Rita Erlich remembers the heyday of a culinary bible nowbattling to compete.
IMAGINE a world without television cooking shows, withoutcelebrity chefs, without so many cookbooks; a world withoutinternet and Google. in the 1970s, where did I go if I wanted toknow more? The Larousse Gastronomique, of course.
My big, old, green-covered edition (it lost its dustjacket yearsago) was bought in 1972. It was the 11th impression in English of agastronomic encyclopaedia that had first appeared in France in1938.
It was a compendium of all that was known about the food andcooking of France and — I often thought — a storehouseof the knowledge and people so severely threatened in the followingyears.
The Larousse — known simply by the name of the publishinghouse, as the great English dictionary is simply called the Oxford— was a powerful teaching aid in the process of educatingRita.
I spent countless hours with it, reading about French regions,banquets, little-known wines, better-known wine regions and moreways to prepare eggs and potatoes than I had imagined possible.
I learnt so much about Twelfth Night cakes, it could have beenmy special subject for a quiz show.
An early visit to France was planned after studying the threeversions of cassoulet — those of Toulouse, Castelnaudary andCarcassonne. that was a disappointment. It turned out thereweremany reasons to go to Toulouse and Carcassonne in the early 1970sbut cassoulet was the least of them.
The book gave me an introduction to tableware (see faience) andthe language of food. thanks to the Larousse, I could handle anymenu in France, however dialectal. Gadelle? oh, that’s aredcurrant. But it was resolutely and unapologetically French.Algeria was in there but not Morocco.
The listing for the avocado, which was called an avocado pear,included some information on its nutritional qualities and told methat in the US, it was used in salads.
No recipes, of course, no further information. Nothing onAustralia, either. The book went from “Aurore” to “Autoclave”. But”Kangaroo” was there: “The flesh of this Australian mammal isedible.”
A generation of curious and dedicated food lovers and chefsdepended on the Larousse Gastronomique, including Philippe Mouchel(The Brasserie at the CrownCasino). It was the first cookbook hebought.
In 1972, when the near-revolutions of 1968 were still close,when the Vietnam War was such an issue and while I was writing amaster’s thesis on the late plays of Shakespeare, all those pageson garnishes and the history of banqueting seemed irrelevantlydelicious. There were times when it was all gastronomic escapism,the foodie equivalent of Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.
