a sous-intendant militaire in Poitiers and Châtellerault. This meant that the agricultural work which he set in motion was largely supervised day-to-day by Cora. There was a parallel enterprise which the couple embarked upon which consisted in encouraging and maintaining silk production, both on their estate and in a model departmental facility in Poitiers. In this, they were joined by Cora’s brother Stéphane in the 1830s who for a couple of decades was an important instructor and improver of silkworm breeding and silk production. When François Millet retired from the military in 1840 (already aged 63), Cora turned from the everyday tasks of management and supervision to her personal ambition to write books, principally of instruction and education. Her first concerned breastfeeding and the rearing of infants, published in 1841. Her second was the Maison rustique des dames. Each of these was written on a foundation of extensive experience, and each continued in circulation for several decades.

In this essay, I shall restrict myself to an account of Mme Millet-Robinet’s views on feeding her servants. Of course, the conditions of domestic service, in France as well as other European countries, not to mention that experienced in slave-owning societies such as the United States, were often scandalous. Ill-fed, ill-housed, over-worked and underpaid might well be a short description of the servant’s lot. But it is evident that conditions varied from one extreme to another and that different classes of employers and types of household could pursue quite contrasting lifestyles. An aristocratic master with a large staff was often deemed a satisfactory berth for a servant, offering fair conditions, the possibility of an honest retirement in old age, and the prospects of promotion up the hierarchy. The opposite might often be encountered in a Parisian household overseen by an unsympathetic mistress, where the staff was small in number, the demands made upon it greatly exaggerated by the exigencies of the social season, and where practical arrangements of accommodation and diet left much to be desired. A Breton maidservant accused in a Paris court at the end of the nineteenth century of stealing her mistress’s clothes stated that she stole them not for her own purposes, nor for resale but out of spite for her mistreatment. In a decade of service to honest country folk in her native region, she had never felt the want of their respect. Not so in Paris. Her plea of mitigation was accepted by the jury and she escaped with the smallest of penalties.

It can hardly be expected that Mme Millet-Robinet would counsel her readers to mistreat their servants. In this she was merely following the conventions of the genre, leaving the more robust advice of Cato on his slaves to one side. Her advice, therefore, to country employers was exemplary in its humanity – humanity touched by the whiff of discipline, of course, but still suffused with the need for mutual regard and respect. Country employers were often more humane in any event. Space was greater, tasks more likely to be shared. Mme Millet-Robinet’s readers were not expected to loiter the whole day in drawing-room and nursery, but rather to roll up their sleeves and participate in the tasks of household, garden and farm.

The readers of Maison rustique employed two classes of servants, those attached to the household (which rarely seem to have included male servants, at least explicitly) and those working on the farm. Both, of course, were called domestiques, and it is not always certain which group the author is discussing. Household servants were often expected to work in the garden and the basse cour (or poultry-yard), the areas of responsibility of the mistress herself, and they were also drawn upon for the great occasions of the agricultural year: the harvest, the vintage and haymaking. Far more of the farm servants were male (these slept in the stables by and large) and while they may have been recruited for high days and holidays in the master’s house itself, for the most part they were fed and accommodated separately in the farmhouse. Mme Millet-Robinet’s arrangements did not envisage the master and mistress sitting down with the servants all on one large table as obtained in many farming households at a lower social level.

Mme Millet-Robinet advised that servants should be allowed their own space: that the mistress should not intrude on their meals, for example, save to assure herself that they were adequate. She also encouraged the mistress to allow servants some liberty in entertainment: ‘So that servants don’t go off in search of amusement in unseemly locales, where they will pick up bad habits and waste their time, you should study to divert them, seizing any convenient opportunity to afford them suitable recreation that does not detract from their duties. As a general rule when hiring servants, it should be agreed at the outset that none of them can absent themselves from the house, even on high days and holidays, without the permission of the master or mistress. You should allow them to go to weddings and feast-days in neighbouring villages, where the family will doubtless go too; indeed, the fear that master and mistress might turn up at any time will inhibit them from making fools of themselves, either in unseemly highjinks or from excessive drinking. When you are happy with your servants, it is sensible to let them have a party at home every now and then; the pleasure it gives them, especially being able to invite their friends along, strengthens the bonds of attachment. Such parties are not costly: a violin, a few tarts, some bottles of wine is the sum of it. It is best if the family takes part too: their presence imposes a little order on the event and adds to the general enjoyment, but they should not overstay their welcome – eventually they will become a bore and a blight on proceedings.’

Furthermore, she suggests that they should sometimes be treated to food of a higher quality than everyday: ‘Every so often, a mistress should treat her people. The rigours of their life ensure that they will take enormous pleasure in a more succulent meal than usual. So it should be that when you kill a pig, given that a good housewife gets as much out of it as possible, you take advantage of the event to treat the servants, whose pleasure will be the greater because they owe it to the generosity and canny management of the mistress. On a feast-day, some chicken will always be acceptable: it is a rich man’s meat, they’ll say, and that thought means there is no better dish to offer them. And a glass of wine from the master’s table, offered while they’re finishing off an arduous task, will both stimulate and please the servants.’ In the same vein, she suggests that after a grand dinner with guests at the master’s table, the servants should get some of the rich pickings: ‘If you wish to have circumspect servants, you must not deny them everything and I do think that when you have handsomely entertained your friends and shared yourself in the festivities, you should not be ungenerous to the servants. Is it not right that they should share in the merrymaking of the household to which they are attached? It would be hard and, I think, very unwise to deny them entirely. Are they not in a some way part of the family? What’s more, you can be sure that they will seek to steal that which they would not dare take in plain view, or which you would refuse them, and hence you provoke them doubly: to greed and to deceit. Look into our own hearts: would we find it easy to live a life of privation in the midst of plenty? To be content with a measly dinner in the face of a sumptuous banquet? This question of basic equality is bound to cross the minds of those who find themselves, thanks to their position in society, wanting the plenty that we enjoy ourselves. There are already too many occasions when can do nothing to hinder such sentiments without adding to them wilfully. We should therefore devote all our efforts to quelling these dangerous thoughts, for the safety of society.’

This concern for social justice extends as far as the servants’ sleeping arrangements. Although a servant’s bed is much smaller than those of the mistress of her family’s, and the mattress less giving, care should none the less be taken that bedding is proper and adequate. ‘I appeal on behalf of the servants,’ she writes, ‘that a good mistress should never forget the hard necessity of social inequality that has made people like herself her servitors. If she wishes to earn their affection and devotion, she should discover in herself something of the maternal instinct, the only intimate connection between a mistress and her servants. What must go through the mind of a poor servant in a hard and unforgiving bed, and one that’s freezing cold, as she thinks back to the soft luxury of the beds she made up that very morning for her employers! Every effort must be made to avoid provoking such thoughts – fatal to social harmony.’

Mme Millet-Robinet’s remarks on feeding household servants are not extensive. She devotes more space to the meals that should be served to the farm labourers, bearing in mind as she does so that it is essential that they be well fed to maintain their productivity, and generously fed so that the best people wish to work for your farm. One significant factor in the editions of Maison rustique that appeared in the 1850s was her experience of the series of poor harvests in the early years of the decade, and the longer series of poor vintages at about the same time which were provoked by the incidence of powdery mildew or oïdïum on the vines (an affliction which, like the later phylloxera, was brought over from north America).

The shortage of grain and wheat led her to explore the utility of other starch staples, particularly for feeding the servants. She favoured rice (Calcutta rather than Carolina) which she used in soups in preference to incorporating in bread doughs. She also favoured increasing the role of root crops in her servants’ diet: be they potatoes, beetroot, or Jerusalem artichokes (for which she harboured a particular affection). On bread for the servants, she advised her readers to study their locality and not to provide bread at odds with that in general consumption in any one district. However, she recommended that servants should be offered good bread, made with bolted flour, with the bran removed, even if, in her opinion, offering better bread than the workforce was accustomed to might give rise to over-consumption and waste.

The other major hiatus with which she had to cope was the series of poor vintages that meant offering wine as a matter of course was well nigh impossible for the provident householder. She made several suggestions to remedy this deficiency, while admitting all along that wine or other fermented drink was invariably the best choice for a thirsty workforce and vastly preferable to water. She was much in favour of piquette, a simple ferment on fresh grapes or on the marc of pressed grapes. She endorsed making simple ferments of hedge fruits and stone fruits from the garden. She advocated making a very weak beer with hops alone: no malt enters into her recipe. She also approved cider in districts where apples grew in plenty. Her most extreme suggestion, however, was that coffee should be the principal substitute for wine. She describes how to brew twenty litres of coffee with a kilogram of ground roasted beans. This mixture is heated on the stove to boiling point, left to boil for 8 or 10 minutes, then allowed to cool and steep for 6 hours. Once the coffee has been poured off the grounds, 1.5 kilos of sugar is stirred in. The grounds are then diluted in another twenty litres of water, brought once more to the boil, then left to steep overnight before also being decanted. This secondary brew, she thought, was just as good as the first. Coffee was then doled out each morning after the workers’ first meal of the day. Everyone got a demi-tasse. This she thought sufficiently stimulating to make them work harder and with greater verve. Her proposal was first printed in the Journal d’agriculture pratique in 1854, and her suggestion was repeated in successive editions of her Maison rustique des dames right up to its final appearance after the First World War.

Throughout the course of her kitchen manual, Mme Millet-Robinet is mindful of by-products of the master’s table that might suit the servants down to the ground. Hence, when ham has been used to bolster the flavour of stocks, ragouts or sauces, it can be recycled for the servants’ dinner. Or if an ox tongue is prepared, the root will do for the servants; or when a few pieces of veal are added to give savour to calves’ sweetbreads, the prime offal may be served to the master and the bits of veal will feed the servants. And when cornichons have been pickled, the vinegar used to cook them in the first instance can be useful for scouring copper, or it can go to the servants. In the same way, freshly pressed walnut oil will throw a deposit. The best can be poured off for the master, the lees will do for the servants. And if the kitchen makes red wine vinegar, this should be reserved for the servants’ hall and the mistress should buy white wine vinegar at market for her own use.

Servants, especially when on active duty on the farm, expected four meals a day. The first might consist of bread and cheese, or bread and soup; the dinner would be served at between 11 and 12 o’clock and consist of soup and another dish, usually vegetables, but at least once a week some sort of meat. Then at four o’clock in the afternoon, more bread, salad, cheese and some sort of curd or milk product with fruits would be taken out to the fields; then supper at the end of the day which would be almost as substantial as dinner. Bread was the staple; soup ran it a close second, either made with stock or based on skim milk if there was a dairy producing butter and cheese on the farm. Vegetables made up the main bulk, particularly root crops, cabbage and choucroute. She commented that many workers are leary of choucroute but soon come to be reconciled to it. Her advice on meat is not to serve it plain boiled, but to offer it in some form of ragout. Salt pork might often be included in the soup and did not necessarily qualify as the meat ration. She suggests that the odd boiling fowl that has keeled over in the hen run, or rabbits kept in the basse cour for the purpose were a very useful source of meat.

Although she is careful not to propose quantities, so that some idea of how much her staff might consume remains a complete mystery, Mme Millet-Robinet is certain that servants’ rations should be adequate, both to maintain productivity, to keep the workforce loyal, and to maintain the reputation of the household.