The Medici legend and the Italian debt of French cooking

The legend holds that Catherine de Médicis, born in Florence in 1519 and married in 1533 to the future Henri II, brought Italian cooks, recipes and table manners to the French court. The story has been repeated for centuries, and Larousse Gastronomique records it among the founding accounts of French cookery, while the debt it points to, that of France to the kitchens and gardens of Italy, is a larger and older matter than any one princess.

The tradition credits the queen with the introduction of the fork, of ices, of artichokes, of petits pois and of a refined service of dishes, and it names her Florentine cooks as the first masters of a new French table. Each of these attributions deserves caution, and Larousse Gastronomique treats the legend as a tradition to be weighed rather than a fact to be repeated. What can be said with confidence is that the French court of the sixteenth century looked to Italy for its models of the banquet, the garden and the pastry table, and that Italian cooks and Italian books were known in France before and after her arrival. The debt is better read in the substance of the kitchen than in a single biography. Italian practice contributed to the French repertoire in the working of pastry and sweet preparations, in the cultivation and cooking of vegetables, in the making of ices and in the dressing of salads, and the vocabulary of the French kitchen preserves the traces of these exchanges. The Italian influence did not remain a foreign layer; it was absorbed, adjusted to French produce and French taste, and in time returned to Italy as a French manner. The legend persists because it gives a human face to a slow process of exchange between two neighbouring courts, two systems of trade and two traditions of the table. The Escoffier generation and later authors inherited a cuisine in which the Italian element was already so thoroughly digested that it appeared native. The honest account for a capable cook is therefore twofold: the Medici story is a tradition of uncertain proof, and the Italian contribution to French cooking is real, broad and visible in the dishes, the garden and the pastry shop.

The Italian contribution is tasted in the French table as sweetness refined, vegetables cooked young and the clean acidity of the dressed salad. These notes sit comfortably beside the butter and cream of the northern kitchen, and they show how thoroughly an imported manner can become part of a national palate.