Les manuels de cuisine

Jean-Claude Bonnet : Cookery Handbooks. Between 1650 and 1830 we see the «embourgeoisement» of cookery books ; what was originally a manual of table etiquette linked to aristocratic festivities became, by shedding its many annexes, simply a source of cooking information. The mid-eighteenth century saw a «new cuisine », simple yet subtle, based on sauces ; there rapidly appeared, in the prefaces and introductions accompanying the practical instructions, a commentary full of erudition. The tension between these two approaches is one of the distinguishing marks of gastronomy. It is not easy to read an 18th-century cookery book, for we are faced with a very strange world of the imagination and a maze of notions.Bonnet Jean-Claude. Les manuels de cuisine. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°15, 1983. Aliments et cuisine. pp. 53-63