National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home

Also by Anya von Bremzen

Paladares: Recipes Inspired by the Private Restaurants of Cuba

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking:

A Memoir of Food and Longing

The New Spanish Table

The Greatest Dishes! Around the World in 80 Recipes

Fiesta! A Celebration of Latin Hospitality

Terrific Pacific Cookbook

(with John Welchman)

Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook

(with John Welchman)

PENGUIN PRESS

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Copyright © 2023 by Anya von Bremzen

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Von Bremzen, Anya, author.

Title: National dish : around the world in search of food, history, and the meaning of home / Anya von Bremzen.

Description: New York : Penguin Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022049211 (print) | LCCN 2022049212 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223165 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735223189 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—Social aspects. | Food—Social aspects. | Nationalism.

Classification: LCC GT2850 .V66 2023 (print) | LCC GT2850 (ebook) | DDC 3941/2—dc23/eng/20230309

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049211

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049212

Cover design and illustration: Roz Chast

Designed by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

pid_prh_6.0_148814534_c0_r2

For Larisa and Barry

And in memory of my brother, Andrei

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Paris: Pot on the Fire

NAPLES

Pizza, Pasta, Pomodoro

TOKYO

Ramen and Rice

SEVILLE

Tapas: Spain’s Moveable Feast

OAXACA

Maize, Mole, Mezcal

ISTANBUL

The Ottoman Potluck

Epilogue

National Dish

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

_148814534_

Introduction

Paris: Pot on the Fire

On a gray fall morning in the days sometime before the pandemic, my partner Barry and I arrived in Paris, where I planned to make a pot-au-feu recipe from a nineteenth-century French cookbook. It was for a book project of my own, one that had begun to bubble and form in my mind, about national food cultures told through their symbolic dishes and meals, which I would cook, eat, and investigate in different parts of the world.

Dumping our luggage in our apartment swap in the multicultural 13th arrondissement, we immediately rushed across the wide Avenue d’Italie—to begin sabotaging French national food culture by ingesting a frenzy of calories. Non-Gallic calories.

At a petite dive called Mekong, a stupendous curried chicken banh mi was prepared with something like love by a tired Vietnamese woman who sighed that Saigon was très belle, mais Paris? Eh bien, un peau triste . . . At a halal Maghrebi boucherie there was mahjouba, a flaky Algerian crepe aromatic with a filling of stewed tomatoes and peppers. And a mustached butcher being tormented by a middle-aged Parisienne, prim and imperious. After she departed with her single veal escalope, he exhaled with a whistle and made a crazy sign with his finger.

Which pretty much summed up how I’d always felt about Paris.

Ever since my first visit back in the 1970s, as a sullen teenage refugee from the USSR newly settled in Philadelphia, my relationship with the City of Light had always been anxious and fraught. Other people might swoon over the bistros, rhapsodize about first encounters with platters of oysters and crocks of terrine. Me, I saw nothing but despotic prix fixe menus, withering classism, and Haussmann’s relentless beige facades—assembly-line Stalinism epauletted with window geraniums.

But right now, onward, for pink mochi balls at a Korean épicerie on the main Asian artery, Avenue de Choisy, after which I frantically stuffed our shopping bag with frozen Cambodian dumplings and three huge Chinese moon cakes at the giant Asian supermarket, Tang Frères. Just nearby, at a fluorescent-lit Taiwanese bubble tea parlor, was where I discovered the Vietnamese summer roll–sushi mashup. Behold the sushiburrito.

It was the happiest Paris arrival I’d ever had. The 13th arrondissement comforted me right back to where I’d just left, my buoyant polyglot New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. The postcolonial profusion of lemongrass, fish sauce, and harissa helped soften my Francophobic unease.

•   •   •

Sending Barry off to settle into our apartment swap—whose tiny cramped kitchen, by some astounding kismet, featured a large poster of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary In Jackson Heights—I carried my purchases to our petite neighborhood park. South Asian and North African kids were kicking a soccer ball by the hibiscus bushes. On a bench, a Koranic old man with a wispy beard and a skullcap put his hand to his heart to greet me: As-salaam alaikum!

With this blessing and a test bite of moon cake (funky salted egg filling), I pondered that which had brought me to Paris—a place unbeloved by me, but historically crucial to the concept of a national food culture. My journey could hardly start anywhere else.

National cuisines, one food studies scholar observes, suffer from problematic obviousness. The same could be said for the very idea of national. Most of us take a view of nations as organic communities that have shared blood ties, race, language, culture, and diet since time immemorial. Among social scientists, however, this primordialism doesn’t hold water. Scholars from the influential mid-1980s modernist school (Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson) have persuasively argued that nations and nationalism are historically recent phenomena, dating roughly to the late Enlightenment—and to the French Revolution in particular, which supplied the model for our contemporary concept of the nation, as France’s absolutist monarchy of divergent peoples and customs and dialects was transformed into a sovereign entity of common laws, a unified language, and a written constitution, ruled in the name of equal citizens under that grand idealist banner: Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

Inspired by the French example, the long nineteenth century would see the rise of ethnonational self-determination from colonial empires, until the first and second world wars released flood tides of new nation-states from the ruins—some of their current borders, of course, blatant carve-ups by European colonial powers.

The final wave of nations arrived in the early 1990s with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the USSR. It was in the latter where I was born in the sixties, to be raised on the imperialist scarlet-blazed myth of the fraternity of Soviet socialist republics—as diverse as Nordic Estonia and desert Turkmenistan—all wisely governed by Moscow, my hometown. The food we relished was the disparate cuisine of an empire: Uzbek pilaf, spicy Georgian chicken in walnut sauce, briny Armenian dolmas; they relieved the quotidian blandness of Soviet-issue sosiski (franks) and mayonnaise-laden salads.

Then in 1974 my mother and I became stateless refugees, emigrants to the US.

I still remember my ESL teacher lecturing grandly in a loud, nasal Philadelphia accent about how proud we students should feel being part of a glorious melting-pot nation. And me trying to imagine myself somehow as a slice of weird Day-Glo–orange Velveeta melting away in the cauldron of gloppy chili of our school lunches. Instinctively wary of the great American assimilationist model, I didn’t melt in very well. My overbearing patriotic Soviet education made me cynical about states and their identities.

Though now I sometimes wonder how it would feel to belong to a small, close-knit nation—Iceland?—I feel most at home in my Jackson Heights barrio of 168 languages, where I can have Colombian arepas for breakfast and Tibetan momos for lunch, and nobody cares about my identity. I’m a Jewish-Russian American national, born in a despotic imperium long deleted from maps. I speak with a heavy accent in several languages, lead a professionally nomadic existence as a food and travel writer, and own an apartment in Istanbul, former seat of the multiethnic Ottoman empire. At table my mom, Barry, and I are passionate ecumenical culturalists. We make gefilte fish for Passover, Persian pilaf for Nowruz, and a ham for Russian Orthodox Easter. The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has a great phrase for this very common postmodern—globalized—condition, of not committing to a single identity or place or community:

Liquid modernity, he calls it. A life where there are no permanent bonds.

•   •   •

So why then would someone like me set out to explore national food cultures?

Because with the rise and domination of globalization, nations and nationalism somehow seem both more obsolete and more vital and relevant than ever. There’s hardly a better prism through which to see this than food. From Kampala to Kathmandu we confront the same omnipresent fast-food burger, while from Tbilisi to Tel Aviv the same global Brooklyn community of woolly hipsters protests such corporate/culinary imperialism with craft beer and Instagrammable sourdough loaves. In a way, both the craft brews and the burgers are different political flavors of transnational food flows. Such full-flood globalization, you’d think, would have wiped away local and national cravings. But no: the global and local nourish each other. Never have we been more cosmopolitan about what we eat—and yet never more essentialist, locavore, and particularist. As the world becomes ever more liquid, we argue about culinary appropriation and cultural ownership, seeking anchor and comfort in the mantras of authenticity, terroir, heritage. We have a compulsion to tie food to place, to forage for the genius loci on our pilgrimages to the birthplace of ramen, the cradle of pizza, the bouillabaisse bastion. Which is what I’ve been doing myself professionally for the last several decades.

What’s more, as a national symbol, food carries the emotional charge of a flag and an anthem, those invented traditions crucial to building and sustaining a nation, to claiming deep historical roots. While in fact, often, they are both manufactured and recent.

•   •   •

And so here I sat on a bench in Paris, unwrapping my hyperglobalized sushiburrito while contemplating a super-essentialist quote from the great scholar Pascal Ory. France, wrote Ory, "is not a country with an ordinary relation to food. In the national vulgate food is one of the distinctive ingredients, if not the distinctive ingredient, of French identity."

Italians, Koreans, even Abkhazians would certainly wax indignant that their relation to food is every bit as special. But if our identities, at their most primal, involve how we talk about ourselves around a dinner table, it was France—and Paris specifically—that created the first explicitly national discourse about food, esteeming its cuisine as an exportable, uniquely French cultural product along with terms such as chef and gastronomy. It was France that in the mid-seventeenth century laid the foundation as well for a truly modern cuisine, one that emerged from a jumble of medieval spices to invent and record sauces and techniques the world still utilizes today. To create restaurants as we know them, and turn terroir into a powerful national marketing tool.

Of course (to my not-so-secret glee, I admit) this Gallic culinary exceptionalism had taken a terrific beating over the past couple decades. So where was it now? And where, and how, did the idea of France as a culinary country come to be born?

•   •   •

The pot-au-feu that was to occupy me in Paris, my symbolic French national meal, came from a book by a deeply influential nineteenth-century chef whose fantastical story befits an epic novel. Abandoned on a Parisian street by his destitute father during Robespierre’s terror, Marie-Antoine Carême would have been invented—by Balzac? Dumas père? both were gourmandizing fans—if he didn’t already exist. Self-made and charismatic, he rose to become the world’s first international celebrity toque (in fact he invented the headgear). Not only was Carême the grand maestro of la grande cuisine’s architectural spun-sugar spectaculars, he also codified the four mother sauces from which flowed the infinite petites sauces, sauce being so essential to the French self-definition. And cheffing for royalty and the G7 set of his day, he spread the supremacy of Gallic cuisine across the globe. Or to put a modern spin on it, Carême conducted gastrodiplomacy (our au courant term for the political soft power of food) on behalf of Brand France.

Even more influential was Carême’s written chauvinism. Oh France, my beautiful homeland, he apostrophized in his 1833 seminal opus, L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siècle, you alone unite in your breast the delights of gastronomy.

•   •   •

How then are national cuisines and food cultures created? The answer, as I’d come to learn, is rarely straightforward, but a seminal cookbook is always a good place to begin. And as the influential scholar of French history Priscilla Ferguson observed, it was Carême’s books that unified La France around its cuisine and food language, at a time when French printed texts had begun making the ancien régime’s aristocratic gastronomy accessible to an eager, more inclusive bourgeois public. Carême’s French cuisine, Ferguson writes, became a key building block in the vast project of constructing a nation out of a divided country.

As the Chef of Kings addressed his public: My book is not written for the great houses. Instead . . . I want that in our beautiful France, every citizen can eat succulent meals.

And the succulence that kicks off his magnum opus is the pot-au-feu, pot on the fire. Broth, beef, and vegetables, soup and main course all in one cauldron, it’s a symbolic bowlful of égalité-fraternité that Carême anointed un plat proprement national, a truly national dish. Pot-au-feu carries a monumental weight in French culture. Voltaire affiliates it with good manners; Balzac and even Michel Houellebecq, that scabrous provocateur, lovingly invoke its bourgeois comforts; scholars rate it a mythical center of family gatherings. Myself, I was particularly intrigued by its liquid component, the stock or bouillon/broth—the aromatic foundation of the entire French sauce and potage edifice.

Stock, proclaimed Carême’s successor, Auguste Escoffier, dictator of belle epoque haughty splendor, is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking.

Stock was homey yet at the same time existentially Cartesian: I make bouillon, therefore I cook à la française.

Carême . . . pot-au-feu . . . such important subjects. Bénédict Beaugé, the great French gastronomic historian, saluted my project. And these days, alas, so often ignored.

In his seventies, his nobly benevolent face ghostly pale under thinning white hair, Bénédict radiated a deep, humble humanity—the opposite of a blustery French intellectual. His book-lined apartment lay fairly near the Eiffel Tower, in Paris’s west. Walking up his bland street, Rue de Lourmel, I noted a Middle Eastern self-service, a Japanese spot, and a wannabe hipster bar called Plan B.

"Ah, the new global Paris," I remarked, to open our conversation.

And a chaos, culinarily speaking, Bénédict said. A confusion—reflecting a larger one about our identity—lasting now for almost two decades . . . Though a constructive chaos, perhaps?

He wondered, however, as I’d been wondering, about the overarching idea of Frenchness, of a great civilization at table. In Paris nowadays, he said, only Japanese chefs seemed fascinated with Frenchness, while Tunisian bakers were winning the Best Baguette competitions.

Yes, immigrant cuisines are changing Paris for the good, he affirmed. But the problem? In France, we don’t have your American clarity about being a melting-pot nation.

Indeed. Asking journalist friends about the ethnic composition of Paris, I’d been sternly reminded that French law prohibits official data on ethnicity, race, or religion—effectively rendering immigrant communities like the ones in our treizième mute and invisible. All in the name of republican ideals of color-blind universalism.

Ah, but pot-au-feu! Bénédict nodded approvingly. That wonderful, curious thing, a dish entirely archetypal—meat in broth!—and yet totally national!

As for Carême? He smiled tenderly as if talking about a beloved old uncle. "An artiste, our kitchen’s first intellectual, a Cartesian spirit who gave French cuisine its logical foundation, a grammar. However . . . A finger was raised. The rationalization and ensuing nationalization of French cuisine—it didn’t exactly begin with Carême!"

Ah, you mean La Varenne, I replied.

•   •   •

In 1651, François Pierre de La Varenne, a squire of cooking to the Burgundian Marquis d’Uxelles, published his Le Cuisinier François, the first original cookbook in France after almost a century dominated by adaptations of Italian Renaissance texts—and the first anywhere to use a national title.

Hard to imagine, but until the 1650s there really wasn’t anything remotely like distinct, codified national cooking, anywhere. While the poor subsisted on gruels and weeds (so undesirable then but now celebrated as heritage), the cosmopolitan cuisine of different courts brought in delectables from afar to show off power and wealth. All across Europe, cookbooks were shamelessly plagiarized, so that European (even Islamic) elites banqueted on pretty much the same roasted peacocks and herons, mammoth pies (sometimes containing live rabbits), and omnipresent blancmanges, those Islamic-influenced sludges of rice, chicken, and almond milk. Teeth-destroying Renaissance recipes often added two pounds of sugar for one pound of meat, while overloads of imported cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and saffron made everything taste, one historian quips, like bad Indian food.

Le Cuisinier François offers the earliest record of a seismic change in European cuisine. Seasonings in La Varenne’s tome mostly ditch heavy East India spices for such aromates français as shallots and herbs; sugar is banished to meal’s end; smooth emulsified-butter-based sauces begin to replace the chunky sweet-sour medieval concoctions. Le Cuisinier brims with dainty ragouts, light salads, and such recognizable French standards as boeuf à la mode. One of La Varenne’s contemporaries best summed up this new goût naturel: A cabbage soup should taste entirely of cabbage, a leek soup entirely of leeks.

A modern mantra, first heard in mid-seventeenth-century France.

Then following La Varenne, in the next century, said Bénédict, a frail eminence among his great piles of books, the Enlightenment spirit fully took over, while print culture exploded. Fervent new scientific approaches teamed up with Rousseau’s cult of nature, whose rusticity was in fact very refined and expensive. Among other things, this alliance produced a vogue for super-condensed quasi-medicinal broths.

And the name of these Enlightenment elixirs?

Restaurants.

As historian Rebecca Spang writes in The Invention of the Restaurant, "centuries before a restaurant was a place to eat . . . a restaurant was a thing to eat, a restorative broth. Restaurants as places—as attractions that would be exclusive to Paris well into the mid-nineteenth century—first appeared a couple of decades before the 1789 Revolution, in the form of chichi bouillon spas, where for the first time in Western history, diners could show up at any time of day, sit at their separate tables, and order from a menu with prices. By the 1820s Paris had around three thousand restaurants, and they already resembled our own. Temples of aestheticized gluttony, yes—of truffled poulet Marengo and chandeliered opulence. But also, crucially, social and cultural landmarks that inspired an innovative and singularly French genre of literary gastrophilosophizing—attracting Brit and American pilgrims who assumed, per Spang, that France’s national character revealed itself in such dining rooms." Which it did.

"Of course national cuisines don’t happen overnight, cautioned Bénédict, as I made ready to leave him to his texts and histories. It was a long process that mirrored developments in culture and politics. But one uniquely French hallmark, he stressed, going back to the mid-1600s, was a culinary quest for originality and novelty, made even more insistent by the advent of restaurants and the birth of the food critic. And pretty much ever since La Varenne, each triumphant new generation of French cuisiniers has expressed a recommitment to the ideal of goût naturel, to a more inventive and scientific—and more expensive—refinement. Carême? He, too, professed the vast superiority of his cuisine on account of its simplicity, elegance . . . sumptuousness. Escoffier boasted of simplifying Carême—to be followed by an early-twentieth-century cuisine-bourgeoise regionalist movement that ridiculed Escoffier’s pompous complexities. Then the 1970s nouvelle cuisine rebels (Bocuse, Troisgros, and the like) attacked the whole Carême-Escoffier legacy of terrible brown sauces and white sauces" to raise the conquering flag of their own (shockingly expensive) lightness and naturalness.

But why—why, after the nouvelle cuisine revolution, did this uniquely French narrative of reinvention and rationalization flounder and tank spectacularly?

Ferran.

Nicolas Chatenier pronounced the culprit’s name with a somber flourish. Nattily dressed, a handsome fortyish businessman-boulevardier, Nicolas was, at the time, the French Academy chair for the enormously influential San Pellegrino 50 Best Restaurants, Michelin’s archrival.

He meant Ferran Adrià, the avant-garde Catalan genius of the erstwhile El Bulli restaurant on Spain’s Costa Brava. In the late twentieth century Adrià appeared seemingly out of thin air, a magician cum scientist who, just like that, brilliantly and wittily challenged, deconstructed, and reimagined established French culinary grammar and logic—the way Picasso and Salvador Dalí upended and electrified the world of art.

Nicolas and I were hashing over the apocalyptic toppling of the cuisine française edifice at a burnished haute-bistro called La Poule au Pot, which charged sixty bucks for a portion of pot-au-feu’s poultry cousin.

Nicolas grew up in a bourgeois Parisian family and remembers their festive excursions to France’s grand dining temples as utter enchantments. That bonbonnière that was Robuchon’s Jamin . . . he reminisced dreamily, as a bearded hipster garçon apportioned our yellow heritage Bresse chicken in broth with a cool millennial irony. Those fairy-tale desserts chez Troisgros . . . Maybe that’s why as an aspiring food journalist in the early aughts, he became so troubled by the raging French gastronomy crise. So he wrote a long magazine article laying out the facts. Which nobody wanted to hear. People accused me, he chuckled, "and I’m not making this up, of being a British spy!"

His eyes turned doleful. France, a great food empire for centuries. Best training, best products, best chefs. And then . . . He lifted a tragic hand. "The national humiliation of that New York Times Magazine story with Ferran on the cover about France declining and Spain ascending!"

But come, Nicolas, I chided, "that article was almost twenty years ago!"

And people here still talk about it, he assured me gravely.

It saddened him how the Spanish had displayed amazing unity around Ferran, while France’s contemporary generation, led by Joël Robuchon and Alain Ducasse, were fighting each other.

It was different with the seventies nouvelle cuisine guys, he insisted. "Troisgros, Bocuse, Michel Guérard, they were clever, authentic—united."

Sure, theirs was a radical 1968 rhetoric; revolution was in the air. But they seized upon that moment, a moment that was part of a sweeping larger cultural energy. Everything was nouvelle and innovative in France then. Nouvelle Vague cinema, nouveau roman literature, a new angle on cultural criticism. We were the capital of culture and fashion—Godard, Truffaut, Yves Saint Laurent!

He paused for a mournful slurp of chicken bouillon. "Followed by twelve years of stagnant immobility under Chirac. A slow, boring [sigh] . . . decline."

So the culinary crisis wasn’t really because of Ferran?

Nicolas gave a Gallic shrug of assent. It was a cascade of crises.

Crises such as outmoded, unsustainable Michelin standards of luxury that bankrupted some chefs, drove others even to suicide; the thirty-five-hour work week introduced in 2000, plus a draconian 19.5 percent VAT (lowered since) that put a further impossible strain on restaurants; at lower-rung places, scandals that erupted about pre-prepared dishes and frozen ingredients; in the countryside, chain supermarket and factory farms that threatened local traditions. Plus the global fast-food invasion arrived.

France, the exporter of a glorious civilization at table, became hooked on McMerde! Nicolas lamented. "Even our baguettes became terrible. Prebaked, frozen, industrial."

But now, apparently, now all was ending well. Baguettes were spectacular once more and millennials were crazy for organic and farm fresh, as if channeling Rousseau’s nature cult. The new vibe, in eastern Paris especially, brought Brooklynesque coffee bars, creative cocktails, Asian-influenced restaurants. Currently all lines in Paris are blurred, Nicolas declared, "and that’s really fun! Okay, we got thrown off for a while by the vitriol from abroad—but we have an open mind now! We may have lost the idea of a national cuisine, but we’ve opened up to outside. Go to Cheval d’Or, he admonished, this Japanese guy doing this supercool neo-Cantonese food . . ."

"So wait—you’re saying the Paris restaurant scene became interesting because chefs ditched the idea of Frenchness?"

Nicolas swallowed hard. He looked cornered. As the 50 Best head for France, he had to defend national values. Well, yes, for a bit, he allowed. "But now people are sentimental again—about bistros! The céleri rémoulade and poulet-au-pot we just had. Look around: every table is full, every night. At these prices."

Terroir, he mused, poking his fork into the carcass of our poulet de Bresse, its graphic, scary claw still sticking out. Maybe that was always France’s answer, her true national narrative. France’s incredible products . . . and how the French talk so superbly about them, feeding the global appetite that they effectively created.

•   •   •

After dinner I wandered along the moonlit Seine, ignoring that romantic riverside Francophiles swoon over so tiresomely, to ponder my conversation with Nicolas. Priscilla Ferguson argues that French cuisine reigned supreme because of the food itself—the proof in the pudding. But, as Nicolas contended, also because the French were such aces at discourse: their conversation, their writing and philosophizing, had elevated gastronomy from subsistence or even a show of class power to a cultural form on par with literature, architecture, and music.

But their conversation, it occurred to me, was what ultimately hurt French cuisine.

Because it became bogged down and essentialist. As progressive ideas erupted elsewhere—the new imaginative science in Spain, the focus on sustainability in California and Scandinavia—the French became fixated on the anxiety of losing their storied supremacy. Their narrative turned nostalgic, defensive, rigid with hauteur and heritage. I recalled a star-studded chef conference in São Paulo about a decade ago. The young Catalan pastry wiz Jordi Roca presented a magically levitating dessert. Brazilian chef Alex Atala passionately discoursed on Amazonian biodiversity. And the French? I still remember rolling my eyes along with the audience when a kitchen team of the gastronomic god Alain Ducasse came onstage to pompously lecture about the importance of . . . stocks. Which is like going on about fountain pens at an AI summit.

•   •   •

Yet here I was in Paris myself, knee-deep in bouillon, researching pot-au-feu along with the history and science of stocks—fishing for broader connections between cuisine and country. It amazed me, for instance, how an eighteenth-century cup of restorative broth sat so smack at the French Enlightenment’s intersection of cuisine, medicine, chemistry, emerging consumerism, and debates about taste, ancienne versus nouvelle. While a century later, broth represented democratization of dining, as inexpensive canteens called bouillons—the world’s proto–fast-food chains—sprang up in fin de siècle Paris, serving beef in broth plus a few simple items to disparate classes in hygienic, gaily attractive surroundings.

Now in the living room of our apartment with its clutter of Balzacian bric-a-brac, I reexamined once again Carême’s opening recipe in L’Art de la Cuisine Française: pot-au-feu maison.

Put in an earthenware marmite four pounds of beef, a good shank of veal, a chicken half-roasted on a spit, and three liters of water. Later add two carrots, a turnip, leeks, and a clove stuck into an onion . . .

A straightforward recipe, if a little weird. Why the half-roasted chicken?

What made the recipe a landmark, Bénédict told me, was Carême’s Analyse du pot-au-feu bourgeois, his opening preamble. For here was the Chef of Kings, who’d dedicated his pages to Baroness Rothschild, explaining the science and merits of bouillon for a bourgeois female cook—bridging the gap between genders and classes, praising his reader as the woman who looks after the nutritional pot, and without the slightest notion of chemistry . . . has simply learned from her mother how to care for the pot-au-feu. This preamble, according to scholars, was what truly nationalized