François Pierre La Varenne

François Pierre (de) La Varenne (1618 – Dijon 1678), Burgundian by birth, was the author of Le cuisinier françois, the founding text of authentically French cuisine. La Varenne broke with the Italian traditions that had revolutionized medieval French cookery in the 16th century. La Varenne was the outstanding member of a group of French chefs, writing for a professional audience, who codified French cuisine for the age of Louis XIV. Nicholas de Bonnefons, Le jardinier François. Qui enseigne à cultiver les arbres, & herbes potageres; avec la maniere de conserver les fruicts, & faire toutes sortes de confitures, conserves & massepains (1651), Les Délices de la Campagne (1654,) and François Massialot, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgois, (1691), which was still being edited and modernized in the mid-18th century.

"In the seventeenth century the French created and promoted a new style of cookery that broke with the Italian model. The French did three things. First, they all but eliminated sweet odours and the colour of gold from their food, thereby wrenching the aspect of the divine from Renaissance food ... Second, the French took one voluptuous aspect of Italian Renaissance food, the salt-acid taste, and adapted it to build a framework in which they incorporated other motifs from antiquity. Third, they tamed the concept of alchemical quintessences by lifting them out of the realm of the mysterious and placing them in the realm of the sensual. In the new sauces built on these essences, they interpreted harmony as the condition in which each ingredient loses its particular identity to merge with the whole" (Peterson, pp. 163-4).

Varenne's systematized work was more than a repertory of recipes, though he introduced the first bisque and Béchamel sauce; he built his sauces methodically on a roux, instead of the crumbled bread that had been the stand-by. The cooking of vegetables is addressed, an unusual departure. In a fragrant sauce for asparagus, the reader may detect an early Hollandaise:

"make a sauce with good fresh butter, a little vinegar, salt, and nutmeg, and an egg yolk to bind the sauce; take care that it doesn't curdle..." [1]

La Varenne preceded his book with a text on confitures (1650) that covered a larger area of cooking than we ascribe to confiture—jams and jellies—but included stillroom recipes for syrups, compotes of fruit as well as great variety of fruit drinks, with a section on salads.

La Varenne followed his groundbreaking work with a third book, Le patissier françois (Paris 1653), which is generally credited with being the first comprehensive French work on pastry-making. In 1662 appeared the first of the combined editions that presented all three works together. All the early editions of La Varenne's works—Le Cuisinier françois ran through some thirty editions in seventy-five years—are extremely rare, like children's books: they too were worn to pieces, in the kitchen, and simply used up.

Editions of Le Cuisinier françois were printed in Amsterdam (1653) and The Hague (1654-56). Soon there were imitators: Le cuisinier françois méthodique was published anonymously in Paris, 1660. The English translation, The French Cook (London 1653) was the first French cookbook translated into English. It introduced professional terms like à la mode, au bleu, and au naturel that are now naturalized as standard expressions. (Similar titles published in Germany, usually said to be translations of La Varenne, prove to be translations of Bonnefons, according to Henry Notaker [2].)

It is often said that La Varenne's first training was in the kitchens of Marie de Medici. At the time his books were published, La Varenne had a decade's experience as chef de cuisine to Nicolas Chalon du Blé, marquis d'Uxelles, maréchal de France, to whom he dedicated his publications and whom he immortalized in duxelles of finely-minced mushrooms seasoned with herbs and shallots, which is still a favourite flavoring for fish and vegetables. The marquis d'Uxelles was the royal governor of Chalon-sur-Saône, sometimes considered the birthplace of La Varenne.

François Pierre La Varenne

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