SC - Cookery Myths and a "New" Book (Longish)
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
Thu Dec 4 14:42:29 PST 1997
Greetings! I've been meaning to write about some of the "new" books I
found when a recent post "tickled" my memory from one of them. Someone
mentioned that Catherine de Medici brought Italian cooks to France,
which is apparantly an "old cooks' legend" and not accurate. Elizabeth
David, one of the cooking "gods" has a new version of her _Italian
Food_ which I was going to tell you all about. (Actually, her estate
does. She died a few years ago.) (ISBN 0-7651-9651-4) The book
currently appears to be on "mark down" at Borders Bookstores for $5.99!
The book is profusely illustrated, mostly with reproductions of
_period_ art which depict various aspects of cookery. For the pictures
and documentation alone, it's worth the price.
The book contains some brief historical information in each of the
chapters and she refutes some of the "legends" that she passed on in
the earlier versions. The recipes are modern but would be useful when
attempting to re-create similar "period" dishes. She refutes the
legend of Marco Polo bringing noodles to Italy as well as the Catherine
de Medici one that someone repeated in an earlier post. This is what
Ms. David writes: "To my original Introduction I have made only one
significant revision, and that concerns the paragraph dealing with the
influence on French cookery traditionally exercised by Catherine de
Medici and the Florentine cooks she is said to have brought with her to
France. These cooks, I now find, are part of a myth originating in
mid-nineteenth-century France, perhaps in the imagination of one of the
popular historical novelists who flourished at that period, and
certainly without historical fact. As briefly as possible, what _is_
historical fact is that when Catherine arrived in France in 1533 to
marry Henri Duke of Orleans, younger brother of the Dauphin, she was
fourteen years old, had barely emerged from the Florentine convent in
which she had been brought up, and had already been granted French
nationality. All her attendants were French.
"Whatever the Italian influence exercised on French cultural life in
general and on culinary developments in particular by Catherine's
marriage to the boy who was later to become Henri II of France, that
transalpine influence had already been active at least since the end of
the previous century...." She goes on for another paragraph and a half
detailing what influences occurred under Charles VIII and in
Catherine's reign as Queen Consort and Queen Dowager.
On the topic of "puff pastry", etc, part of another paragraph reads,
"One of her pastrycooks is credited with the invention or at any rate
with the introduction of flaky pastry, but then so are other
personages, among them the much later painter Claude Lorrain, who is
said to have learned how to make it in Rome. Many food historians
would say that some form of fine-leaved pastry had been known at least
since the days of the Romans, and I think they would be right, but
equally I have doubts about the claim that Catherine's pastrycooks made
their "feuillete' " with butter rather than with oil or lard. One does
not hear much about the use of butter in France at this period...."
A lovely book! Do you have a Borders Bookstore in your area??? I've
bought six books already for use as gifts!
Alys Katharine
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