Corrupting Cooks: Domestic Service and Expertise in Eighteenth-Century France

[摘要] In this dissertation I argue that a new type of cook emerged during the eighteenth century: a ;;taste professional;; who articulated a sophisticated policy of fashion and health, known as la cuisine moderne, in order to advance cooking;;s status. By proposing ever-accelerating cycles of culinary change, these domestic servants drove the consumer revolution at the most basic intersection of gustatory and metaphorical taste. Capitalizing on the Enlightenment;;s concern for bodily and material happiness, cooks claimed to be medical practitioners, placing them at odds with those who argued that cooks lacked the requisite authority to practice a science of the kitchen. By appealing to public opinion in their effort to secure recognition as taste and health experts, however, cooks forced doctors to debate with them on implicitly equal terms. Cooks were singularly unqualified assume these roles. They worked primarily as domestic servants, including both men and women in their ranks and lacking formal certifying and training institutions. Contemporaries responded to the incongruity of cooks;; scientific claims by vilifying them in a wide range of visual and textual media. I contend that the vitriolic response to la cuisine moderne grew out of the perception that cooks destabilized social and cultural order. I conclude that cooks;; explicit assertion of modernity worked against them, since servants ultimately could not be modern. Thisdissertation thus revises our understanding of the limits of modernity as a successful rhetorical strategy. I organize my analysis along three axes: practices, discourse, and representations. I open with an archive-based study of the spatial and material constraints faced by cooks and the strategies they deployed to structure their occupation. Next I explore the claims made by cooks as new taste experts: here I utilize printed cookbooks not just as indicators of dining practices but rather to propose a novel discursive space where cooks asserted revolutionary expertise. Finally I analyze the contemporary response to cooks;; selfstyled authority. Paintings, engravings, plays, verse, and medical treatises consistently portrayed cooks as both physiological and moral dangers that threatened to corrupt the body, the household, and indeed even society.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Enlightenment

[关键词] Cooking;Enlightenment;France;Gender;History;Medicine;Social Life and Customs;Cooks;La Cuisine Moderne;Philosophy