Busting French Cuisine Myths:

Catherine de’Medici’s Italian Chefs Taught the French How to Cook

According to legend, the turning point in the development of French gastronomy was 1533, when Catherine de’ Medici, daughter of the famous Florentine family, married the future King Henry II of France. The suite of servants who accompanied her north from her native Tuscany included chefs, who brought the recipes and techniques of Italian cooking with them. These dishes were unlike anything served in France at the time and they touched off a culinary revolution.

Versions of this story have been reprinted countless time since first surfacing in the 18^th century and they have also entered into popular oral tradition. Whenever I mention to a group of acquaintances—in France or even here in America—that I write about the history of French cuisine, somebody inevitably brings up Catherine and her cooks. But the story is a fiction, as a little history will show.

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First off, newly syndicated readers who want to have access to my previous posts can find them archived here as well as listed on my own site here.

After last week’s speculations on time I would like to ask an even deeper question: why is there time?

My 4 year old daughter would be proud. What I mean is, why do things evolve in the first place? It seems to me that fundamental physics has to answer not only ‘what’ questions but also ‘why’ questions if it claims to provide understanding. I think I have an answer, or a glimpse of one.

The answer has to do with quantum anomalies; no not the large (not very quantum, then) things that seem to turn up in every other episode of Star Trek Voyager, but what physicists mean by this, which I am afraid is much more dry and dusty. In fact, I’m going to have to ask you to dust off your high school calculus books, just for a minute.

I explained in a previous post that even if nobody at the moment knows how to reconcile quantum theory and gravity, quantum spacetime should emerge as an effect coming out of any unknown theory. Typically, the coordinates x,y,z of space would also be quantum variables, so space alone should typically form some kind of symbolic algebra. Due to quantum effects, the order of the variables in this algebra will matter, xy will typically not coincide with yx. One says that the algebra is ‘noncommutative’.

Click to enlarge

Now, what about differential calculus on such a quantum space? If you remember any high school calculus it means things like dx, dy, dz as the ‘infinitesimal differences’. Newton and Leibniz both considered such things as numbers which are then made arbitrarily small. Hands up if your high school calculus class contained a picture like the one shown at left. It defines differentiation of a function f in the x direction as a limit of the slope df/dx of the triangle as dx gets small.

So to develop quantum gravity effects in physics we also need ‘quantum differentials’ dx, dy, dz. They should enjoy the properties that differentials enjoy in Newtons theory except, since xy and yx need not coincide, similarly y dx need not coincide with dx y, etc. Now, here is the remarkable thing one finds as you dig deeper into this world of quantum geometry:

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A Revolution in Taste was profiled in The New Yorker just the other day!

Pinkard reveals that before the storming of the Bastille a revolution took place at dinner tables all over France, when ornate, liberally spiced medieval styles of cooking were displaced by farm-fresh food prepared so that it “not only tasted, but also looked, like what it was.” Le goût naturel is strikingly relevant to the way we eat today. For instance, the Newtonian physician George Cheyne, who pioneered a new science of dietetics, advocated the reduced consumption of corn-fed poultry and cattle and argued that vegetables be eaten according to the season. Pinkard relishes debunking persistent myths: champagne was not invented by a Benedictine monk named Dom Pérignon but, rather, caught on thanks to the invention and diffusion of the modern wine bottle. Her lively account concludes with a series of meticulously sourced ancien-régime recipes demonstrating the finesse with which French food is now synonymous.

Those ancien-régime recipes are what I’ve been posting here over the past weeks. Part of that finesse lies in their simplicity. Getting it “right” is part ingredients, part practice. With that in mind, I turn to Thanksgiving. Whether or not you “celebrate” the holiday, what better way to spend a day than to cook? My problem: half my guests will be vegetarian. No giant bird for me. So I’m thinking that I’ll cook my holiday fall-back animal: lamb. I haven’t had any since my May trip to Scotland.

Below is a lovely recipe that Pinkard takes from Bonnefons, nice and simple to execute, but done right, looks heavenly.

As for the vegetarians, there’ll be plenty of veggies around, maybe last week’s beet dish.

After the jump: Roasted Rack of Lamb with Bitter Orange Deglazing Sauce

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Diane Rehm interviewed Cambridge author Yasheng Huang yesterday, and the streaming audio is now live!

Give it a listen >>

Huang is author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, recently featured in my favorite magazine, The Economist.

With the Martin Gardner books available, I’ve been throwing the word hexaflexagon around a lot. It’s part of the title, after all.

For anyone who hasn’t ever seen one, they’re cool. I came across this video of someone flexing a hexaflexagon made from a map; one of the more interesting applications I’ve seen.