Whose French Cooking? What French Cooking?

In the 1960s, many middle class women (and I was one of them) and men too in England and the United States were swept up in French cooking, in England the French cooking of Mrs. David, in the United States the French cooking of Julia Child.

And as I mentioned earlier, although this might seem mere fashion, the effects reverberated through the food industry–restaurants, supermarkets, tourism.

Neither of these ladies grew up with French cooking.  They both came to it as adults, Elizabeth David in her 20s, Julia Child not until her 40s.  So how did they learn about French cooking?  And what kind of French cooking was it?

Let’s start with Elizabeth David, since her reign began first.  Her first experience with French food was with a family of Norman roots when she went to France in her teens, a family that she described as being food obsessed even by French standards.  Having been raise in rather unhappy upperclass English family with little in the way of good food, she loved what she encountered.

Following World War, she explored France.  She’d spent the intervening years pursuing the longstanding north European dream of a different and more relaxed south Europe and Middle East and also, bohemian men, some of whom helped shape her vision of food.  Although she was not rich was later to earn her way writing about food, the very fact that she could embark on such a venture set her aside from most of her compatriots. Now she went into small butcher’s shops in the provinces, she bought bread and chocolate to eat on thyme-scented hillsides, she ate in the provincial restaurants established in the 20s and 30s and now just getting back on their feet, she read widely in the massive French literature about French food.

So Elizabeth David’s  French food was the French “provincial” food created in the 1920s and 30s for tourists from Paris seen through a romantic screen of rejection of all things English.

I would bet a good bit that she had never cooked most of those recipes, let alone tested them. Not that this worries me because recipe testing in most cases (not all) is vastly overrated.  But someday a scholar is going to locate the origins of all those recipes in French cookbooks.

Julia Child by contrast was Paris based. She visited restaurants on a weekly basis and attended the Cordon Bleu, thanks to an allowance from her family. The Cordon Bleu had been founded in the late nineteenth century to bring middle class housewives up to speed with high French cuisine, the kind of cuisine that was prepared in restaurants in Paris, London, St Petersburgh, Vienna,  and by cooks in the houses of the international diplomatic corps.  By the time Child went, there were still courses for housewives, but she immersed herself in the toughie professional one.

Then Julia Child had the madcap idea translating this professional cuisine, already becoming dated when she was learning it, for American middle class housewives with no kitchen help.  The women listed as her co-authors on Mastering came from that tiny upper crust that either had a cook in the kitchen or took their guests to restaurants.

Hers was a wonderfully generous belief in the housewife’s capability and determination, the ultimate democratic gesture of taking a cuisine designed to emphasize  social differences and make it accessible to all.

So although their dishes overlapped, David and Julia offered their audiences quite different ideas about cuisine.  David’s was this breath of scented air, recipes as poetic guides to possibilities, a touch of sophistication and class for the aspiring.  Julia’s allure was the challenge, the hard work, the mastery the guaranteed results that offered entry into a tempting international world.

Neither vision had much to do with what French housewives, still reeling from World War II, actually cooked (here and here), an observation not a criticism.

And for that reason, their readers, at least this reader jiggered with them from the beginning.  Take stock, one point where they converged, something requiring pounds of bones and meat and bottles of wine, wine with a name moreover. Either of their recipes for stock would have taken my food budget for an entire week.  I was more likely to land on the moon than make this kind of stock. Of this more later. No matter, the jiggering could be forgotten.

The vision could not, that was what made these books, not the dozens of others published since the mid nineteenth century (indeed earlier) that purported to induct English and Americans into French cooking.

Each vision came at an opportune moment.  The English, as has often been pointed out, were finally rid of food rationing by the early 1950s and David offered color, scent, flavor that seemed, at least to be accessible.

The Americans–well, one way of telling the history of American food is an oscillation between the plain foods of democracy and the elaborate high cuisine of the world scene of gentility and sophistication.  Julia Child, publishing when the Kennedys made gentility and sophistication respectable, neatly bridged that divide with democratic access  (hard work and practice) to a sophisticated international cuisine.

A story replete with ironies.

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