Venue: Aarhus University, Kasernen. Building 1586 Room 114 or on Zoom (for Zoom-link please contact Lis Møller: litlm@cc.au.dk)
28 April 2022, 1-3PM (CET)

Frédérique Desbuissons, senior lecturer, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

Imagining Cooking in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Eugène Ronjat, illustrator of Jules Gouffé

Although the visual is an essential ingredient of gastronomic culture today, images were not definitively incorporated into cookbooks until the twentieth century. Their gradual emergence during the nineteenth century, therefore, constitutes a particularly stimulating field of research, at the crossroads of food history, food studies, book history, art history and visual studies. The Librairie Hachette in France, which specializes in illustrated books, exercised both care and consistency in their choice of illustrations for the cookbooks of celebrity chef Jules Gouffé (1807–1877). Apprenticed to Antonin Carême during the Restoration, Gouffé was one of the last representatives of Carême’s decorative cuisine. These illustrations, based on drawings and paintings by the artist Eugène Ronjat (1822–1912), will be the focus of my presentation on culinary illustration in the second half of the nineteenth century. I will also discuss the afterlives of these images in contemporary art and popular culture, and address what this type of object does to the history of art.

In advance of my lecture:

Jules Gouffé’s books are available on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France:

• Livre de cuisine, Paris, Hachette, 1867. NUMM-1520383
• Livre des conserves, Paris, Hachette, 1869. NUMM-6209793
• Livre de pâtisserie, Paris, Hachette, 1873. NUMM-107860