More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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29 February
Someone who was foolish¹ enough to post a comment on the first of what has become a trio of these postings did so to ask what my advice would be on the matter of croutons. To which my immediate response was:
That is a good question, but not one not to be thought of apart from that of the use of condiments, or, of course, of the edicts as a whole of the court of Louis XIV², I must say (probably in a later posting, on a quite diferent topic)...
For, that epoch³ was, just as we still have the origins there of our code of dining etiquette (e.g. not eating off the knife, how to set out the cutlery, and other impermissible uses of it, etc.), the source of various rulings about food and wine (and how, when and why they are to be consumed - with a very special section on cake).
If I had the energy to invent them, we could spend a merrily long time considering them all, but let us confine ourselves - willing prisoners - to the matter of soup (and avoid, if at all possible, the tangentially connected one of letting cheese melt in it).
Well, of course (miser that he was), Louis invented the crouton. You know how it is: you have some pretty big palace stuck in a field outside Paris, and it's hard to get the catering right. The Royal Baker produces too much for numbers at court that day, and Louis is fretting about this bread that is going uneaten and stale, so he tasks said regal bakery with the task of devising a way of using it.
They are bakers, so they already know about freshening up bread by warming it up again a little, and just take it a little further, rescuing bread that has gone beyond those bounds in this form of what can be added not just to soup, but to any dish with a signifcantly liquid element⁴.
Louis is, of course, delighted, and willingly takes the credit in front of those first to see him sprinkle what he dubs croûtons into his French onion (which, of course, The French assuredly don't - and never have - called it, any more than Danish pastries go by that name in Norway): he was thinking of cru plus tons, by which he meant the top-notch crunching noises that would result.
However, that real origin has been subsumed, in the search for some wholesome derivation, by some piffle about the word 'crust' (when there may be no crust involved on any side of the dice that croutons essentially are - though, but at the risk of burning the apex, they could be tetrahedra, or, without that problem (but the much greater one of making them), icosaehdra or dodecahedra).
However, Louis ends up having to banish croûtons, because his - sometimes not very classy - courtiers end up mucking around with them during meals, and even having games of craps with them later. (They were only emancipated after the Revolution, when Danton much prized them.)
The same sparing qualities can be seen in the well-known account of Marie Antoinette - also, as it happens, addressing what to do if bread is short. (No doubt this was the practice of Louis - if numbers at court exceeded supply, the bakers were asked to find some gâteaux to fill the lack.)
I'll wager that she would have used the subjunctive⁵, which I hazily recall being something of the order of Qu'ils mangèrent des gâteaux!, but I'm certainly not going to check that!
End-notes
¹ The word is used for reasons that may become apparent.
² We - seem to - take for granted that a monarch's name has such trailing capital Roman numerals to denote how many Henrys there have been (strange that we stopped at VIII - did the name fall out of fashion, for some reason (probably related to that king's eating habits)?), but why did we adopt this practice (from the Roman Empire, I think - either that, or from someone's repeated playing of Risk), and what happened at the time to lead to that choice?
³ Until cut short by what happened in (and leading up to) 1789 and afterwards, with the rise to power of Gérard Depardieu (and the coincidental reinstatement of chocolate as a form of currency, still marked to-day, more than two centuries later, by those little string-bags of chocolate money at Christmas).
⁴ If you happen to believe in the merits of Wikipedia®, I suppose that you can be forgiven for crediting it when it launches into an explanation of their purpose with salads first ('notably the Caesar salad')...
⁵ Unless a speaker is really classy (or attempting to impress - as impress one must - an examiner in advanced French), people don't go out of their way to use this mood, so knowledge of it all becomes a little vestigial...
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