SC - Cookery Myths and a "New" Book (Longish)

[Elise Fleming]

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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