Masters of Disguise: French Cooks Between Art and Nature, 1651-1793

摘要

FROM THE WINGED HARE presented at Trimalchio's dinner to the four-and-twenty blackbird pie of English nursery-rhyme fame, we delight in food that is not what it appears to be. In the year 800 Charlemagne's cooks skinned a peacock to preserve the beautiful plumage, then spiced, larded, and roasted the naked bird. The skin was placed over the cooked carcass, the feathery tail fanned out, and a little flaming cotton ball placed in its mouth as it was brought into the banquet hall. Flaming peacocks and swans regularly graced royal tables throughout the Middle Ages. In our own day, the turducken—in which a boneless turkey encases a boneless duck that encases a boneless chicken— represents the latest instantiation of culinary artifice that aims to momentarily fool, and lastingly delight, its audience. Other examples abound, notably in the realm of sweets and desserts, such as the buche de Noel, marzipan fruits, wedding cakes, and sugar sculptures. Artifice has been an enduring ideal of elite European cuisine from the ancient world to the present day.