Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking

This colorful history of French cooking takes us back before salt and pepper shakers had been dreamed of and explains why we begin with salad and end with dessert. Full of zesty quotes and recipes from period cookbooks and illustrated with wonderful still-life paintings, Acquired Taste is a trove of discoveries about cooking techniques and terms that still flourish today. Salt and pepper, salad and dessert-we may take for granted the taste of our food and the sequence of the courses, but European-American cuisine was invented under fascinating circumstances in the mid-seventeenth century. In a book redolent with fresh lore about the history of cookery, T. Sarah Peterson reconstructs the revolution in French cooking that explains why we eat as we do. Bountifully illustrating her story with still-life paintings and recipes from period cookbooks, Peterson explores a change in French cooking in the mid-seventeenth-century-from the heavily sugared, saffroned, and spiced cuisine of the Medieval period to a new style based on salt and acid tastes. In the process, she reveals more fully than any previous writer the links between Medieval cooking, alchemy, and astrology. Peterson's vivid account traces this newly acquired taste in food to its roots in the wider transformation of seventeenth-century culture which included the Scientific Revolution. She makes the startling-and persuasive-argument that the shift in cooking styles was actually part of a conscious effort by humanist scholars to revive Greek and Roman learning and to chase the occult from European life. Such ingredients as artichokes, asparagus, and foie gras reappeared in the kitchens of Europe as part of this invocation of antiquity. The Classical revival succeeded so well in creating a fashion for the salt-acid tastes of Ancient cooking that, by the end of the century, the new cooking dominated European tables. Intended to arouse the appetite in a manner subtle and erotic, modern French cuisine continue to achieve its effect using the very ingredients that teased the Ancients.