fi nest luxury hotels in Europe. Escoffi er’s Guide Culinaire is still
the professional chef’s bible on classic French dishes. It contains
2,984 recipes, all meticulously cross-referenced and indexed.
Escoffi er also essentially invented how modern kitchen staffs are
organized—with a rigorous hierarchy and chain of command and
into separate departments.Gastronomy
Gastronomy, the science and art of eating well, also develops in the
19 th century. The most prominent gastronomes were a combination
of scientists researching the physiology of taste, restaurant critics,
and food writers expounding on the art of fi ne eating. These people
become arbiters of taste—precisely in the way that court chefs used
to be—but they’re writing for popular audiences, for anyone with
enough money to patronize restaurants or buy ingredients and have
them cooked well.
Grimod de La Reyniere, who wrote Almanach des Gourmands,
is the father of the modern restaurant review. Probably the most
well-known gastronome was Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who
wrote a book called Physiologie du Gout in 1825 that was not just
about taste in the chemical or physical sense, but also about what
constitutes good taste, how best to enjoy food, and why it should be
a serious concern. What makes Brillat-Savarin’s work so timeless is that he has an
excellent sense for what the French call le terroir, which involves the
nature of the soil, the climate, the local produce, when ingredients
come into season, and how to serve them without spoiling them.
In other words, he’s not a food snob; he’s a gastronome, someone
trying to analyze the nature of taste and why things taste good. His best-known saying is in the aphorisms that open his book and
is probably among the most often misquoted things anyone has
written: “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are.” He
means that you can tell someone’s personality from what they eat.
Are they conservative or adventurous? Do they want bland food, or