The Invention of the Restaurant : Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture / Rebecca L. Spang.

ISBN:

9780674243996

9780674244016

Title:

The Invention of the Restaurant : Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture / Rebecca L. Spang.

Author:

Spang, Rebecca L., 1961-

Personal Author:

Spang, Rebecca L., 1961-

Physical Description:

1 online resource (353 pages)

Contents:

Preface to the 2020 Paperback Edition -- Introduction: To Make a Restaurant -- 1. The Friend of All the World -- 2. The Nouvelle Cuisine of Rousseauian Sensibility -- 3. Private Appetites in a Public Space -- 4. Morality, Equality, Hospitality! -- 5. Fixed Prices: Gluttony and the French Revolution -- 6. From Gastromania to Gastronomy -- 7. Putting Paris on the Menu -- 8. Hiding in Restaurants -- Epilogue: Restaurants and Reverie.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Restaurants -- France -- Paris -- History -- 18th century.

Restaurants -- France -- Paris -- History -- 19th century.

Food habits -- France -- Paris -- History -- 18th century.

Food habits -- France -- Paris -- History -- 19th century.

Geographic Term:

Paris (France) -- Social life and customs.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2020

Publication Information:

Cambridge, Massachusetts :

Harvard University Press,

[2020]

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
647.954436109033 23	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize
Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize

"Witty and full of fascinating details."
-- Los Angeles Times

Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.

This is a book about the French revolution in taste--about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne.

"An ambitious, thought-changing book...Rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories."
--Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

"[A] pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant."
-- New York Times

"A lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed...Spang is...as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish."
-- The Times