English reception of French cookery, in particular cuisine bourgeoise, and its interpretation for English kitchens in the nineteenth century.

This third submission to the International Congress of the IEHCA at Tours was made in 2023. It continues but extends the theme of the relationship between French and British culinary literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

There has been a long history of interconnection and interchange between England and France in both the practice of cookery and the description of that practice in recipe books and culinary manuals. This might indeed be a truism inasmuch as it relates to the cookery deemed most suitable for the aristocratic or plutocratic table. From an early date, the most significant French culinary texts have been translated rapidly into English. With few exceptions, the reverse was never the case. But these translations were always of haute cuisine manuals, suitable for wealthy tables, not those of the middle orders (not that French recipe books of the eighteenth century cared much about the middle orders, save Menon’s Cuisinière bourgeoise). In the nineteenth century, however, while translations into English of authors such as Ude and Carême continued apace, we also begin to see the appearance of translations or interpretations of French cuisine bourgeoise, treating it not as a lingua franca of cooks everywhere, but more as a foreign ‘ethnic’ style that can teach us some good habits and introduce us to new methods and flavours. There had been a tendency among English authors of middle-class cookery books, from Hannah Glasse onwards, to treat French cooking as ‘a cobweb theory of cookery, such as the flimsy constitution-mongers of France have spun for these 12 or 15 years past out of their distempered brains, to deceive and ruin that miserable people,’ to quote Mesdames Hudson and Donat of Edinburgh in their preface to The New Practice of Cookery (1804). But with the later interpretations of cuisine bourgeoise, French cookery combined ‘economy with elegance,’ which might be adapted to ‘families of moderate fortune.’

From the earliest phase of producing cookery and housewifery manuals for women of moderate means – a signal achievement of British publishing in the eighteenth century – there had been great suspicion of the French model. It was the French, after all, who had written the most important cookbooks of the preceding century, and it was French methods and dishes which had been disseminated by court cooks in England. But as early as 1727, Eliza Smith, in her Compleat Housewife or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion states that ‘What you will find in the following sheets are directions … for dressing… the best … provisions in such a manner as is agreeable to English palates; saving that I have so far temporized, since we have, to our disgrace, so fondly admired the French tongue, French modes, and also French messes, to present you now and then with such receipts of French cookery as I think may not be disagreeable to English palates.’

It must be admitted that this statement by Smith smacks of straightforward prejudice – English good, French bad – as well as a more nuanced judgement that suggests French tastes are not our tastes in most instances: not good or bad, just different. We have to wait a couple of decades before the chief point about French cookery is established as a monotonous drone of whinge and complaint: that it is unacceptably extravagant. The standard-bearer of this anti-French prejudice in the mid-eighteenth-century has always been seen as Hannah Glasse in her Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy of 1747, and many editions thereafter. The quotation which delights us most is as follows: ‘A Frenchman, in his own country, would dress a fine dinner of twenty dishes, and all genteel and pretty, for the expence he will put an English lord to for dressing one dish. But then there is little petty profit. I have heard of a cook that used six pounds of butter to fry twelve eggs; when every body knows, that understands cooking, that half a pound is full enough, or more than need be used: but then it would not be French. So much is the blind folly of this age, that they would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook.’

The nub of this argument is not so much that French cookery is expensive, but that cookery as practised by French cooks in the service of the British aristocracy is wasteful because the clever French cooks know how to extract maximum perquisites and under-the-counter payments from their gullible, status-hungry employers. She does visit its expense on later pages: ‘This dish I do not recommend; I think it is an odd jumble of trash, by that time the cullis, the essence of ham, and all other ingredients are reckoned, the partridges will come to a pretty penny,’ and, ‘Read this chapter, and you will find how expensive a French Cook’s sauce is.’

Later still, she comes back to her original criticism: ‘I think here is enough to shew the folly of these fine French cooks. In their own country, they will make a grand entertainment with the expence of one of these dishes; but here they want the little petty profit; and by this sort of legerdemain sum, fine estates are juggled into France.’ It is the confidence trick that she objects to, just as much as the style of cookery.

This criticism of the French manner was rejected by the Sussex tavern-keeper William Verral in his Complete System of Cookery, published in 1759. Verral had worked previously in the Duke of Newcastle’s kitchen, under the French chef M. de St. Clouet, who went on to cook for the Duc de Richelieu. Clouet’s style was as up-to-date as any man’s in Paris. Verral defended him energetically against the criticism of extravagance. He remarked, ‘Much has been said of his extravagance, but I beg pardon for saying it, he was not that at all, nay, so far from it, this I can aver, that setting aside the two soups, fish, and about five gros entrées (as the French call them) he has, with the help of a couple of rabbits or chickens, and six pigeons, completed a table of twenty-one dishes at a course, with such things as used to serve only for garnish round a lump of great heavy dishes before he came here, such as calves and lambs’ sweetbreads, sheep and lambs’ rumps, turkeys’ livers, and many other such like things, of which, with proper sauces, he used to make as many pretty neat dishes.’

Here lies the kernel of the matter: French cookery, especially haute cuisine as described in male-authored manuals from La Varenne to La Chapelle, was seen by the English as extravagant. The stocks and cullises required large amounts of meat, and the gros entrées demanded much by way of expensive and extensive accompaniments. However, Verral noticed, when it came to made dishes, the smaller fricassées, ragoûts, vegetable dishes and so forth, that were arranged around the table, the English repertoire was much narrower, and the French were masters of the highly economic recycling of leftovers as well as of unconsidered trifles that might otherwise go to waste. What was more, English cooks were not as adept at these made dishes as were the French. One reason, he suggested – and here he was once more underlining the potential economy of the French kitchen – Verral described in a series of amusing tales how the English country kitchen was woefully lacking in its batterie de cuisine and, most significantly, cooked only on the open hearth and often did not take advantage of the charcoal-burning stove which used much less fuel, occasioned less heat in the room itself, and was much easier for the cook who was handling the many small pans required for a range of made dishes. Another lack evident in English kitchens, according to Verral, was the facility to pile embers or coals on top of a pan, because it was provided with a dished lid. This Dutch oven or braising pan arrangement enabled French cooks to give top and bottom heat to small made dishes as well as larger braises. Interestingly, more than a century later, when Jules Gouffé’s Livre de cuisine was translated into English by his brother Alphonse in 1868, the translation omitted the illustration of a four de campagne, used in the French original to cook a vanilla soufflé. By that time, of course, most English kitchens were cooking on ranges with multiple ovens, rather than the open hearth. To continue in this vein for a moment, English apologists of French cookery repeatedly maintained that the superior economy of the French kitchen lay particularly in its very light consumption of fuel. The inventor and manufacturer Charles Harel offered a number of such devices from the beginning of the nineteenth century. They all worked with charcoal and were much less wasteful than an open hearth or large cast-iron range.

Gilly Lehmann has described how British cookery book authors in the second half of the eighteenth century presented a gutted and coarsened version of the French style, replacing the long-drawn-out and fairly expensive method of making a jus or coulis with something that could be magic’d out of a bottle in seconds. Elizabeth Raffald for instance, made her cullis with lemon pickle and gravy browning. One of the problems for British cooks was that they had no French model of a middle-class lifestyle. The sole French cookbook that might have suited them, Menon’s La Cuisinière bourgeoise of 1746, was not translated until 1793, otherwise their models were manuals of court and aristocratic cookery. This began to change in the post-revolutionary years, most especially with works on domestic economy by Madame Gacon-Dufour in 1804–5 and the publication of Louis-Eustache Audot’s La Cuisinière de la campagne et de la ville ou Nouvelle cuisine économique of 1818. Only a few years after this, in 1822, Aglaé Adanson produced her manual of domestic economy, La Maison de campagne of 1822. This quickening of French interest in cooking for more modest households is well described by Audot in his preface – I paraphrase: ‘For a long time every well-run household in the world has followed the rules and methods of French cookery. Even their cookery books are filled with recipes translated from French works. However, the recipes contained in this literature are not suited to the circumstances of the housewife herself. She does not have to compose magnificent dinners but rather she seeks to combine as far as she is able well-being with simplicity. This book owes its origin to the lack of any other suitably popular and practical work.’

This shift in emphasis in French cookbooks continued throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in the acceptance and celebration of la cuisine bourgeoise as a style distinct from haute cuisine as practised in restaurants and upper-class households. What should be acknowledged is that British cooks and recipe writers recognised the emergence of this family style of cooking at quite an early date. Of course, they had been accustomed to it by the great flood of middle-class cookbooks in eighteenth-century England, but now they turned to the French formulation in the hope of improving British practice. There were some early outliers, but the messages would be the same all through the Victorian period to follow. The earliest explicitly French cookery book, written by an Englishman to explain the virtues and variety of French cooking to his home readers, was French Domestic Cookery, Combining Economy with Elegance, and Adapted for the Use of Families of Moderate Fortune by an English Physician Many Years resident on the Continent, published in 1825. The identity of the physician has not yet been established, but his book was well-enough regarded for it to be reissued twenty years later in 1846.

He opens his introduction by saying: ‘Few publications of importance on the subject of French cookery having appeared in this country within the last thirty years, with the exception of “Ude’s French Cook,” a book of merit, but which is more particularly adapted for the supply of the tables of the opulent, the present work has been edited, in order to fill up this obvious deficiency in our family libraries, by laying before the British public a copious selection of the most simple and least expensive receipts in French cookery ; with the especial view of proving that the generally received opinion of the middle classes in this country, respecting French dishes, namely, that they are almost all unwholesome, extravagant, and difficultly prepared, is founded in prejudice, and is either false, or highly exaggerated ; contrary conclusions having been arrived at by the other nations of Europe, all of which follow the system of French cookery much nearer than John Bull, whose gastric propensities are still so far confined to the favourite fare of his ancestors, as to prefer the ponderous solidity of British roast beef and plum pudding, to the almost boundless variety of dishes contrived by the ingenuity of French cooks.’

He goes on to claim the following advantages of the French style: ‘1st, as regards its variety; 2dly, its economy; 3dly, its healthiness; and 4thly, its practical facility.’ Variety will ever be a touchstone of supporters of the French style, the monotony and unhealthfulness of the British table preoccupying commentary for several decades. So too is economy, both in using up leftovers and efficient kitchen arrangements. Because of ‘the great variety in the French modes of re-serving dishes, there is no excuse for wasting in the kitchen even the slightest remnants of meat, vegetables, or bread, as any portions of either, that are clean and sweet, can reappear at table, agreeable both in form and flavour.’ Furthermore, ‘With the sole exception of the roast, all French dishes can be prepared by means of a portable stove at the moderate expense of a few pennyworths of charcoal or coke, for a family dinner of six or eight persons, in case the kitchen is not furnished with a stewing stove. Thus, on the days that a roast is not wanting, the kitchen fire need not be lighted; by which a very important saving is effected in family expenditure.’

What may be seen in the first half of the nineteenth century is the emergence of a twofold vision of French cookery. On the one hand there are the gastronomes and gourmets, allied with the aristocracy and the opulent, who view France as the source of all good cooking. This haute cuisine was all-encompassing, they did not talk about food except within its terms of reference. Their literary diet was from the same source: leaving to one side the great treatises of the eighteenth century, they were now provided with chef’s manuals by such people as Ude, Beauvilliers, Carême and, later, Gouffé and Urbain Dubois as well as English productions from the 1840s by Soyer and Francatelli.. They also fed on the nascent gastronomic literature of France derived from the works of Grimod de la Reynière and Brillat-Savarin. But there was this alternative vision of French cooking, one suitable for people of moderate means, which might on the one hand be viewed as an ethnic style (much as we would see Indian, Italian, Spanish, or East Asian cooking) or as something which could be combined with English methods to create a new and all-conquering hybrid. These authors did not depend greatly on translations of French originals. None of the French mistresses of domestic economy were translated, nor was Audot’s bible of cuisine bourgeoise put into English until 1846. This would hold good in the latter half of the century too: there were no translations of Tante Marie or Mme de St Ange. We had to rely on English interpreters.

Not long after the English Physician had published, there appeared in Edinburgh Meg Dods’ Cook and Housewife’s Manual. Meg Dods was the pseudonym of Christian Isobel Johnstone, a journalist and part of Sir Walter Scott’s circle. She had some apposite comments in the introduction to her fourth edition of 1829, which grafted much more French material onto her original text: ‘The vanity and amusing self-importance of the artistes imported to teach the refined cookery of France in our barbarian isles, has drawn ridicule upon their art, which ought to be exclusively confined to its conceited professors; for there is much, not only in the actual Cookery, but in the domestic economy of our refined neighbours, worthy of profound attention. In the hope that the foreign graces, transplanted into this Volume, may considerably enhance its value to the practical cook, a culinary system superior to either the French or the English may be drawn from the combined excellencies of both countries.’ She wrote later in the book: ‘It will save much trouble to admit at once, that the French are the greatest cooking nation on earth. … However it may be in this country with those ministers of vanity imported to English kitchens by luxury and ostentation, economy is thoroughly understood in France. Though objections are brought to the high relish of French dishes, we will venture to affirm, that the receipts given in our English cookery books, with their heterogeneous mixture of a thousand and one ingredients, are not only more expensive, but less simple, than those of Beauvilliers or Balaire.’

The English Physician’s French Domestic Cookery was an early and isolated example of our embracing of la cuisine bourgeoise, but other books showed a greater willingness to incorporate French recipes as the style gained currency. Thus Mrs Rundell’s New System of Domestic Cookery of 1807, the most popular manual of the first half of the century, incorporated an extra chapter of French cookery in the 1831 edition. In much the same manner, but from the very first edition, the anonymous author of Domestic Economy and Cookery for Rich and Poor of 1827 advertised that it contained an account of the best ‘English, Scotch, French, Oriental and other Foreign Dishes,’ treating France as another ethnic cuisine. It was remarkably wide-ranging for such a date, having plenty on Turkish, Middle Eastern and Asian food, including detailed instructions (the first in England) for making yoghurt. Eliza Acton, the best author of the mid-century, first publishing in 1845, extended her repertoire from the outset to take in French dishes, but she too added a chapter in her 1855 edition of foreign and Jewish cooking. On our relation to France, she remarked: ‘England is, beyond most other countries, rich in the varied and abundant produce of its soil, or of its commerce, which in turn supply it all that the necessities or the luxury of its people can demand; yet, until within very recent years, its cookery has remained far inferior to that of nations much less advanced in civilization; and foreigners have been called in to furnish the tables of our aristocracy, and of the wealthier orders of the community, those refinements of the art which were not to be obtained from native talent. Our improvement was for a long time opposed by our own strong and stubborn prejudices against innovation in general, and against the innovations of strangers in particular; but these, of late, have fast given way before the more rational and liberal spirit of the times: happily for ourselves, we have ceased to be too bigoted, or too proud to profit by the superior information and experience of others upon any subject of utility. The present age is one of rapid and universally progressing knowledge; and nothing which is really calculated to advance either the great or the small interests of society if now regarded as too homely or too insignificant for notice. The details of domestic economy, in particular, are no longer sneered at as beneath the attention of the educated and accomplished; and the truly refined, intelligent, and high-minded women of England have ceased, in these days of comparative good sense, to consider their acquaintance with such details as inconsistent with their dignity, or injurious to their attractions.’

The author of Domestic Economy and Cookery remarked: ‘It is worse than ridiculous to hear the English boasting of their charitable and benevolent institutions, and valuing themselves on a comparison with the virtuous and unobtrusive frugality of the French, and indeed of every other nation, when there is twice as much wasted by their menials as would, if fitly ministered, maintain in honest independence the wretches whose name is a sanction for drunkenness in a tavern, or dissipation at a masquerade. “A French family would live well on what is daily wasted in an English kitchen.”’

In 1853, just a few months before the new-forged alliance of England and France went off to war in Crimea to beat the living daylights (they hoped) out of the Tsar of Russia, there appeared two strikingly similar books. The first was entitled French Cookery Adapted for English Families and was written by Miss Frances Crawford (who would publish in the same year a manual of French confectionery); the second was titled The Manual of French Cookery Dedicated to the Housekeepers and Cooks of England who Wish to Study the Art, Simplified for the Benefit of the Most Unlearned, written by ‘One Who Has Tested the Recipes’. Each was written with sparing commentary, without reflection on the difference between the cookery of the two countries. Only in the case of the second book did the author indicate why she thought it necessary. Of course, she was not cooking herself, but ‘had I to direct the cooking of any particular entree, I was compelled to reduce the directions to the most simple form, to meet the understanding of my cook : this became a positive nuisance, for, even if they could read well enough to master the difficulties of a receipt, yet, unless I superintended the preparation, I too often found that something was misunderstood or forgotten. This determined me to compile, for my own use, a receipt-book; I therefore made myself mistress of the manual, as well as studying the art by book.’

There appeared in 1864 Cookery for English Households ‘by a French lady’ which covered much the same range as the two titles from ten years previously. She states that she had lived for many years in Burgundy, but the recipes show no particular regional affiliation. ‘After reading several books on French cookery,’ she wrote, ‘it struck me that none of them were appropriate to the class which most wanted them – I mean the class rich enough to have good dinners, and still which cannot afford to keep a good chef.’ She even contemplates the extreme possibility that the mistress might indulge in some cooking herself: ‘Ladies don’t like to cook, thinking it might spoil the beauty of their hands, but this may be easily avoided; if they would take the precaution not to touch peeled vegetables nor the handle of a pan without gloves, there would not be any difference between their hands and those of the idlest ladies their acquaintance. The gloves used in the kitchen should be thick, so as to prevent the heat of the handle from browning and thickening the skin of the fingers.’

The French lady mentioned was particularly conscious of the culinary influence of the French chef who became a national celebrity in England during the 1840s and 1850s, Alexis Soyer. Although himself cook to the Reform Club and in various aristocratic households, he also was concerned with the wider public sphere, both in Ireland after the famine and in the Crimea. He wrote several important books each of which addressed a different class of consumer. His Gastronomic Regenerator of 1846 was largely haute cuisine; his Modern Housewife or Ménagère of 1849 was directed at the middle classes; and his Shilling Cookery Book for the People of 1854 was for the poor. In the Modern Housewife, he urged the sense of French cooking: ‘Were the middle classes but slightly acquainted with the domestic cookery of France, they would certainly live better and less expensively than at present; very often, four or five different little made dishes may be made from the remains of a large Sunday’s joint, instead of its appearing on the table of a wealthy tradesman for several days cold, and often unsightly, and backed by a bottle of variegated-coloured pickles, made with pyroligneous acid, which sets one’s teeth on edge merely to think of it.’

The eventual translation of Audot’s Cuisinière bourgeoise which appeared in 1846, Soyer, the translated Jules Gouffé with its first half devoted to middle-class cookery – these were the staples of French bourgeois cooking for English kitchens to depend on. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, there was another handful of titles, French Dishes for English Tables by C. de Pratz (1908), Easy French Cookery by the chef Auguste Mario of the Café Royal (1910), then a gap until after the First World War when there appeared French Cooking for English Homes in 1923 and, perhaps most importantly, X. Marcel Boulestin’s Simple French Cooking for English Homes in the same year. Boulestin was to make a career out of producing and interpreting French cuisine bourgeoise and was a significant antecedent of the post-Second World War renaissance of the art in the hands of Elizabeth David and others.