Before proceeding, in future posts, to examine the history of individual courses in France, it is useful first to look at the general concept over time.





First service. A German brewet, heads of cabbage, a sorinque of eels, turnips, beef pies, large meat.

Second service. The best roast one can get, fat geese in dodine sauce, fresh water fish, blancmange, an arboulastre [herb omelet?]. Nordic pies, crepes, larded milk, milk tourtes.

Third service. Capon pies with dodine sauce, rice in mouthfuls, boar tail in hot sauce, lechefrite and sugared darioles.

Fourth service. Frumenty, venison, gildings, overturned eels, roast breams.

Boar's head as an entremets.

Interested in the history of the food of Paris? Visit the Paris Food History site.





ées

), meat or fish and the issue (here substantially the same as the dessert

)

. The king does mention pottages as one sort of starter, but along with fricasees and pastries (basically meaning savory pies at this point).

Over a decade later, Bodin , in criticizing luxury in dining, referred to “an ordinary dinner of three services, consisting of a boiled, roast and fruit” course, the fruit here again referring to dessert. Admittedly, both texts offer an idealized view of what a meal should be and in fact Bodin complains that no one wants to accept such limits. But t

hey do show that the basic idea of a full meal remained both limited and fluid,

and that the idea of a standard service beginning with a soup or pottage was far from established.





Salads and hors d’oeuvres

First service

Four pottages and four entr ées

Second service

Four "strong pieces" (court-bouillon, a piece of beef, or a large roast), with salads

Third service

Roast game and poultry and a small roast.

Optionally, in the middle of the table, melons, different salads, oranges and lemons, liquid jellies in small marzipan holders

entr

ées

entr

ées seems to have first appeared in the sixteenth century; salads had certainly been eaten in the past, but were most noted on menus starting in the seventeenth century.

entr

ées

(here still meaning starters), followed by roasts, entremets and dessert (“fruit”).





What appears here is

a core sequence very like that for fourteenth century weddings, but with salads and hors d’oeuvres sometimes worked into it.

One meal for Louis XIV reverses part of this, offering hors d’oeuvres before pottages, both part of the first service, then a second service of roasts, a third of entremets and a last one of fruit and candies.





I

n the eighteenth century, the same general pattern held.

A period cookbook outlined some sample meals, one starting with a first service of both pottages and

entrées,

a large

entrée;

a second service of roasts, entremets and hors d’oeuvres; and a third service of fruits and preserves (that is, dessert)

.

When

meals were larger, they were often expanded by removes (

relevés

entrées,

removes, large entremets, roasts and small entremets.

Or one could simply expand the number of dishes in each course. And so a very long menu from 1788 for Marie-Antoinette consists of four pottages, two large

entrées,

sixteen

entrées,

four hors d’oeuvre, six dishes of roast and two moderate entremets.











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R

estaurants

B

y the late eighteenth century, the first restaurants had appeared and courses were increasingly codified as menus became standard.

A menu from Véry , one of the first great restaurants, from 1791 or 1792 lists pottages, fish

entrées,

[untitled] meat

entrées,

roasts and salads, entremets and desserts.

In 1803, the English traveler Francis Blagdon reproduced t he full menu of Beauvilliers , another of the first great restaurants. This included courses for pottage (which Blagdon now translates frankly as “soup”), hors d’oeuvres, beef

entrées,

pastry

entrées,

poultry

entrées,

veal

entrées,

mutton

entrées,

fish

entrées,

roasts, entremets, and dessert.

In 1814, when the Guide des Dineurs gathered the menus of all the most well-known restaurants into one volume, most followed roughly the same pattern as Beauvilliers, including servng hors d’oeuvres after the pottages and breaking the

entrées

out by type.





N

ote that with the restaurant, the roast course began to be displaced in importance by the so-called

entrée,

which was no longer just a starter, but often effectively where one found most of the meats. Otherwise, the mention of "

pastry

entrées" highlights an item which had persisted since the Middle Ages, even if it is never called out as a separate course: the savory pie. This had been a fundamental part of dining for centuries and only began to fade in this century. At Beauvilliers, the course still included some savory pies, but also a number of vol-au-vents, the closest modern equivalent (with pâté en croûte) to the savory foods served in pastry for centuries. This medieval touch would persist through much of the nineteenth century, but disappear, as a separate item, by the twentieth.





P

rivate dining remained more varied and retained some features of earlier menus. This was true even as, before 1840, fashion shifted service from the long-standing "French" style - serving all the dishes of a course together - to what became known as the "Russian" style ( service à la russe ), in which dishes were served successively (as is standard today and probably was standard from the start in restaurants).



In 1842, the great chef Marie-Antoine Carême included a long list of model menus in his

Le Maître d'hôtel français

, This begins with a long look at menus of earlier eras, analyzed from Carême’s (often disapproving) view as a modern (for his time) chef. He then provides numerous menus mainly meant for very large meals. The biggest differences between these and the restaurant menus is that he continues to include removes (mainly of fish), as well as what he calls “large pieces” (

grosses pièces

, full roasts of a sort not appropriate to restaurants), along with the pottages,

entrées,

roasts, entremets and desserts found on restaurant menus as well. In these, he also does not break the

entrées

out by type.





First service

Two soups, two removes and four entrées, six hors d'oeuvres

Macon or Burgundy wine

Second service

Two dishes in the middle, roast and fish in court-bouillon, eight entremets

Bordeaux wine

Dessert

Two pièces montées [ornate, decorative desserts], eight assorted dishes; compotes, fruits, etc.

Fine wines



Meanwhile, restaurant menus shrank from the multipage pamphlets

most common

at the start of the century to one page.

When V

a

n Gogh drew a sketch on a menu at a

Bouillon

– one of the earliest chain restaurants – he inadvertently preserved a rare menu from 1886 . The order on this one page document is as follows: soups, hors d’oeuvre, fish,

entrées,

roasts, vegetables, salads, desserts. The

entrées

at this point are no longer broken out into different sorts and would not be even in more upscale menus. The one big absence here is of the entremets course, which persisted on most other menus.

Some menus now began to start with oysters; exceptionally, some include the remove courses better known from private dining, and sometimes (as was more common later) “cold meats”.





Twentieth century

The biggest change





The most surprising survival was of the entremets course, which goes back to the Middle Ages. Many restaurants still included this until the Fifties. When present, it typically covered the more complex desserts, as opposed to fruit, nuts, biscuits and sometimes ice creams which would be found under the desserts heading. This was not universally true; some restaurants had only the desserts heading early on. But it was common enough not to be exceptional until mid-century.

In some cases too a cheese course could be listed just before the dessert course.





Otherwise, several other courses began to appear on some menus, depending on the establishment. For a long time, eggs or omelettes could follow the soup course. Cold dishes or cold meats could come towards the end.

Grillades

– grilled foods –

are sometimes listed separately.





In terms of other meals,

glimpses peek through anecdotally. In his

(1905), Favre writes:

An academic dinner, even in its simplest expression, must include two soup selections, one thick and the other with a consomm é base, hors d'oeuvre, fish, a garnished piece of butcher's meat, a poultry entrée and a roast of game or vice versa; vegetables, hot entremets, ice creams and pastry; for dessert, fruit and petits-four. The four grand cru wines are indispensable: Bordeaux, Burgyndy, Spain and Champagne.

O

ne writer in 1914, pleading for a simplification of formal banquets, wrote : "Nothing is scarier than sitting down to a banquet of 6 to 7 francs a head, and reading a menu made up of two soups,

entrée

, fish,

sherbet

, roast, poultry, foies gras, salad, ice cream, treats and at least three wines!"





In his

Modern French Culinary Art

(1966),

P

ellaprat argues for simplification in elegant banquets. He state

s

:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, …. the menu, even at a banquet, was something like this: o n e soup, thick or clear; one fish dish; one remove or entrée; one roast, usually accompanied by a salad; one vegetable dish; one side dish, hot or cold, followed by an ice; dessert.

Then goes on to present simpler menus from the second half of the century, such as this from 1959:

Foie gras parfait

Sole souffl é Abel Luquet

Saddle of lamb Antonin Car ê me

Cointreau sherbet

Cold sliced Nantes duck with orange

Selection of cheeses

Omelette Duc de Prasliin

Beneath the rarefied names here, the basic sequence resembles that in restaurants, with an hors d’oeuvre, fish, meat, the refinement of sherbet in the middle of the meal, poultry, cheese and what is effectively dessert.





Otherwise, the sequence at restaurants did not greatly change towards the end of the century, except that the entremets course had disappeared.

Meanwhile, i

n 1981, a restaurant at Roissy already listed

plats

(plates) instead of

entrée

s: hors d’oeuvres, soups, fish, plates, salads, cheese, dessert. (The term appears to have begun as plats du jour , but simply became a standard course.) This substitution – echoing the displacement of the roast course earlier by the

entrée –

would become more apparent by the next century, but was not yet common.





But as late as 1998, the basic menu for the venerable

Pied de Cochon

offered hors d’oeuvres, eggs, fish,

entrée

s, vegetables, cheese and desserts – that is, a sequence that had existed for decades.

entrée,

which frequently has returned to its primitive sense of an “entry” or starter. And so a very common sequence is of

an

entrée

, a plate and dessert. This may include variations such as a salad or cheese course. Frequently, too, “hamburgers” and “sandwiches” appear as separate courses

, as do “pasta”

and even (in English) “snacks”

.





More upscale restaurants may stay closer to tradition.

The

very elegant Taillevent lists (on its English menu ) Starters, Fishes [

sic

], Meats and Desserts.

But s

ome other top restaurants list no categories at all

or use eccentric headings verging on poetry.





Traces of the traditional courses remain in general usage. But as in much else about modern Parisian dining, rules are disappearing or even being consciously subverted.

It takes some effort to tease out the influence of a sequence that was barely glimpsed in the fourteenth century, only became stable in the eighteenth and was not truly codified until the restaurant became established.