OP: The Art of Eating in France

Peter Owen, London, 1975. Hardcover. Very Good.

For centuries, students of fine cooking have been chasing the ideals of French culinary tradition, but what would it have been like to be an eater at the point of origin, during the Belle Epoque?

French philosopher and journalist Jean-Paul Aron (1925–1988) transports us to 19th century France, shedding light on the rapidly changing—emerging even—culinary scene across the country.

Game meats, for example, were once only available to the noble class for whom hunting was a privilege before the Revolution. Afterward, however, game appeared on menus everywhere, as a “symbol of hard-won equality.”
 
Seating assignments proved to be particularly challenging, as, in all reasonable effort to avoid conflict between tablemates and maintain civility, one must know their Bonapartists from Legitimists from Orleanists from Republicans—perhaps not all too different from today.

While Aron has much more to say about restaurants, service, foodstuffs, etc., notions of class are pervasive and conspicuous. In his observation of period wine opinions, he recounts that Bordeaux was only appropriate drinking for “those who do heavy manual work” in need of “a generous wine,” and Champagne was pejoratively called coco aristocratique (aristocrat’s cocaine) and dismissed as “manufactured.”

Our copy is the 1975 edition, translated from the original French, in Very Good condition. Clean and unmarked though showing some general wear.