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    Bread, Pastry and Sweets in Old Regime France
    Bread, Pastry and Sweets in Old Regime France
    Bread, Pastry and Sweets in Old Regime France
    Ebook200 pages3 hours

    Bread, Pastry and Sweets in Old Regime France

    By Jim Chevallier

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    About this ebook

    Le Grand d'Aussy traces French bread history from the first Tameliers and Fourniers to the Boulangers whose bread evolved from a simple boule to the pains mollet of the seventeenth century and the long breads which already began to replace round breads in the eighteenth century. Along the way he looks at the different types of bread, typically made from wheat, and also the other grains and even other products which were used to make bread.

    He then presents the history of French pastry, which began, essentially, as meat pies and other foods cooked in pastry before evolving into a dizzying array of tarts, wafers, nieules, ratons, cassemuseaux, flans, rissoles, beignets, marzipan and other treats.

    This leads naturally enough into the subject of sweets, of various spices and fruits preserved in sugar and honey, sweet pastes, nougat, macaroons and other treats sometimes eaten after dinner and sometimes all through the day.

    Along the way, as always, Le Grand draws in a rich variety of older sources, studding his inventories of facts with colorful anecdotes. The result is itself a rich box of tasty treats.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJim Chevallier
    Release dateOct 15, 2014
    ISBN9781311230409
    Bread, Pastry and Sweets in Old Regime France
    Author

    Jim Chevallier

    Jim Chevallier is a food historian who has been cited in "The New Yorker", "The Smithsonian" and the French newspapers "Liberation" and "Le Figaro", among other publications. CHOICE has named his "A History of the Food of Paris: From Roast Mammoth to Steak Frites" an Outstanding Academic Title for 2019. His most recent work is "Before the Baguette: The History of French Bread". He began food history with an essay on breakfast in 18th century France (in Wagner and Hassan's "Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century") in addition to researching and translating several historical works of his own. He has been both a performer and a researcher, having worked as a radio announcer (WCAS, WBUR and WBZ-FM), acted (on NBC's "Passions", and numerous smaller projects). It was as an actor that he began to write monologues for use by others, resulting in his first collection, "The Monologue Bin". This has been followed by several others over the years.

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      Book preview

      Bread, Pastry and Sweets in Old Regime France - Jim Chevallier

      legrand - bread front cover v1b

      Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy

      Bread, Pastry and Sweets

      in

      Old Regime

      France

      Edited and Translated

      by Jim Chevallier

      Chez Jim Books • North Hollywood, CA

      Published by:

      Chez Jim Books

      To contact the editor, e-mail: jimchev@chezjim.com

      Translations and additional text copyright © 2014 by Jim Chevallier

      All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form.

      ISBN: 9781311230409

      Although the editor and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of these translations and any additional information contained in this book, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistency herein.

      v1fe

      About Le Grand d'Aussy's Work

      The current volume has been extracted, translated and retitled from Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy's classic work on French food and drink, which has come down to us with the slightly misleading title of Histoire de la vie privée des Français depuis l’origine de la nation jusqu’à nos jours; that is, History of the private life of the French from the origin of the nation until our days. Though Le Grand originally intended to produced such a comprehensive work, in practice he only finished the three volumes on food and drink (first published in 1783). Incomplete as these may be in terms of the overall project, they are almost manically thorough in their examination of the specific subject and have remained, over the centuries, some of the prime sources on the subject. Not only do even modern writers continue to draw on them for key information, more than one writer (in both French and English) has shamelessly copied whole stretches of Le Grand's work, well after it was written, and presented it as their own.

      Le Grand at one point refers to himself as a compiler and certainly one of the strengths of his work is that it brings together a wealth of information drawn from earlier sources, some classics of their respective periods, some profoundly obscure. He began as a Jesuit and brings to his task the methodical, erudite and demanding precision which made the Jesuits so admired as teachers. But his personality – passionate, determined, unsparing, but also compassionate, even witty and sensual – shines through. When he thinks a previous writer has written nonsense, he says so, succinctly. When he feels obliged to work his way through fastidious, if important material, he lets his impatience show. When he includes an anecdote more because it is entertaining than because it is essential, he does so without apology. At the rare moments when he draws on his personal experience or acquaintance, he brings us vividly into the instant.

      He is, in a word, not only an informative but a lively and enjoyable writer, but one who, in English, is more often cited than translated at length. The present effort is intended to remedy that, if only in small measure.

      About This Translation

      While some French food terms have straightforward English translations (pain/bread, bière/beer} others present special challenges. Some are used in English as is, whether or not their French term is translatable. Some are untranslatable, yet may have a suggestive meaning. Others have equivalents in English which are not really translations; conversely, many can be translated directly, but the translation may not be used in English. In such cases, the approach here has been generally to give the French versions, with translations where appropriate (in square brackets and quotes) or the English equivalent (in square brackets only.)

      The word pâte

      Since dough plays such an important part in what follows, it is useful to understand the variants on the French word for it: pâte, or in older French, paste. The latter word, pronounced differently, became the English word for flour-based glues and things like fruit paste. It is derived from the Latin word pasta, and in fact the Italian word means exactly the same thing (pasta, though made with harder dough and in many shapes, is essentially dried dough). The French use exactly the same word as for dough for the latter (though typically in the plural: pâtes). When Le Grand refers to "Italian pâtes", he clearly means pasta, but it is also possible that in his own time he still thought of these as Italian doughs.

      Foods encased in dough were called doughed: pasté or (later) pâté. This word became pastie in English. The modern version has come to mean, not the dough container, but the meat preparation put inside it. Today, when meat pâté is served inside pastry, it is called pâté en croûte (pâté in crust).

      Meanwhile, originally, foods made in pasté came to be known collectively as pastisserie – that is, pastry. Those who made such foods were known, literally, as pastryers - pasticiers. Today we would call them pastry-chefs, but these artisans made far simpler fare and can more fairly be called pastry-cooks. In fact, one common English translation was even more pedestrian: pie-men. Many medieval pasties, then, were essentially what the English called pies.

      Typically, the boundaries between all these different meanings are clear. But for period speakers, their common relationship was probably far more apparent and Le Grand himself is not always absolutely clear about which he means.

      Layout and annotations

      This is not, in any meaningful way, an annotated edition, but certain phrases or references have seemed to require clarification or alternate suggestions; the latter appear here in-line, in square brackets ([]). The alphabetic footnotes are Le Grand's own and originally appeared at the bottom of the physical page in each case.

      In most cases, archaic spellings of places, etc. have been converted to their modern equivalents. Where the equivalence is too uncertain to be definitive, a note appears after the word in question. Where no meaningful information has been found, the word is left as it is in the original text.

      With few exceptions, the titles of the many works cited have been left in French, since presumably those who wish to consult them will be seeking the works in that language. The work includes numerous quotes from Latin, most are preceded by a paraphrase in the main text; others are followed by my own translations.

      Le Grand is inconsistent about providing dates. Where he offers no clue to a work or a person's period, these are provided here in square brackets.

      Le Grand regularly includes sideheads in his text, and most of the headings used here are taken from these. Some have been promoted to clarify the work's structure and a few high-level headings have been added to group these conceptually.

      An Overview of Le Grand d'Aussy on Bread, Pastry and Sweets

      Le Grand d'Aussy's chapter on bread appears in the first of his three volumes; for reasons which will be explained, those on pastry and dessert come later in the second volume (even if that on bread touches on pastry incidentally).

      Le Grand on bread

      Breads and grain had a disproportionate importance in Old Regime diets, especially for the poor, and Le Grand begins his entire work by addressing these. He starts with a long (and frankly rather tedious) chapter on preserving grains, a subject of great importance at the time, and then turns to the question of milling, before at last addressing the subject of bread per se. It is that chapter that begins this collection.

      Le Grand opens with an essentially mythical look at the origin of bread in the East before writing more credibly that the Gauls probably learned of bread from the Greeks at Marseille. He also cites Pliny's claim that early Romans lived mainly on porridge and also learned of bread-making from the Greeks. He then claims that bread was first baked at the mouth of the hearth (as it would be later), but the earliest hearths in fact were little more than open fires.

      His look at the origin of ovens is equally mythical. He is right however to say that bread continued to be made beneath the coals even after ovens were known in France. After a brief look at a portable oven from his own time, he turns to unleavened bread, which was very likely the first bread of the Gauls.

      He then, a little confusingly, skips several centuries to address the issue of what he calls bread plates, but which are more commonly known as trenchers. These appeared in the late medieval era and were unknown not only to the Gauls but very likely to medieval diners before the Crusades. Le Grand cites a verse which is probably the main source for the idea that trenchers, soaked with sauce, were given to the poor; this may have been true at one point, but later sources describe the leftover trenchers being carefully gathered and stored after the meal.

      Turning to leavenings, he loosely describes sourdough – for centuries the main leavening in France – but also mentions others, such as verjuice, etc.

      The story of brewers' yeast in France is a special one. Unlike countries where beer was the dominant drink, France had long favored sourdough as a leavening. This despite the fact that, as Le Grand points out, the Gauls (though probably only under the Romans) had used the foam (Le Grand says the lees) of their beer to leaven their bread. This foam was, quite simply, yeast. French pastry-cooks used it to avoid (another writer explains) the sour taste left by sourdough. But it did not reappear in French bread-baking until the seventeenth century. Le Grand's explanation for this is that the taste for a softer, finer bread – pain mollet (literally, softish bread) – required a stronger leavening because of the milk and butter used in it (he does not however say why this had not been the case in the fourteenth century, when evidence exists of the same practice).

      At this point, a familiar pattern occurred in France: the innovation was considered suspect. The use of brewer's yeast to make bread was not the only food-related matter to draw medical condemnation, leading various opinions and contradictory decisions; Le Grand gives a brief overview of this somewhat comic quarrel, later satirized as The Battle of Pain Mollet. (Note that pain mollet had been made – no doubt with sour dough – for centuries before this.) He then points out that the method's popularity in Paris was not echoed in the provinces, and provides interesting thoughts on why not.

      He mentions two kneading machines, neither of which met with success. In fact, numerous attempts to introduce these would be made all through the nineteenth century before overcoming, among other obstacles, the reluctance of bakers to mechanize.

      He then backtracks to trace the history of bakers in

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