Eggs, Cheese and Butter in Old Regime France: Le Grand d'Aussy's History of French Food, #3

By Jim Chevallier

Green eggs were popular once, and long before Dr. Seuss, in France. Poached eggs were served with orange juice and spices. Easter eggs inspired not egg hunts, but loud, raucous processions.
Cheese might be eaten with sugar and even cinnamon. Brie and Parmesan cheese were popular long before modern times. Butter could be preserved with salt, but also by being melted and put in earthenware jars.
On fast days, when meat was forbidden, sometimes eggs were allowed, in other periods they were not; the same thing was true of milk and cheese.
These facts are all found in the brief but wide-ranging chapter the eighteenth century writer Le Grand d'Aussy included on eggs and dairy products in his three volumes on the history of French food. Two hundred years later, modern food historians still turn to Le Grand's work for information on various foods, and this new translation gives a sample of the varied and colorful information they find there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Chevallier
• Release date: Jan 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301649471

Jim Chevallier

Jim Chevallier is a food historian who has been cited in "The New Yorker", "The Smithsonian" and the French newspapers "Liberation" and "Le Figaro", among other publications. CHOICE has named his "A History of the Food of Paris: From Roast Mammoth to Steak Frites" an Outstanding Academic Title for 2019. His most recent work is "Before the Baguette: The History of French Bread". He began food history with an essay on breakfast in 18th century France (in Wagner and Hassan's "Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century") in addition to researching and translating several historical works of his own. He has been both a performer and a researcher, having worked as a radio announcer (WCAS, WBUR and WBZ-FM), acted (on NBC's "Passions", and numerous smaller projects). It was as an actor that he began to write monologues for use by others, resulting in his first collection, "The Monologue Bin". This has been followed by several others over the years.

Book preview

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Eggs, Cheese and Butter in Old Regime France

by Pierre Le Grand d'Aussy

Notes and translation by Jim Chevallier

Chez Jim Books

Eggs, Cheese, and Butter in Old Regime France

by Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy and Jim Chevallier 

Published by Chez Jim Books at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 by Jim Chevallier

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form.

Published by:

Chez Jim Books

To contact the editor, e-mail: [e-mail]

Although the editor and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of these translations and any additional information contained in this book, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistency herein.

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About Le Grand d'Aussy's work

The current volume has been extracted, translated and retitled from Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy's classic work on French food and drink, which has come down to us with the slightly misleading title of Histoire de la vie privée des Français depuis l’origine de la nation jusqu’à nos jours; that is, History of the private life of the French from the origin of the nation until our days. Though Le Grand originally intended to produce such a comprehensive work, in practice he only finished the three volumes on food and drink (first published in 1783). Incomplete as these may be in terms of the overall project, they are almost manically thorough in their examination of the specific subject and have remained, over the centuries, some of the prime sources on the subject. Not only do even modern writers continue to draw on them for key information, more than one writer (in both French and English) has shamelessly copied whole stretches of Le Grand's work, well after it was written, and presented it as their own.

Le Grand at one point refers to himself as a compiler and certainly one of the strengths of his work is that it brings together a wealth of information drawn from earlier sources, some classics of their respective periods, some profoundly obscure. He began as a Jesuit and brings to his task the methodical, erudite and demanding precision which made the Jesuits so admired as teachers. But his personality – passionate, determined, unsparing, but also compassionate, even witty and sensual – shines through. When he thinks a previous writer