Eating Like Louis XIV

[Hannah]

From the Telegraph

Opulence and ritual were of key importance during the Ancien Régime, and so the meals were divided into several services: hors d’œuvre, soups, main dishes, go-betweens and fruit. Within each service (except for the fruit course) there were between two and eight dishes. By the time Louis retired at 11.30pm, he would have eaten some 20 to 30 dishes, after which he would then pocket the candied fruit and nibble on a boiled egg as he made his way to bed.

I find it a little scary that he needed that boiled egg to tide him over on the way out.

[FunnyJohn]

I find it a little scary that he needed that boiled egg to tide him over on the way out.

Probably better than a "wafer thin mint."

[Waitman]

As a testament to Louis’s appetite for luxury, Dom Pérignon (the winemaker Louis most favoured)...

How brilliant that when the perspicacious Sun King felt like "drinking the stars" he chose a marque that did not exist until the 20th Century, named after an obscure toiler was virtually unknown outside of Rheims before his name was slapped on advertisements in the late 1800s.

I suppose that if would be (additionally) churlish of me to point out that the champagne Louis XIV drank -- assuming he even drank the stuff, it wasn't wildly popular unto 50 years after his death -- would have been dramatically different from whatever Moet-Chandon is bottling these days (much sweeter and very cloudy), delivering a further blow to claims of authenticity in the breathlessly rewritten press release printed by the Telegraph (not that it wasn't a fun read, but my gush tolerance is low today).

Oh, guess what occasionally annoying but overall enlightening and illuminating book I read over break?

[Sthitch]

Seems like Louis XIV was a lightweight compared to what the nobility of the mid-14th century served at their banquets. In the book “A Distant Mirror,” Barbara Tuchman details the wedding banquet of Lionel of England and Violante Visconti which included such guests as Petrarch, Chaucer, and Froissart as:

The stupendous wedding banquet, held in June, left all accounts gasping. Its obvious purpose was to testify to ‘the Largeness of Duke Galeas his soul, the full satisfaction he had in his match and the abundance of his coffers.” Thirty double courses of meat and fish alternated with presentations of gifts after each course…

The meats and fish, all gilded (with a paste of powdered egg yolk, saffron, flour sometimes mixed with real gold leaf), paired suckling pigs with crabs, hares with pike, a whole calf with trout, quails and partridges with more trout, ducks and herons with carp, beef and capons with sturgeon, veal and capons with carp in lemon sauce, beef pies and cheese with eel pies, meat aspic with fish aspic, meat galatines with lamprey, and among the remaining courses, roasted kid, venison, peacocks with cabbage, French beans and pickled ox-tongue, junkets and cheese, cherries and other fruit. The leftover food brought away from the table ,from which the servants customarily made their meal was enough it was said, to feed a thousand men.

But this was not the only banquet described, she also details a state dinner for 800 held by Charles V of France for an aging Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV upon his visit to Paris:

So many dishes were served that for once there were “too many to tell,” and indeed too many for the ailing guest of honor. The king had ordered four courses of ten pairs of dishes in each, but thoughtfully eliminated one course of ten to reduce the time the Emperor had to sit at the table. As it was he would have had to partake of thirty pair of such dishes as roast capons and partridges, civet of hare, meat and fish aspics, lark pastries and rissoles of beef marrow, black pudding and sausages, lampreys and savory rice, entrement of swan, peacock, bitterns, and heron “borne on high,” pasties of venison and small birds, fresh- and salt-water fish with a gravy of shad “the color of peach blossom,” white leeks with plovers, duck with roast chitterlings, stuffed pigs, eels reversed, frizzled beans – finishing off with fruit wafers, pears, comfits, medlars, peeled nuts, and spice wine.

[Ericandblueboy]

The Empress Dowager Ci'xi may be the most extravagant.

The large table in the center of the hall is for the Empress Dowager to have her meals. For each meal, about 128 eunuchs, cooks and tea servants attended, to her every wish in the 8 big courtyards, more than 100 rooms. Each meal, she had more than 30 kinds of porridge, over 50 kinds of rice or noodles, a choice of 128 courses of her imperial kitchen was subdivided into five bureaus, each was in charge of something special, like the bureau of cakes or the bureau of vegetables etc.

[Mark Slater]

How brilliant that when the perspicacious Sun King felt like "drinking the stars" he chose a marque that did not exist until the 20th Century, named after an obscure toiler was virtually unknown outside of Rheims before his name was slapped on advertisements in the late 1800s.

I suppose that if would be (additionally) churlish of me to point out that the champagne Louis XIV drank -- assuming he even drank the stuff, it wasn't wildly popular unto 50 years after his death -- would have been dramatically different from whatever Moet-Chandon is bottling these days (much sweeter and very cloudy), delivering a further blow to claims of authenticity in the breathlessly rewritten press release printed by the Telegraph (not that it wasn't a fun read, but my gush tolerance is low today).

Oh, guess what occasionally annoying but overall enlightening and illuminating book I read over break?

Pierre Perignon was the well known vigneron of the Abbé de Haut Villers outside of Rheims. It is entirely possible his Coteaux Champenois Rouge (pinot noir) was known at Louis's court. The bubble thing happened later.

[Poivrot Farci]

Lobster aspic chaud-froid

Pfft. Everyone from Philéas Gilbert to Robert Goulet knows that the chaud-froid was conceived at the Château Montmorency in 1759, forty-four years after the portly monarch’s passing. Hell, the Maréchal de Luxembourg named it himself. It is most certainly not attributed to Chaufroix, an entremetteur from Louis XV’s royal kitchen.

Reader’s Digest version: Maréchal de Luxe threw a party at his soignée spread. Had to split before dinner to hook-up with the King’s Council. Came back and had cold chicken fricassee & white sauce leftovers. Dug it and asked chef for it again. Chef: refroidi. Maréchal: Meh... chaud-froid.

Rumors of a Roman inception are based on an 1885 excavation of Pompeii during which a vase with the inscription calidu-frigidus was unearthed and contained expired meat in jelly.

[Michael Landrum]

Pfft. Everyone from Philéas Gilbert to Robert Goulet knows that the chaud-froid was conceived at the Château Montmorency in 1759, forty-four years after the portly monarch’s passing. Hell, the Maréchal de Luxembourg named it himself. It is most certainly not attributed to Chaufroix, an entremetteur from Louis XV’s royal kitchen.

Reader’s Digest version: Maréchal de Luxe threw a party at his soignée spread. Had to split before dinner to hook-up with the King’s Council. Came back and had cold chicken fricassee & white sauce leftovers. Dug it and asked chef for it again. Chef: refroidi. Maréchal: Meh... chaud-froid.

Rumors of a Roman inception are based on an 1885 excavation of Pompeii during which a vase with the inscription calidu-frigidus was unearthed and contained expired meat in jelly.

Go to the signature external link (Kitsch & Classics) for a glimpse of what appear to be pate glory holes.