Cuisine. This art of flattering taste, this luxury, I was going to say this luxury of fine dining of which so much is made, is what is called in society cuisine par excellence . Montaigne defined it most briefly as the science of the gullet , and Monsieur de la Mothe le Vayer, Gastrology . [1] All these terms properly designate the secret, reduced by scientific method, of eating beyond what is necessary, since the cuisine of abstemious or poor people is comprised only of the most common art of preparing dishes to satisfy life's needs.

Dairy, honey, the fruits of the land, vegetables seasoned with salt, bread cooked in embers, these were the foods of the first peoples of the earth. They made use of these benefits of nature without any other refinement and were as a result only stronger, more robust, and less exposed to disease. Boiled, grilled, and roasted meats, or fish cooked in water followed. They were taken in moderation: health did not suffer; temperance still reigned; and appetite alone regulated the timing and number of meals.

But this temperance did not last long: the habit of always eating the same things and with practically the same preparation engendered disgust; disgust gave birth to curiosity; curiosity led to experiments; and experimentation brought about sensuality. Man tasted, tried, diversified, chose, and came to make an art of the most simple and natural action. [2]

The Asians, more voluptuous than other peoples, first employed all the produce of their climates in the preparation of their dishes. Commerce brought these productions to their neighbors. Man chased after riches, only loving their enjoyment in order to furnish his voluptuousness and in order to change simple and good food into something more abundant, more varied, more sensually prepared, and as a result more harmful to health. Thus delicacy of the table passed from Asia to the other peoples of the earth. The Persians communicated to the Greeks this branch of luxury, which the wise legislators of Sparta always vigorously opposed.

The Romans, having become rich and powerful, escaped the yoke of their ancient laws, abandoned their frugal life, and tasted the art of fine dining: Tunc coquus (said Titus Livius, 1, XXXIX) vilissimum antiquis mancipium, estimatione & usu, in pretio esse, & quod ministerium fuerat, ars haberi coepta; vix tamen illa quae tunc conspiciebantur, semina erant futurae luxuriae . [3] These were only the early stirrings of the sensuality of the table that they soon pushed to its greatest period of expense and corruption. It is necessary to read in Seneca the portrait of what was made of it; I say in Seneca because his severity (or his bile if you prefer) teaches us many things on this topic that the spirits most indulgent in the faults of their century ordinarily pass over in silence. One saw, he tells us, nothing but Sybarites softly lounging in their beds, contemplating the magnificence of their tables, satisfying their ears with most harmonious concerts, their sight with the most charming spectacles, their smell with the most exquisite perfumes, and their palates with the most delicate meats. Mollibus lenibusque fomentis totum lacessitur eorum corpus et ne nares interim cessent, odoribus variis inficitur locus ipse, in quo luxuriae parentatur . [4] In effect it is from the Romans that came the multiplicity of services, and the establishment of these servants that we call cup-bearers, stewards, carving squires , etc. but their cooks were especially important, sought after, esteemed, and paid according to their merit, which is to say their preeminence in this illusory and pernicious art, which far from conserving life, produces an inexhaustible source of harm. There was in Rome such an artist in cuisine that he was paid four talents per year, which according to the calculations of Dr. Bernard equals 864 pounds sterling, or around 19,000 livres of our currency. Antony was so happy with one of his cooks in a meal given to Queen Cleopatra that he gave him a city in compensation.

These people sharpened the appetite of their masters through the number, the force, the diversity of dishes, and they had extended this diversity so far as to change the shape of all the morsels they wanted to prepare. They imitated fish that were desired but unavailable, giving to other fish the same taste and even the same form of those that the climate or the season refused to gluttony. Using fish meat, Trimalcion's cook even in this manner fashioned different animals: wood-pigeons, turtle-doves, fat pullets, etc. Atheneus speaks of a half-roasted pig, prepared by a cook who had the dexterity to gut and stuff it without splitting it open.

From the time of Augustus, the Sicilians surpassed others in the excellence of this tricky art; this is why there was no delicate table in Rome which was not served by people of this nation.

said Horace. [5] Apicius, who lived under Trajan, had found the secret of preserving fresh oysters. He sent them from Italy to this prince while was in the land of the Parthians, and they were still very fresh when they arrived. So the name of Apicius for a long time inspired a variety of dishes and created something of a cult among the gluttons of Rome. It must not be doubted that the name of some voluptuary of this capital, better placed following the name of dish than at the head of a book, would be more surely immortalized by his cook than by his publisher.

The Italians first inherited the remains of Roman cuisine . It is they who introduced the French to fine dining, whose excesses several of our kings tried to repress through edicts, but in the end it triumphed over the law during the reign of Henri II. So the ultramontane cooks came to establish themselves in France, and it is one of our least debts to this throng of corrupt Italians which served in the court of Catherine de Médicis.

I have seen, said Montaigne, among us, one of these artists who had served cardinal Caraffa: he give me a lecture on this science of the gullet with magisterial gravity and bearing, as if he had spoken on some great point of theology; he enumerated the differences of appetite, that on an empty stomach, and that after the second and third services, and the means at one point to please it, at another to wake and stimulate it; the administration of sauces, first in general, and then specifying the qualities of the ingredients and their effects; the differences of salads according their need, the means of decorating and embellishing them to render them even more pleasing to the eye. Next he preambled on the order of a service full of beautiful and important considerations, and all inflated with rich and magnificent words, and those even that are used to discuss the government of an empire. He reminded me of my man:

"That is too salty: this is burned; that is not spicy enough, this is very well prepared; remember to make it the same another time." [6]

Grasping the flavors which should dominate in each dish, the French soon surpassed their masters, and made to forget them: from that moment, even if they have challenged them, even on important things, it seems that they have found nothing so gratifying as seeing the taste of their cuisine surpass that of other opulent kingdoms, and to reign without competition from the one end of the globe to the other.

It is true, however, that thanks to manners and to general corruption each rich country has its own Lucullus, who by their example cooperate to perpetuate the love of fine dining. They agree it is enough to disfigure in a hundred different manners the foods given by nature, which by this means lose their good qualities. These are (if it can be said) rather so many pleasing poisons prepared to destroy the temperament and to shorten the length of life.

Thus the cuisine that was simple in the first ages of the world, having become more complex and more refined from century to century and from place to place, is currently a field of study, one of the most painful sciences, regarding which we see appearing without end new treaties under the names of Cuisinier françois , Cuisinier royal , Cuisinier moderne , Dons de Comus , Ecole des officiers de bouche , and many others which perpetually change method and sufficiently prove that it is impossible to reduce into a fixed order that which the caprice of men and the dissoluteness of their taste seeks, invents, and imagines in order to conceal ingredients. [7]

It must however be admitted that we owe to the art of cuisine many preparations of great utility and which merit the examination of physicians. Of these preparations, some deal with the preservation of foods, while others render digestion easier.

The preservation of foods is a very important point. Independently of the famine which sometimes afflicts the most fertile regions, long distance voyages necessarily require this preservation. The method for achieving it is the same for foods from the plant kingdom as it is for the animal kingdom. This method depends on the addition or the removal of some parts which tend to prevent corruption, and the latter means of preserving foods taken from animals is the simplest. It consists in the desiccation which is produced by a slow and gentle fire, and in warm lands from the heat of the sun. It is, for example, from this latter method that fish are dried which later serve as food.

One can also subtract from the juices of animals all their superfluous moisture, and render it suitable; since they have mucilage, they can survive this change. From this process comes the invention of jellies and tablets of meat, which survive transport on long distance voyages. But since these tablets are not without additives, they belong more specifically to the type of preservation which is very ordinary, and which is performed through the addition of some foreign body capable of postponing putrefaction by itself: this is what sea salt and common salt accomplish. Vegetable acids, vinegar, verjus, lemon, lime, etc. are also appropriate for this effect, because they tighten the animal solids on which they are used, and render their union more intimate and less dissolvable.

Meats taken from animals are also preserved by volatile salts weakened by the combustion of plants and by volatile acid salts mixed closely with a extremely thinned oil: such are smoked foods. But this preparation involves desiccation which comprises great part of it; however, it is certain that the oil which comes out of smoke and these very subtle salts, taking the place of the water which evaporates from the body of the meat, must render it much less alterable. Experience demonstrates this everyday, since meats and fish that are prepared in this fashion keep better than by any other method.

There are several other methods of preserving food, but since they are founded on the same principles, I should stop here. Thus in cooking meats, whether boiling them or roasting them, they are always better preserved than otherwise, since much of their mucilage is eliminated. One can also preserve for some time parts of animals and plants under fat, under oil, under purified juices, which prevent their fermentation or their spoiling by protecting them from the outside air. Finally aromatics such as pepper and spices are even more used as preservatives since they typically give an agreeable flavor to food; however it is rare that salt is not involved in this preparation. Let us add that desiccation goes along always or almost always with aromatics for the foods we want to preserve for a long time.

In that which concerns the art of rendering the two kingdoms' foods easier to digest, the first common rule is a preliminary and strong application of heat, especially with regard to meats, because the fibers of raw flesh bind too strongly together for man's stomach to be able to separate them, and the mucilage which joins them needs to be weakened considerably in order to be more soluble and more easily digested. This is why boiling in some form of liquid is employed (such as in water, in oil, in wine, etc.), or else the action of a dry heat which roasts them and cooks them in their internal juices.

The addition of different substances that are joined to this first preparation contribute even more to facilitate digestion, or serve as a corrective. The most ordinary seasoning to facilitate digestion is salt, which in small doses lightly irritates the stomach, increasing its action and the secretion of liquors. Every corrective consists in giving foods the altering character contrary to their particular excesses.

But in regards to the science of the gullet , so cultivated, which only seeks to stimulate the appetite by the hidden preparation of foods - as I have said above what should have been thought of this sort of experimental research of sensuality - I am content to add here that however agreeable the dishes prepared by the luxury in all countries might be, following the caprice of gastrology , it is certain that these dishes are a kind of poison rather than foods useful and proper for the preservation of health. A judicious physiological theory on this topic will be found in the essay on food by Monsieur Lorry, Doctor of the Faculty of Paris, 1754, in -12. [8]

Notes

1. [Michel de Montaigne, "On the Vanity of Words," in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne , trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 222.]

2. [Here Jaucourt follows nearly verbatim François Marin, La Suite des dons de Comus , 3 vols. (Paris: La veuve Pissot, 1742), vi. "He tastes, he tries, he chooses and thus arrives little by little to make an art of the most simple, most natural and most necessary action."]

3. [Titius Livius, The History of Rome , ed. Ernest Rhys, trans. Canon Roberts, vol. V (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1912), 39.6. "The cook whom the ancients regarded and treated as the lowest menial was rising in value, and what had been a servile office came to be looked upon as a fine art. Still what met the eye in those days was hardly the germ of the luxury that was coming."]

4. [Seneca, De Vita beata , XI. "Their whole bodies are stimulated by soft and gentle cushions, and in order to give the nostrils something to do, various perfumes imbue that place where feasts are given in honor of luxury."]

5. [Horace original and translation. "estrictus ensis cui super inpia cervice pendet, non Siculae dapes dulcem elaborabunt saporem, non avium citharaeque cantus." "When guilty Pomp the drawn sword sees / Hung o'er her, richest feasts in vain / Strain their sweet juice her taste to please." Horace, The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace , trans. John Conington (London: George Bell and Sons, 1882), 3.1.]

6. [This passage from Terence and the previous paragraph come from Montaigne, "On the Vanity of Words," 222-223.]

7. [François-Pierre de La Varenne, Le Cuisinier françois, enseignant la maniere de bien apprester, et assaisonner toutes sortes de viandes, grasses et maigres, legumes, Patisseries, etc. Reveu, corrigé, et augmenté d'un traitté de confitures seiches et liquides, et autres delicatesses de bouche. Ensemble d'une table alphabetique des matieres qui sont traittées dans tout le livre. (Paris: Pierre David, 1652), François Massialot, Le Cuisinier roial et bourgeois, qui apprend à ordonner toute sorte de repas, et la meilleure manière des ragoûts les plus à la mode et les plus exquis. Ouvrage très-utile dans les familles, et singulièrement nécessaire à tous maîtres d'hôtels, et ecuïers de cuisine. (Paris: Charles de Sercy, 1691), Vincent La Chapelle, Le Cuisinier moderne, qui apprend à donner toutes sortes de repas, en gras et en maigre, d'une manière plus délicate que ce qui en été écrit jusqu'à présent (La Haye: 1742), François Marin, Les Dons de Comus, ou les délices de la table. Ouvrage non-seulement utile aux Officiers de Bouche pour ce qui concerne leur art, mais principalement à l'usage des personnes qui sont curieuses de sçavoir donner à manger, et d'être servies délicatement, tant en gras qu'en maigre, suivant les saisons, et dans le goût le plus nouveau (Paris: 1739), L'Escole parfaite des officiers de bouche: contenant le vray maistre-d'hostel, le grand escuyer-tranchant, le sommelier royal, le confiturier royal, le cuisinier royal, et le patissier royal , (Paris: La veuve Pierre David, 1662).]

8. [Anne-Charles Lorry, Essai sur les alimens, pour servir de commentaire aux livres diététiques d'Hippocrate (Paris: Vincent, 1757).]