Romantic Gastronomies

Notes

¹ Monkey, in French, is "singe," and the verb "singer" means to imitate mindlessly—as in "to ape" in English.
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² The drawing, and the tongue-in-cheek commentary below it, play on the meaning of "baron" in culinary French, as a large roast, usually of mutton or lamb.
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³ Steward to the Prince de Condé, Vatel stabbed himself fatally with his own sword, during a feast in honor of King Louis XIV, when an important seafood delivery was delayed. The provisions arrived soon after. (cf. Dominique Michel,  Vatel ou la naissance de la gastronomie [Paris: Fayard, 1999]).
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⁴ This is similar to Jean-Léon Gérôme's Phryné devant le tribunal of 1861, in which the courtesan's gesturing to cover her face, while ostensibly out of modesty, all the more surely calls attention to her resplendent nudity, and to her identity as an incomparable beauty: she was supposedly the model for Praxiteles's Venus of Knidos, the archetypal nude in Western art.
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⁵ This is similar in conception to Marcelin's caricature "Romans populaires," which pokes fun at novelists George Sand, Eugène Sue, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas père, through heraldic shields displaying "not the author's coat of arms, but instead a witty emblem of the work in question" (cf. Garval 2004a, 16-17).
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⁶ Cf. "la guerre Picrocholine" in Rabelais's Gargantua, or the conflict between the "Andouilles" and "Quaresmeprenant" in Le Quart Livre.
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⁷ Soyer explains that this "letter to the public press" never made it to its destination, "through the mismanagement of my servant, who threw it into the post without paying the postage" (40).
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⁸ This refers to Byron's poem, "Written after Swimming from Systos to Abydos."
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⁹ Cf. Karl Marx's Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte and Victor Hugo's Napoléon le Petit, both published in 1852.
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¹⁰ Nicolas Soyer was the son of  Alexis Soyer junior, himself the illegitimate son of the famed chef and the parisienne Adèle Lamain, resulting from their liaison before the former's departure for London. Alexis Soyer senior apparently did not learn of his son's existence until 1851, and recognized him officially as his child in 1853 (Volant and Warren 239-242).
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