French and English writers on domestic economy and cookery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
This is the second submission on the broad topic of nineteenth-century French writers on domestic economy, particularly Mme Millet-Robinet, which I contributed to the 2022 congress of the IEHCA at Tours. Again, it is not long and it lacks footnotes and references.
As a result of my enthusiasm for a quartet of French women writers on domestic economy in the first half of the nineteenth century – namely Mmes Gacon-Dufour, Aglaé Adanson, Elisabeth Celnart and Cora Millet-Robinet – I have been thinking about their output and the ways it, and French cookery books in general, compare and contrast with that of England and Scotland in the period after Louis XIV came to the throne and before the rise to power of Napoleon III. Of course, the brushstrokes will be broad, but I am particularly concerned with authorship on the one hand, and the intended audience, whether as readers or purchasers.
Marie Armande Gacon-Dufour
First, perhaps, a short introduction to our distinguished quartet. Marie Armande Jeanne Gacon-Dufour (1753–1835) was the daughter of the Paris concierges of the rich banker Jean Paris de Marmontel. Her mother was the wetnurse of Marmontel’s son and his milk-sister benefitted from the family’s patronage. She was a reader at the court of Louis XVI, received lands and a fine marriage contract thanks to their generosity, and spent most of her life living on her estates in the country. Having a sound education, she developed as an historian, memoirist and novelist, as well as embracing the cause of agricultural improvement. Although female, she was an early corresponding member of important agricultural societies. She espoused republican ideals and was a forceful voice for female education in matters practical and intellectual. She wrote several significant manuals of domestic economy and works concerning the management of livestock and poultry from 1804 until the 1820s; she was joint reviser of Armand-Ernest Havet’s influential household dictionary, Le Dictionnaire des ménages ou recueil de recettes et d’instructions pour l’économie domestique (1820), after the untimely death of the author in 1822; she compiled books of instruction in making soaps and perfumes and composing herbal remedies for farm animals.
Aglaé Adanson
Aglaé Adanson (1775–1852) was the daughter of the celebrated botanist and naturalist Michel Adanson. Her parents divorced when she was a young girl and she was no more successful in her two marriages, although settling eventually with her partner, the architect Pierre Descotils. But it was as a single woman that she ran an estate near Moulins that was gifted her by her mother’s lover and it was as a woman without necessarily a male partner that she wrote her Maison de campagne in 1822. At her Château de Balaine she created France’s first private arboretum, laid out gardens and greatly improved the agricultural side of the estate. Her manual of domestic economy is extremely characterful, replete with botanical instruction and an inspiration to any who, like her, wished to move out of the hubbub of the capital into the arcadian bliss of the country.
Unlike the first two ladies, Elisabeth Celnart, formally known as Elisabeth Bayle-Mouillard (1796–1865), was happily (it would appear) married to a lawyer. Well educated, her father was a schoolmaster, she turned early to literature and poetry, but made her name with a series of manuals of domestic economy, perfumery, charcuterie, cosmetics, soaps, dressmaking and animal husbandry. These were mostly written for Nicolas Roret, one of the most prolific publishers of practical handbooks in the first half of the century, of equal if not greater importance perhaps than Louis-Eustache Audot, publisher and author of La Cuisinière de la campagne et de la ville. Celnart is sometimes accused of plagiarism, in particular with regard to her work on perfumery, of Mme Gacon-Dufour.
Cora Millet-Robinet, a portrait by her brother-in-law, Hyppolite Bruyère
The final member of our quartet is Cora Millet-Robinet (1798–1890) who was born in Paris to parents involved in the colony of St Domingue (now Haiti). Her brother was the eminent chemist and pharmacist Stéphane Robinet. She married her maternal uncle, an old soldier François Millet, who owned a small estate in Poitou. They settled there and vigorously pursued reformed methods of agriculture and promoted the introduction of silk in the region, planting thousands of mulberry trees and establishing model magnaneries for raising silkworms. For many years, Cora was in sole charge of the estate while her husband was pursuing his military career, but on his retirement she turned to writing. Her magnum opus was the Maison rustique des dames, first appearing in 1845 and then for twenty-one editions until 1944. She was a fervent advocate of the rural life, or educating women to country and farming ways, and of them playing a full part in the administration of household, farm and family. Before her death at a ripe old age she was one of the first two women to be made a chevalier of the Agricultural Order of Merit.
These women were among the first cohort of female recipe writers in France – for before 1797, when Mme Mérigot’s short book on potatoes appeared, all the cookery books that had been published in France had been written by men and, with very few exceptions, for men. Not only that, but their preoccupation was almost invariably élite food and ways of cooking it – and the cooks, for the most part, were male.
This could not be more different to the situation in England – and, it should be added in parenthesis, to a greater or lesser extent to that of other northern European countries. Here, the production of court cookery books, written by male chefs for their colleagues or patrons, largely dried up by the 1730s – the final flourish being the first edition of Vincent de la Chapelle’s Modern Cook in 1733. Although men-cooks were a constant presence through the rest of the century, assuming greater importance with their tavern cookbooks in the last two decades, they were outnumbered by female authors writing for quite a different public.
The first female, professional author on domestic matters was Hannah Woolley, whose Ladies Directory appeared in 1661 and who followed it up with several titles, a few of which went out over her name but were ghosted by opportunistic publishers. Much of what she wrote touched on the instruction of gentlewomen fallen on hard times (thanks to the Civil War and its repercussions) who needed to work for a living as housekeepers or companions. It also was designed to instruct domestic workers who wished to better themselves.
Woolley’s output set a certain pattern which only strengthened in the ensuing decades. Many of the women were professional cooks, but not necessarily in noble households. Most of them had quite an ambivalent attitude to court cookery and, by extension, to French cooking in general, although often borrowing its tropes while condemning its extravagance. As the century wore on, there was also a coarsening of the French model, as they sought greater ease of performance and greater economy, so that a cullis might be created, by Elizabeth Raffald for instance, with lemon pickle and gravy browning. The lemon pickle was made by steeping dried quarters of lemon in white wine vinegar with mace, cloves, nutmeg, garlic and mustard seed for three months and straining off the juice; the browning was caramel dissolved in red wine with Jamaica pepper, cloves, shallots, mace, mushroom ketchup, salt and lemon rind.
The audience, given the generally high price of the books, was doubtless the female employer, but she was not expected to undertake the cooking: she would pass the book to her cook who by this time would be able to read, if not write – a situation that was less likely in France.
There was a marked tendency in England too, for books that were a by-product of cookery schools. Hannah Woolley and her husband were involved in education, although not specifically instructing in domestic economy; so too was the anonymous author of The Young Lady’s Companion of 1734 who stated she was a ‘Gentlewoman who formerly kept a boarding school’. But the first avowed cookery instructor was Edward Kidder, who kept a school of pastry work and cookery in London and whose recipes were printed some time in the 1730s. As well as enrolling as a pupil, readers could be taught by him in their own homes. A copy that came on the market not long ago was inscribed by the original owner, ‘Her book, February 12th 1734 the day I began learning of Mr Kidder’ – showing that not all his pupils were unlettered servants, but their literate mistresses too. Such works appear regularly through the century, not just in London but in provincial centres such as Newcastle and Edinburgh. The most significant female cookery author of the later part of the century, Elizabeth Raffald, herself ran a cookery school in and around Manchester. Such forays into education were not evident in France until a century later, although all our original quartet were eloquent on the need to teach domestic economy to young girls raised in less useful arts.
Another contrast between Britain and France at this time was not that the French simply produced fewer cookery books than the Scots and English, but that theirs were in vast majority published in either Paris or Lyon while in England there were a surprising number put out by printers in provincial centres such as Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester and Edinburgh, even if London was still pre-eminent. A reflection, perhaps, of the growing prosperity of soon-to-be industrial heartlands, where a new reading public was emerging; and a reflection too of the larger number of titles being published.
What is interesting in the work of our quartet of French women writing on domestic economy is that many of their concerns mirrored those of English women authors some forty or fifty years before. One thing, however, did set them at odds with the British experience. They all wrote with particular emphasis on the country-dweller: La Maison de campagne, Recueil pratique d’économie rurale et domestique, Manuel des habitans de la campagne, Maison rustique des dames. In a later edition of his Cuisinière de la campagne et de la ville, Louis-Eustache Audot remarked that the success of his book, first printed in 1818, prompted many publishers to retitle their old properties to include reference to country matters. This emphasis on the countryside was not replicated in England: reference to the country housewife, hitherto common, died out in the 1750s with the wonderful book by William Ellis, The Country Housewife’s Family Companion. Thereafter, the majority of titles were expressly written for urban households. In part, the French tilt towards the country was due to three of these women being closely involved with the reform and renewal of French agriculture, as executants, not mere onlookers. Hence Millet-Robinet’s rationale for writing her book was to fit young women for a farming life, to equip them with the skill and knowledge to become brides to an otherwise frustrated cohort of bachelor farmers.
A constant thread in British cookery books written by women was their wish to be understood, by denying themselves high-flown language and technical jargon. ‘If I have not wrote in a high, polite style, I hope I shall be forgiven; for my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way,’ wrote Hannah Glasse in her Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy of 1747. In like manner, Mme Gacon-Dufour wrote in her Manuel complet de la maîtresse de maison, ‘I have made a point of only using understandable language. A clear and simple expression is the way to make the procedures described perfectly comprehensible and is the route I have adopted.’ Millet-Robinet’s manual is written so precisely, with an almost lawyerly regard for exact terminology, that it would be impossible to misunderstand her.
There is a similar convergence in our British and French exemplars in their approach to styles of cookery, even if the British did anticipate the greater simplicity of cuisine bourgeoise by some fifty years. The British approach was muddied and muddled by the authors’ chauvinism: none of that French muck here. But it was not only French food they were refusing, it was also the high-flown and elaborate court cookery of whichever country. So Sarah Harrison, in her House-keeper’s Pocket-book of 1733, remarked, ‘A few good ingredients make the best dishes, and a crowd of rich things are apter to satiate, than to please the palate of those who have the nicest taste.’ Hannah Glasse was among the most eloquent and the most chauvinist: ‘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 and 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 everybody 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.’
Critical to this attitude was the pursuit of economy: a constant emphasis on the cheapest way to do things, the recycling of leftovers on the next day and so on. The English attitude was shared by their French equivalents. They were writing for women of modest income who wanted nothing to do with haute cuisine. Aglaé Adanson expressed it well: ‘I do not pretend to rival the formerly imperial, now royal chef of Monsieur Viard [a reference to the most popular haute cuisine manual of the early nineteenth century, Le Cuisinier impérial, 1806, subsequent editions being royal and then national]. On the contrary, I draw a most definite distinction between him and myself: he has worked for people of great wealth, and I write for modest country-dwellers. … You can have refined taste on a modest income and your palate will not be dulled by frequent consumption of complicated ragouts overburdened with costly and unhealthy ingredients … In fact, I guarantee that my instructions will satisfy that desire for refinement without damaging the pocket or your health.’ Mme Millet-Robinet, by the same token, was emphatic that such high-falutin’ guides should not be followed. Her recipe for calf’s head in the manner of turtle comments, ‘To make this as instructed in the Cuisinier royal of Viard requires so many ingredients and so much studied elegance that a common-or-garden cook runs great risk of losing her head.’ Her suggestions produce a dish no less excellent but more modest – however, it still needed a sauce containing mushrooms, truffles, cocks’ combs, artichoke bottoms and calf’s brains.
Louis-Eustache Audot, not female admittedly, pursues the matter of extravagance in his influential work, observing that M. Viard quite unnecessarily required two veal joints, one pheasant, four partridges, a joint of ham and a bottle of Madeira to produce a sauce espagnole. This pillorying of haute cuisine takes us straight back to the criticisms made of Monsieur Clouet, the French chef of the Duke of Newcastle in the mid-eighteenth century. His extravagance was denied by the English author William Verral who constructed a cogent defence of French cooking as much less wasteful and opulent than most people presumed – a trope which continued in minor key for the next century and a half.
Although this English strain of chauvinism and resentment of French influence persisted through the whole eighteenth century and beyond, usually in the form of protest at extravagance and over-sophistication, borrowing from French sources continued apace. None, in the mid-eighteenth century was more appreciative of it than one Martha Bradley, a professional cook in the spa city of Bath, whose British Housewife appeared in 1756. Gilly Lehmann has analysed her borrowings, influences and much greater refinement than, say, Hannah Glasse. When we come to the nineteenth century and the contemporaries of our original French quartet, one can see a greater alignment both of culinary style and of subject matter and book arrangement.
Eliza Acton, whose Modern Cookery of 1845 is nowadays thought the best Victorian recipe book, was very open to French influence (and profited from some help from the French celebrity chef Alexis Soyer). She wrote, ‘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 bigoted, or too proud to profit by the superior information and experience of others on any subject of utility.’
In similar fashion, the writer Anne Cobbett, the daughter of the celebrated agitator and politician William Cobbet, was very happy to draw on French example in her English Housekeeper of 1835. She acknowledges her inspiration being in part the work of Aglaé Adanson whom she acknowledges in her introduction: ‘The idea of composing an “English Housekeeper” was first suggested to me by the Maison de Campagne of Madame Adanson, a book which has gained great reputation in France, and which was written for the instruction of persons about to settle in the country, or to assist those already settled there. … [T]he plan of Mme Adanson is so judicious that I feel much indebted to her for her example.’ Miss Cobbett devotes much of her preliminary matter to a diatribe against the then current tendency of female education to ignore entirely practical matters of household administration and management. This was a trope that had been strongly pursued by French women writers from Mme de Genlis, to Mme Gacon-Dufour through to Mme Adanson and, with extra fervour and desire to extend the education from the household to the farm, Mme Millet-Robinet. In England, the very influential author Mrs Rundell had urged educational reform at the turn of the century in her Domestic Cookery of 1806, and Eliza Acton had something to say on the education of servants (as well as their mistresses): ‘It can scacely be expected that good cooks should abound amongst us, if we consider how very few receive any training to fit them for their business. Every craft has its apprentices; but servants are generally left to scramble together as they can.… We have often thought, that schools in which these duties should be taught them thoroughly, would be of far greater benefit to them than is the half-knowledge of comparative un-useful matters so frequently bestowed on them by charitable educationists.’ (She seems not be aware of those cookery schools which abounded in the eighteenth century.)
I might contribute here a thought about our most celebrated cookery book of the nineteenth century, Mrs Beeton. Disregarding its culinary content, which was fairly firmly British, indeed taking recipes from sources that first appeared in the seventeenth century, the arrangement of her book does seem to me to be strongly affected by the French model exemplified by Cora Millet-Robinet. Note that the book is entitled Household Management, without reference to cookery at all, even if the bulk of the content consists of recipes. But she does range over all the functions within the house, from laundry to wetnursing and the rearing of children. The great difference, of course, between Beeton and Millet-Robinet, is that the Englishwoman was writing for the urban household, not the relatively self-sufficient countrywomen whom Millet-Robinet addressed.
Finally, what should we think of all these cookery books being written for women who would do very little cookery themselves. Is there any recognition that their readers might stand day after day at the stove? In general, no. The purchaser would be the mistress of the house, she would convey the instructions to her servants. She might indulge in cookery, but it would be that sort of cookery that had been accepted as the province of the mistress from the very first appearance of printed cookery books in the sixteenth century: the still room, the medicine chest, the sweetmeat box, possibly the dessert course – all activities that were not time-dependent. For, of course, the mistress was the public face of the household and could hardly appear filthy from the kitchen to receive her guests. Cooking was somewhat hotter and sweatier than it is today with the stylish cook-hostess at her travertine worktop.
We might close with Cora Millet-Robinet’s contrary view: ‘ It is absolutely essential that the mistress of the house knows how to cook. A thousand entirely predictable circumstances may make it necessary for even a rich woman to have to cook at some stage, especially in the country where no opportunity exists, as it does in town, of obtaining supplies from a restaurateur. Even if she does have somewhere to go for help, is it not a great blessing for the mistress who is not wealthy to be able to stand in for her cook at a moment’s notice? She will thereby study economy, and avoid imposing on her family a strange and sometimes unwholesome diet; for restaurateurs of the second rank abuse their spices and seasonings to mask the poor quality of the raw materials they employ.’