2.2 The History and Modern Development of Gastronomic Tourism
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Although food tourism has only become an officially recognized sector of the tourist industry this century, its Western roots can be traced back to the birth of the French Republic. After the French Revolution (1789–1799), when the growing middle and the working classes overthrew the aristocracy along with the political and social systems of the ancien régime (old order), the restaurants and culinary culture that arose began to cohere into a national cuisine. Prior to the 19th century, most famous French chefs worked for the aristocracy. A guild system determined who was allowed to become a chef. During what became known as the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), however, the monarchy and the adjoining aristocracy were unseated and, in many cases, literally beheaded. With the aristocracy overturned and the elite guild system dismantled, chefs moved from the private into the public realm. During this era, restaurants began to proliferate, and Paris became the gastronomic capital of France.
Many chefs moved to Paris to work in restaurants, the number of which multiplied exponentially in post-Revolutionary France. By the 1820s, upwards of 3,000 restaurants operated in the nation’s capital. Yet other chefs moved abroad, where they worked in some of the world’s finest hotels, helping create an international taste for French cuisine. During the early 19th century, the chef Marie Antonin Carême (1784–1833) established what would become known as le grande cuisine, based on rich sauces and elaborate techniques. When Carême moved abroad to England for a brief stint, he was hired to cook for the Prince Regent, who served as de facto head of the country from 1811–1820 before inheriting the throne as King George IV (1820–1930). Like Carême, French chefs who worked abroad created an international taste for French food. In turn, many French chefs began to teach their culinary techniques, opening restaurants where they served le grand cuisine in Italy, Germany, England, and the United States. This lavish style of cooking would be modernized in the early 20th century by Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935), whose La Guide Culinaire (translated into English as the Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery) canonized a lighter, more seasonally dependent form of cooking that continues to be taught in culinary schools today.
As restaurants and other food purveyors and their products proliferated in post-Revolutionary France, a national culinary culture began to emerge. The burgeoning food and restaurant industry, in turn, gave rise to books, essays, and literature, which sought to define, critique, and regulate French cooking and dining more broadly. The rise of restaurants along with the growing body of food writing, effectively transformed French gastronomic culture into a national cuisine, one that had been codified into print through the spread of gastronomic literature and cookbooks. As chefs moved into the public realm and food purveyors began to proliferate, food criticism sprang to life. Food criticism as a genre of writing officially began in 1803, when Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1837) published the first installment of Almanach des Gourmands (1803–1812). The Almanach not only included restaurant reviews, but also evaluated caterers and their menus, dishes, and food products. It also instructed readers about etiquette and offered advice on how to host dinners, compose menus, and to behave as a dinner guest. In short, Grimod aimed to democratize gastronomy, which had previously been reserved for the aristocracy.
The second founding father of gastronomic writing, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) wrote the Physiology of Taste (1825). Brillat-Savarin presented cooking as a skill that bridged the arts and the sciences. His Physiology added a unique philosophical and sociological depth to gastronomy, promoting it as a mode of learning about the world. In doing so, he would articulate precisely why gastronomy has become such a fast-growing sector of the 21st-century tourist industry. As Brillat-Savarin understood, gastronomy provides a bridge to a culture’s heritage, its traditions, and its contemporary expression. In sum, Brillat-Savarin understood food’s capacity to connect people with a place. A region’s dishes and modes of cooking speak simultaneously to its past, to what it has become, and to what it wishes to be. In its most thoughtful form, food serves as a form of communication with the capacity to impart knowledge, inspiration, and cultural enlightenment.
Whereas gastronomy as a field dates back to post-Revolutionary France, the roots of gastronomic tourism date back to the 1920s and the publication of La France Gastronomique, a “series on French provincial cooking, which recommended inns and restaurants to discerning French travelers” (McLean, 2012, p. 98). Authored by Marcel Rouff and Curnonsky (pseudonym of Maurice Edmond Sailland), the series merged French provincial cooking with automobile travel. During the same decade, the now-famous Michelin Guide first introduced its star system for restaurants and lodging. Anticipating the motorcar boom of the 1920s, the Michelin brothers, André and Edouard, founded a tire company in 1889. They would eventually create one of the iconic texts of gastronomic tourism—The Michelin Guide—which became the first of its kind to rate restaurants and hotels using a star system. Over the course of the late 1920s and the 1930s, La France Gastronomique and Guide Michelin would help popularize France as a gastronomic tourist destination.
The first national dining guide in the United States, Adventures in Good Eating (1936–1962), became so popular that the author, Duncan Hines (1880–1959), would create a separate volume for recommended lodging. In the late 1940s, Hines began to write a food column, which was reprinted by newspapers across the United States. Duncan Hines’ “Adventure in Good Eating at Home” featured recipes for the home cook that were adapted from the restaurants featured in the guide. As discussed in Chapter 1: History of Tourism, Victor Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–1966) would help African Americans navigate the United States during the Jim Crow segregation era, a time of extreme violence against Black Americans. The Green Book provided lists of places that welcomed African Americans travelers for meals and for lodging. Mass travel developed into a proper industry after World War II, and food writing developed alongside it, spreading new ideas and codifying a national cuisine in the United States. As they had in France and would do throughout Europe, food writers began to debate, define, critique, and classify the nation’s food and food culture.
The nation’s first glossy magazine devoted to food and wine, Gourmet Magazine was launched in 1941. As with all gastronomic publications printed for the general public, Gourmet helped to create a conversation and debate about the nation’s food culture, its heritage, and its future. Whereas Gourmet set its sights largely on the food scene in New York and looked to Europe for inspiration, the monthly publication American Cookery focuses intently on the nation’s culinary identity. The magazine grew out of one of the nation’s most popular cookbooks of all time—Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896), which remains in print today. A graduate of the cooking school herself, Farmer would become its principal in 1891 and help train generations of women in what was then known as the “domestic science” of cooking. Farmer, her school, and her cookbook formulated a set of recipes that came to represent American home cooking.
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Key Takeaway: The origins of gastronomic tourism can be traced to the early 1800s when chefs began to open restaurants in Paris and the first food critic—Grimod de la Reynière—inaugurated an annual guide devoted to reviewing the quality of the dishes, artisanal products, and culinary skills found throughout the capital city. Gastronomic tourism slowly emerged alongside food writing, eventually leading to motorcar touring through the provinces of France beginning in the 1920s. During the 19th century, French cooking would initiate and infiltrate U.S. fine-dining, while the Boston Cooking School published a series of magazines and cookbooks that helped formulate a large set of recipes that came to represent American home cooking.
Significance to Gastronomic Tourism: As national culinary identities developed over the 19th and 20th centuries, they began to create distinctive food cultures that were popularized by food writers and critics.
Significance to Tourism: With the goal of promoting the sale of their tires, the Michelin brothers promoted car travel through restaurant reviews, yoking mobility and travel with gastronomy, leading the way for what would eventually become officially recognized in the 1990s as gastronomic tourism.
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The nation’s first official cooking school, The Boston Cooking School was founded in 1879. The school played a key role in the domestic science movement, which began in the United States as a way to train housewives how to prepare family recipes, meals, and menus. As its name suggests, the domestic science movement focused on recipes as scientific formulas and on cooking as a scientific endeavor. The school began to publish a monthly magazine The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics, which was renamed American Cookery in 1914. It ceased publication just five years after the founding of Gourmet Magazine.
Whereas American Cookery helped standardize the national palate, by the 1930s American food writing had begun to expand its attention from cooking as a science to include the notion of cooking as an art and an understanding of the outstanding chef as an artist. This emphasis on cooking as an art and on gastronomy was embodied by Gourmet Magazine (1941–2009). Not surprisingly, Gourmet drew inspiration from France. Whereas the Boston Cooking School and its magazine aimed to standardize American home cooking as a formula that could produce consistent results, Gourmet sought to promote and articulate cooking and dining as artforms and, in so doing, drew inspiration from the genre of gastronomic literature first founded by Grimod and Brillat-Savarin in the early 1800s.
As the United States began to develop a cohesive culinary identity, driven in large part by the domestic science movement, well-heeled Americans looked to France for inspiration, attempting to add a cosmopolitan flair to the nation’s culinary landscape. From 1949 to 1952, Gourmet Magazine published a column on French gastronomic tourism authored by Samuel Chamberlain. The author first encountered France while serving as an ambulance driver during World War I. He would return again in the 1920s. In his column for Gourmet, “An Epicurean Tour of the French Provinces,” Chamberlain contextualized the history of French provincial cooking. He also reviewed inns and restaurants and included recipes gathered from French chefs. In 1952, the columns were published in book form as Bouquet de France, providing well-heeled Americans with an English-language gastronomic tour guide to the French provinces.
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Attributions
The umbrella term food tourism refers both to the tourist who intentionally travels in search of food-centered adventures and to the tourists who becomes readily engaged in a destination’s food offerings only after they have arrived at a given destination.
