Food
Bee Wilson reads the Three Musketeers for chocolate
Published 11 November 2002
You've heard of The Three Musketeers. But what of the six pages on cocoa? Asks Bee Wilson
It is 200 years since Alexandre Dumas was born, in Villers-Cotterets, to a mulatto general in Napoleon's army and his small-town sweetheart. Still France's most famous novelist, Dumas is far better known across the world than Balzac or Victor Hugo, never mind Celine or Camus. Who hasn't heard of The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo? But we should also remember Dumas pere as one of the great French gastronomes of the 19th century, the author of one of the finest food reference books ever written.
Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine (1873) has all the hallmarks of classic Dumas. Much of it is technically derivative; liberties are taken with facts; the whole thing goes on for pages - hundreds of pages - longer than the reader expects; and yet to read it is to enter a world of magic and excitement that one leaves only reluctantly. Like most of Dumas's best work, the dictionary was written in a hurry, and for money (famously, the reason why his fiction contains so much snappy dialogue is that he was paid by the line).
The year was 1869. Dumas was old and ailing and pressed for cash. He moved to Roscoff, a part of France famous for its onions, lived cheaply and wrote furiously. By March of 1870, he had managed to churn out a 600,000-word manuscript on everything from absinth to zest. His publishers had just begun setting the typescript when the Franco-Prussian war broke out. Dumas died in December, without seeing his culinary masterpiece published.
Even Dumas could not have produced so much so quickly, had his interest in food not been long-standing and prodigious. Much of the charm of the book comes from the enthusiasms Dumas conveys for this or that foodstuff. As Alan Davidson has commented, it is a wildly unbalanced dictionary. There are six pages on cocoa, but only half a page on milk. But the lack of balance is precisely what makes it so compelling. We learn that Dumas loves violet ice-cream and swan meat (though not on the same plate), but that he despairs that no nation has ever learnt how to make gherkins properly. He adores game (a reflection of a boyhood spent consorting with poachers) and gives all kind of advice on what to do with partridges, whether boiling old ones to make bouillon more "tonic" or pot-roasting young ones with a delicious stuffing of butter, breadcrumbs, shallots, parsley and champagne, before serving with the juice and zest of Seville oranges (an excellent addition to all small birds). Like most writers, he seems to love coffee, and laments the French habit of mixing it with chicory, which, he says, only started in 1808 when Napoleon's "Continental blockade" deprived France of the real stuff. Many of the most exotic details in the book reflect Dumas's life as an "indefatigable traveller", through Africa and the Caucasus as well as Europe. We learn of ostrich meat and sea anemones and the Neopolitan habit of adding too much fennel to everything.
But Dumas didn't need extravagant material to write well. In a sense, he was at his best when doing little more than self-promotion. He uses an entry on Cavaillon melons as an excuse to boast about how many books he has written, telling a story in which he agrees to send all 500 of his novels to the Cavaillon town library, in exchange for a lifetime annuity of 12 green melons, thus plugging both Cavaillon melons and his own backlist.
Similarly, the dictionary ends with a 5,000-word essay on mustard, its history, etymology, its usage by famous people, etc. Only at the very end do we find out that the whole treatise has been an advertisement for the Bornibus brand of Dijon mustard. It was Dumas's genius to make such blatant puffery delightful.
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