Philippe le
Bel was hardly half an hour at table, and Francis I. thought more of
women than of eating and drinking; nevertheless, it was under this
gallant monarch that the science of gastronomy took rise in France.
Few have heard the name of Gonthier d'Andernach. What Bacon was to
philosophy, Dante and Petrarch to poetry, Michael Angelo and Raphael
to painting, Columbus and Gama to geography, Copernicus and Galileo to
astronomy, Gonthier was in France to the art of cookery. Before him,
their code of eating was formed only of loose scraps picked up here and
there; the names of dishes were strange and barbarous, like the dishes
themselves.
Gonthier is the father of cookery, as Descartes, of French philosophy.
It is said that Gonthier, in less than ten years, invented seven
cullises, nine ragouts, thirty-one sauces, and twenty-one soups.
A woman opened the gates of an enlightened age; it was Catherine, the
daughter of the celebrated Lorenzo de Medici, niece of Leo the Tenth,
then in all the bloom of beauty. Accompanied by a troop of perfumers,
painters, astrologers, poets, and cooks, she crossed the Alps, and
whilst Bullan planned the Tuileries, Berini recovered from oblivion
those sauces which, for many ages, had been lost. Endowed with all the
gifts of fortune, the mother and the wife of kings, nature had also
gifted her with a palate, whose intuitive sensibility seldom falls to
the lot of sovereigns.
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