Expert Cook in Enlightenment France
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€66.99
A01=Sean Takats
Author_Sean Takats
Category=JBCC4
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
cooks
cuisine
Enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
expertise
literacy
medicine
numeracy
professionalization
science
servants
taste
Product details
- ISBN 9781421402833
- Weight: 431g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Feb 2012
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the eighteenth-century French household, the servant cook held a special place of importance, providing daily meals and managing the kitchen and its finances. In this scrupulously researched and witty history, Sean Takats examines the lives of these cooks as they sought to improve their position in society and reinvent themselves as expert, skilled professionals. Much has been written about the cuisine of the period, but Takats takes readers down into the kitchen and introduces them to the men and women behind the food. It is only then, Takats argues, that we can fully recover the scientific and cultural significance of the meals they created, and, more importantly, the contributions of ordinary workers to eighteenth-century intellectual life. He shows how cooks, along with decorators, architects, and fashion merchants, drove France's consumer revolution, and how cooks' knowledge about a healthy diet and the medicinal properties of food advanced their professional status by capitalizing on the Enlightenment's new concern for bodily and material happiness.
The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France explores a unique intersection of cultural history, labor history, and the history of science and medicine. Relying on an unprecedented range of sources, from printed cookbooks and medical texts to building plans and commercial advertisements, Takats reconstructs the evolving role of the cook in Enlightenment France. Academics and students alike will enjoy this fascinating study of the invention of the professional chef, of how ordinary workers influenced emerging trends of scientific knowledge, culture-creation, and taste in eighteenth-century France.
Sean Takats is an assistant professor of history at George Mason University.
