Lots of news lately for A Revolution in Taste, but there’s plenty going on. The November 30 issue of The New York Times Book Review featured a full review.

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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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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If you’re like me, you love beets. They’re all over restaurant menus lately, which is great. Though delicious and simply done, I find ordering them underwhelming. After all — they’re really easy to make at home, and they keep for ages. I’ve gotten my wife eating them, and probably do so 2 or 3 times a week. Here, Susan Pinkard, trolling through historical French recipes, has excavated a recipe for a Good Friday dish (totally vegetarian). It’s unlike my usual beet routine, so I’m going to give it a whirl. How could one go wrong with 2 sticks of butter?

BEETS WITH BEURRE BLANC (La Varenne)

Serves 4

In his list of dishes suitable for Good Friday, the strictest fast day of the church year, La Varenne mentions “bette-raves au beurre blanc” (beets in white butter). Sadly, no recipe is included with the listing. However, in an earlier chapter on entremets suitable for fast days, he described a dish of beets sauced with vinegar and fresh butter that suggested the thickened butter sauces that he used for fish. Pairing such a luscious sauce with the earthy beet seems slightly odd nowadays, but it is delicious. Because beets kept well through the winter, they would have been a welcome addition to the Lenten table, when the growing season was just beginning in the region of Paris. The rich, elegant sauce, creamy but balanced by the acidity of the vinegar, would have provided relief from the general austerity of the fast day menu. Note: If you use red beets (as La Varenne recommends), their powerful color will turn the portion of the beurre blanc with which they come into contact into beurre rose!

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Considering Bush’s decision-making style, and what many perceived as a reckless, ham-fisted approach to policy, it’s no wonder that the press is scrutinizing Obama’s style very closely.  And already, people are cautiously sizing-up Obama’s poised, deliberate way of addressing questions and problems.

Cambridge author Joan Hoff was recently interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education about his “professorial” style during discussions.

“He seems to be reflective when directly asked a question,” says Joan Hoff, a research professor of history at Montana State University at Bozeman and author of A Faustian Foreign Policy: from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (Cambridge University Press, 2008). While academics might find that style of speaking “calming and reassuring,” she says, it might come across as too wordy to the general public.

For Hoff, Obama shouldn’t “overdose on deliberation.” I guess I might fit into the “academic” category, and yes, “careful” and “deliberate” are words I’d use to describe my ideal president’s decision-making. But hordes of people didn’t flock to see Obama the professor.

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