'Between soup and love,

the first is better.' -Spanish proverb

I couldn't disagree more, but then, other than a couple bisques and chilled consommé with fresh mint and lemon, I tend to find soup a rather terrifying proposition. However, whether we agree or disagree with old Spanish chestnut-writers, or old Spanish-chestnut writers (and I do make exception to my soup exception for a good chestnut bisque, I assure you), the degrees of separation between soup and love are not as numerous as may appear. They involve:


- Belle-Epoque Grandes Horizontales
- guilds
- lesbian thespians
- cured meats
- Jacobins
- gastronomic proto-Taylorism

----and Dominicans.

You think I can't pull these together; you suspect it could be done by no one. And it is a disparate list. But I can and I will, and it will further buttress my argument that just when you let down your guard and imagine it can't possibly happen here, you meet Dominicans in the strangest of places...

The august Auguste Escoffier is the name that unites this strange list. I was reading Kenneth James' absorbing biography of the chef (from which any names or numbers herein are taken), which briefly gives a summation of the state of restaurants and cuisine in France and England before Ritz and Escoffier launched the Savoy in London. There was very much in France (though by no means paralleled in England) by this time a tradition of haute cuisine; Escoffier's revolution on the Continent was the efficiency and systematization brought by his brigade system, and a substantial reduction thereby, in the name of modernization and productivity, of the number and severity of beatings of cooks delivered by chefs. Corporal punishment in a kitchen slows everything down, and Escoffier believed quality and speed could coexist.

Despite there being by Escoffier's time a short history of fine restaurants in France, this development could not have happened without the short history of the guillotine, a more severe form of corporal punishment than that used by successful chefs in their private reigns of terror in tiny, sweaty fiefdoms. The Jacobins had, amongst other things, succeeded in producing a class of ronin chefs, as prior to the Revolution the best cooks had always worked for the best families. Gourmandise took place on estates and in castles; eating out was, as it had been since the time of the ancient Romans, the province of travelers, who had no choice of entrée at the hostelry they stopped at, but rather partook of the same potluck pot au feu as the rest of the overnight guests.

An enterprising Parisian by the name of Boulanger twenty-some years before the Revolution conceived of offering a sit-down meal with a choice of options from a menu to city-dwellers wanting a meal but no room to go with it. The climax of his meal was always a soup, which he called a 'restorative,' or 'restaurant,' getting him in trouble with the guilds, who had continued to operate since the Middle Ages in various formulations and groupings as the sole source of takeaway items such as cured meats, cooked meats, bread, pastry, sausages and sauces. Specifically, the traiteurs (from traditor, one who delivers; from tradere, deliver; surrender; from trans + dare, to give; nothing at all to do with selling state secrets, as these fellows were masters of sealed lips and secret handshakes), or caterers, argued that his 'restorative' was in fact a ragoût, which they alone were licensed to sell. The traiteurs lost, M. Boulanger won, and by 1789 there were about 50 such establishments in Paris (p.26). The Revolution temporarily interrupted the revolution, but within ten years after the bloodletting stopped there were hundreds of the new restaurants in Paris.

Enter Escoffier, England, and César Ritz. The world of dining in Britain changed for the better with the opening of the Savoy: there was fine food, organization, modern menus, ambiance, and personalized service for the guests. All that remained was to coax well-to-do Victorians, with their armies of servants and cooks, out of the house on occasion for epicurean entertainment. While Victorian gentlemen were accustomed to dining out, they did so in the company of other men or with women other than their wives; it was considered unseemly for ladies to be seen eating in public. Thus one prong in Ritz' and Escoffier's campaign was to create an atmosphere that would welcome and enchant, rather than discomfit, wives and other ladies of virtue. To succeed in this would require banishing the other sorts of ladies, such as actresses, singers, and those more skilled in the companionship arts than the domestic. An evening dress-code stipulation eliminated some; barring single female diners left well-heeled-but-dateless demimondaines dining elsewhere.

One celebrity courtesan who lacked neither escorts nor evening dress and thus continued to patronize the Savoy was one-time Folies Bergère dancer Mlle. Liane de Pougy, born Anne Marie Chassaigne and later crowned Princess Anne-Marie Ghika of Romania, who despite two marriages and a Sapphic amour she described as the love of her life, renounced her past life of scandal and splendor and finished her days serving disabled orphans at the Asylum of St. Anne as a Dominican tertiary.

In (there's no way it wouldn't be, is there?) Savoy...

And you thought I couldn't do it.