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Denise Gigante, "Introduction."
Romanticism may be associated with gusto,
but it has hardly been recognized—at least within
literary circles—as the period that saw the invention
of the restaurant and a unique, comic-philosophical genre
of writing about food. But in fact Romanticism was
coterminous with, and in many ways emblematic of, the
culture of sophistication and social positioning we
associate with modern gastronomy. On the heels of the
French Revolution, gastronomy developed as a self-conscious
aesthetic, modeled on the eighteenth-century discourse of
taste. The gastronomer around the turn of the nineteenth
century began to make a fine art of food just as his
better-known peer, the dandy, would do of fashion. Both
were French-influenced phenomena, figures who crusaded for
the value of the aesthetic in an age of increasing
consumerism. The dandy famously flouted bourgeois ideals of
common-sensical economy, insisting on pleasure as a path
out of the everyday into the more elevated pleasures of the
imagination. So too did the Romantic gastronomer, a
strangely forgotten figure, help prepare the way for
today's haute couture. The current shift in
attention across academic disciplines from the high to the
low, from "The Sublime to the stomach" as Harold Bloom
remarks, prepares us to consider the fate of the aesthetic
connoisseur—the prototype, after all, for today's
critic—as he navigates the shift from a rarefied,
abstracted appreciation for the fine arts to the more
full-bodied experience of gusto.
[go to
introduction]
Michael
D. Garval, "Alexis Soyer and the Rise of the Celebrity
Chef."
While largely forgotten today, the
French-born British chef Alexis Soyer (1809-1858), whose
ideas and initiatives anticipated much of our culinary and
gastronomic modernity, played a key role in the evolution
of the chef as a public figure. Like other early celebrity
chefs, he first styled himself as a great man of letters,
filtering his fame through the lens of literary renown. But
much set him apart, particularly his dandyism, theatrics,
and tireless self-promotion; above all, his widely-read
books—a paradoxical enterprise for a semi-literate
culinarian—propelled his renown, showcasing both his
literary pretensions and popularizing bent. Soyer also
intuited much about the importance of images within the
period's burgeoning fame culture, cultivating his public
persona through the frontispieces and illustrations to his
works, and emulating the grandeur of great Romantic
figures, especially Byron. He fashioned himself a figure at
once endearing and ridiculous, avant-garde and retrograde,
a dandified faux-revolutionary, a champion of the common
people cloaked in uncommon frippery, his extraordinary
singularity served up in frenzied pursuit of mass-market
ubiquity. In particular, Soyer's humanitarian efforts in
the Crimean War, and account thereof in his Culinary
Campaign (1857), offered him an unprecedented forum for
self-fashioning and promotion, turning himself into the
bold hero of his own flatteringly-illustrated narrative.
Thrusting the obscure realm of the chef or logistician into
the limelight, he established that chefs need not pretend
to be great writers, to be seen as noteworthy personages.
This shift in the vision of chefs as public figures
underpins their later emergence as broadcast
stars—the first of whom, Xavier Marcel Boulestin
(1878-1943), was in many ways Soyer's spiritual heir.
[go to
essay]
Carolyn Korsmeyer, "Tastes and
Pleasures."
Both the modern field of aesthetics and
nineteenth-century gastronomy share an interest in
analyzing taste, a shared endeavor that the latter hoped
would elevate the pleasures of the table to aesthetic
standing. Philosophy, however, continues to exclude literal
taste and its sensuous pleasures from genuinely aesthetic
experience. This essay examines the concept of pleasure,
the subjectivity of taste, and the case for the aesthetic
status of this sense. Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of
Taste is the central gastronomic text employed in the
course of sorting through philosophical opinions about
literal, gustatory taste. The essay concludes that the
concept of pleasure requires greater critical scrutiny
before the commonality between literal and gustatory taste
can be determined.
[go to essay]
Joshua
Wilner, "Economies of Excess in Brillat-Savarin,
Balzac, and Baudelaire."
Although Baudelaire's attitude towards
Brillat-Savarin was dismissive to the point of open
contempt, his writing on drugs situates itself from the
outset, however ironically, within the rhetorical field of
the Physiology of Taste's “Meditations on
Transcendental Gastronomy.” Focusing on Baudelaire's
early essay, "On Wine and Hashish Compared as Means for the
Multiplication of Individuality" (precursor to
Artificial Paradises, Wilner argues that for both
writers, the consumption of substance, rather than
subserving the economy of the healthy body, becomes human
only insofar as it vehiculates an excess of desire. Wilner
also suggests that the progressive transformation of the
consuming subject into a figure of human perversity,
partially occulted in Brillat-Savarin, spectacularly
displayed in Baudelaire, may be correlated with stages in
the emergence of consumer capitalism. With close ties both
to Brillat-Savarin's text and to Baudelaire's, Balzac
"Treatise on Modern Stimulants" exemplifies an intermediate
stage in this process.
[go to
essay]
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