About Le Grand d'Aussy and his history of French food from the Gauls to the eighteenth century
If you have read much food history, especially French food history, you have no doubt encountered material from the work of Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy (1737-1800). You may not know it, however, since modern food historians often use few, if any, footnotes, and so writers like Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat make Le Grand's facts (and often his errors) their own. Only someone familiar with Le Grand's work will recognize their source. But certainly Le Grand is familiar to historians of French food; one calls him "the first serious French food historian". It is hard in fact to think of any major food historian in any language before Le Grand.
Le Grand's monumental three volume history of food was meant to be part of a larger work, a history of French private life. As it is, Histoire de la vie privée des François: depuis l'origine de la nation jusqu'à nos jour could more accurately be called "The history of French food from the Gauls through the eighteenth century". It was in fact a work done for another, the Marquis de Paulmy, who first had the idea for the series and had originally engaged someone else to execute his concept. Ultimately, Le Grand and the marquis would fall out and quarrel over credit for the work, which was thus interrupted.
If food historians know Le Grand above all as one of their own, others consider him a medievalist, largely thanks to his edition of twelfth and thirteenth century fabliaux. He has also been credited with introducing the Breton terms menhir and dolmen to the French language.
He later became the conservator of the collection of French manuscripts at the National Library and was working on a study of old French poets when he suddenly died.
Strangely, if some English writers have shamelessly appropriated whole stretches of his work on food, no complete translation of this classic work has ever been published. Chez Jim Books however has now published several separate works on different aspects of food history, extracted from the relevant chapters of Le Grand's classic work. Though taken from different volumes, together these represent roughly two thirds of Le Grand's text.
Click title for more about each book ~ Click on corresponding image to buy
Le Grand's chapter on eggs is only one of several to address the complex history of Catholic fasting in France which allowed and banned different foods through the centuries. That and the other chapters are brought together here for a unique and concise history of the practice.
Le Grand's history includes rich details on fasting in France at different periods - but not in one chapter. The translation offered here combines – with minimal editing for flow – sections from Le Grand's chapters on “Poultry”, “Eggs, Cheese, Butter and Milk”, “Fish” and “Prepared Dishes” respectively. Taken together, these passages present an unusually concise and reasonably comprehensive overview of the history of Catholic fasting in Old Regime France.
Coffee was still relatively recent to France when Le Grand wrote and he gives its history until then, but only after looking at other refreshments, both cold and hot, including ice cream, lemonade, coffee and tea.
Strangely, there has been no full history of French wine in English. Luckily, Le Grand's chapters on the subject are comprehensive, going from the Gauls to his own time and are translated here in this volume.
Le Grand explores the furniture and objects around presenting food, going from tables and lighting to the various materials used to make tableware and in several cases how they were first made in France.
In the last few chapters of his masterwork, Le Grand discusses feasts and all that went with them: table decorations (from real to artificial flowers), customs and the often over-the-top entertainments known (like a certain course as well) as entremêts. These are the great food historian's most exuberant and colorful chapters, bristling with details on food, ornamental techniques and dizzyingly complex diversions for the well-off.
An overview of Le Grand's work and the translations
This table shows the basic topics from the 1782 edition of Le Grand's work (without chapters, sections, etc) with the starting page for each and the corresponding translation where one exists. Where a partial or full translation exists, the column following the page number includes an entry (with a link to the relevant page). An "X" indicates that the entire section has been translated; an "e" indicates that an extract from this section is included in a translation.
