the annoyances of envisioning a kitchen
First of all, you have one more week to sign up for my giveaway of three paperback copies of Nghi Vo’s gorgeous novel The Chosen and the Beautiful. The google form to fill out is HERE. I will do the drawing next Friday.
Second: you can now buy paperbacks on my website!
It has frankly not been the easiest thing to find descriptions of the kitchens of early (i.e. between 1800 and 1820) Parisian restaurants. While there were a great number of English-speaking tourists moving through Paris whenever the cessation of Napoleonic hostilities allowed, and a great number of these tourists were fascinated by these newfangled “restaurants,” the accounts they left behind them dealt with the interior decoration of said establishments (characterized by very large mirrors and gilt fittings) and the peculiar sociological constitution of the French who liked to dine in such establishments (more than one American lady registered great distress at the notion that strangers might watch you eat. Quelle horreur! but renting private rooms in which to dine was also one of the defining features of early restaurants.) Rebecca Spang, in her book The Invention of Restaurants, comments in an off-hand way that most restaurant kitchens were in the basements, hidden from the eyes of patrons.
In their respective books about French culinary invention, Susan Pinkard and Jean-Robert Pitte both meditate upon the 17th-century introduction of the potager stove: essentially a brick box which one shoveled hot coals into, with several holes in the top to set one’s saucepans to cook — predecessors to the modern stove burner. These potager stoves allowed for the gentle simmering of sauces over long periods of time, something which could not be accomplished easily with a pot on a chain in a fireplace. For a period of time these two cooking technology coexisted in the same kitchens (link goes to a picture of the 18th-century kitchen of the Hotel Cabris, showing a tiled potager next to a hearth.) Presumably large joints of meat were still being roasted over the fire while the accompanying sauce cooked on the nearby stove.
When one considers the lack of adequate lighting, poor ventilation, and potential for flooding in a basement kitchen near the Seine, the working conditions for early Parisian restaurant chefs seem dire.
The world remains in grim shape. I suggest you find a group working in your community for the rights and well-being of immigrants and donate to them. In my case, that’s La Colaborativa, who are part of the joint lawsuit suing the Trump administration over their unconstitutional attempt to end birthright citizenship.
Read good things, and dream of better,
Sharon