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CMRS Lecture Series, Tomasik Lecture

October 7, 2013

CMRS Lecture Series, Tomasik Lecture

Medieval Noble Feast Painting in jpg format.

Timothy Tomasik, Associate Professor of French, Valparaiso University

"Cuisine by the Cut of One's Trousers: Cookbook Marketing in Early Modern France"

090 18th Avenue Library 10/11/2013 3-5 PM

Contrary to what some culinary historians have been asserting up until the last decade or so, the French Renaissance did actually have a thriving trade in homegrown cookbooks. Beginning in the 1530’s, a new generation of cookbooks appears in France that synthesizes the innovations of earlier sixteenth-century texts.  Between 1536 and 1627 appear twenty-seven editions of a cookbook associated with the printer Pierre Sergent, bearing witness to the literate public’s appetite for works of cookery.  By analyzing title pages, woodcuts, and prefatory remarks, we can see that cookbooks were being marketed to a wide spectrum of social stations and potential readerships, each representing contradictory desires.  This analysis demonstrates that questions of conviviality are not limited to an elite sector of society.  The early modern French banquet is a space whose contours can be adapted to fit a number of occasions, accommodating diners from all strata of society.