Rituals in Food



Rituals in Food

Most food has been made and consumed domestically throughout Western history. Eating out was for travelers, in inns and taverns where the customers were served more or less what would have been on the domestic table anyway. Regular eating out, and eating out for status with special foods reserved for the occasion, is a predominantly French institution of the Industrial Revolution. Our words for eating out are all French or translations - hotel, restaurant, caf6, menu, entr6e, chef (chef de cuisine), wine list (carte des vins), cover charge (couvert), maitre d'hotel, restaurateur, hors d'oeuvres, hostess (hotesse) - only with waiter (and waitress) do we remain stubbornly Anglo-Saxon, "boy" sounding a bit strange in the context. Essentially at first an upper and upper-middle perversion, and to do with the desire to move conspicuous eating and spending into the public arena, eating out has become vastly democratized with technology, affluence, and overemployment - leaving less time for preparation at home. The great chefs, who previously cooked in the great houses, moved out to the great restaurants. The French upper classes had previously made a great public show of attending court or church. When both these institutions declined in importance after the Revolution, attendance at great restaurants became a substitute. The "great codifier" Auguste Escoffier laid down elaborate and rigid rules of cooking procedure like a pope: cuisine became "haute," and chefs ruled hierarchically organized vast kitchens like tyrannical cardinals. The great restaurants came to resemble renaissance palaces or cathedrals. The very word "restaurant" comes from the verb "to restore" and has more than practical overtones. (The original restaurants were in fact legally "health food stores.") From these grand beginnings, eating out came to be imitated by the bourgeoisie, ever anxious to give themselves upper-class airs, and finally became general in the culture and in all Western countries. If the rituals of eating out have become less grand for the mass of people, it still retains its aura as an "event." The grand aspects are retained in expeditions to restaurants offensively overpriced but ritzy (after the Polish- French founders of the greatest of the great establishments). We spend not so much for the food as for the entertainment value and the naughty thrill of being (we hope) treated like royalty in an otherwise drab democratic environment. Even lesser expeditions still have the air of an event. The family outing to the local burger joint still has an air of preparation and difference; it can still be used to coax youngsters to eat, and provide a mild enough air of difference from routine to be "restorative." Even the necessary lunch for workers who cannot eat at home has been made into a ritual event by the relatively affluent among them. "Doing lunch" in the business world is regarded as a kind of sacred operation where, the mythology has it, the most important deals are made. A puritanical campaign against the "three-martini lunch" by the then President Carter (Southern Baptist), had ...