If we are to believe Jean-Paul Aron, we owe the rise of French cuisine and the invention of the restaurant to the guillotine. For when the French Revolution dispatched hundreds of noblemen and women, it denied the master chefs and their kitchen brigades the livelihood that came from satisfying their appetites. “Those superb artist-chefs who had hitherto worked exclusively for the great noblemen,” he quotes Les Petits-Paris of 1854, “one saw gastronomy descend into the Third Estate and even into the petite bourgeoisie.”
It is never quite clear if Aron sees this as progress.
The Art of Eating in France, subtitled Manners and Menus in Nineteenth-Century France is an odd blend of history, cultural criticism, and creative nonfiction. Aron draws upon hundreds of sources and assembles an impressive set of figures to portray the evolution of how and what Parisians ate over the course of the century. In 1820, mutton was the most expensive meat. In 1846, Parisians consumed six million oysters; in view of the fact that only the elite could afford or had the taste for oysters, Aron estimates that the average oyster-lover ate 300 oysters a year. The Vicomte de Viel-Castel polished off 240 oysters at one meal as a mere appetizer. Eggs, on the other hand, were eaten only occasionally — once or twice a week at most, perhaps because the preferred dish, the omelette, had to be prepared individually and thus was unsuitable for the canteen-style service of the masses.
He constructs a taxonomy of the dining options available to Parisians, from the premier restaurants like Le Véfour (now Le Grand Véfour), founded in 1784, where the extravagances of court kitchens were commercialized into haute cuisine, through the two-franc bistros that pretended to offer good value (“Soup, a choice of any three dishes, dessert, half a bottle of wine. Prompt service, cleanliness”) but became notorious for cutting corners — and the 23-, 20-, and 17-sous meal establishments that were even worse, down to the “cow-sheds,” the 20- and 40-centime hovels that fed the working classes without home kitchens (“a scrag-end of meat with vegetables”).
As Aron shows, the Parisian food service industry practiced an extreme form of recycling: the discards and unused portions of the top restaurants were sold to the bistros, who did the same in turn, until the bowl of bouillon served in a cow-shed would likely have originated in the stock of a fine-dining restaurant several weeks earlier, being reused and watered down repeatedly along the way.
The extremes of gluttony witnessed throughout the century would put Roman emperors to shame. Eating in obscene quantities was not just a display of wealth and conspicuous consumption but considered a sign of power. After the Vicomte de Viel-Castel’s oyster fête, he went on to stuff himself with: swallows’ nest soup; beef stew with potatoes, a whole salmon from Lake that he ate down to the bones; a pheasant crammed with truffles; a salmis of ten ortolans; asparagus, petits pois, a pineapple, and strawberries. Along with this he drank three bottles of wine and a bottle of sherry, liqueurs, and coffee, the final bill coming to over 500 francs, more than the annual income of a worker and equivalent to tens of thousands of US dollars today.
Competitive eating was not a sport but, in some cases, a life-and-death struggle. Père Gourier, a regular at the restaurant Bonvalet known as the “assassin of the fork,” enjoyed selecting a victim and subjecting him to repeated evening-long banquets until a heart attack or some disease of the gastrointestinal tract sent him off to the cemetery. He finally met his match in one Ameline, who secretly purged between bouts to maintain an appetite. After weeks of gustatory combat, Gourier reared back as if to sneeze, then fell face-first into his plate, dead from a massive stroke or aneurysm.
For Aron, eating is merely another means of combat, particularly for position, and the smaller the distinctions between the relative positions of diners, the fiercer the battle. “Dinner is beset by snares and pitfalls; it is shot through with violence,” he writes at the start of a chapter titled “Drama” that describes a superficially elegant and polite dinner among members of the upper crust of the petite bourgeoisie. Beneath the surface of fine china, vintage wines, and exquisitely-prepared dishes, he writes with savage satire, “Let’s admit it: we are among the wild beasts. At the slightest provocation, they will devour each other.” Luis Bunuel’s name appears nowhere in this book, but surely images of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie must have been running through Aron’s mind as he wrote this. The people writing restaurant guides and rhapsodic memoirs of unforgettable meals are, often unbeknownst to themselves, “describing the very basis of social injustice.”
The Art of Eating in France is far more splenetic that a typical work of history. The message underlying Jean-Paul Aron’s study is that the glories of French cuisine are founded upon — indeed, he argues, reinforce — layers of economic and social inequality. The reader who follows Aron through the 19th century of Parisian kitchens and dining tables will find themselves in territory far, far from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. No wonder that the International Herald Tribune’s reviewer, Mary Blume, described the book as “very much an appetite destroyer.”