French Influences on American Food: French Cookbooks in America

The French influence also filtered into America through cookbooks. Louis Eustache Ude, the cook of Louis XVI, who had fled to England during the French Revolution, published The French Cook (London, 1813); this book demonstrated the elegant cooking that was the mark of a fashionable household. It was published in Philadelphia fifteen years later, the first of many French cookbooks in America. Other nineteenth-century books of French cookery published in the United States include Eliza Leslie’s translation of Domestic French Cookery (1832), Mme. Utrecht-Friedel’s La petite cuisinière habile (1840), the first French language cookbook published in America, and Louis Eustache Audot’s La cuisinière de la campagne et de la ville, which was translated into English and published in America as French Domestic Cookery (1846). Charles Elmé Francatelli, Queen Victoria’s maître d’hôtel, was born in London of Italian heritage, but he studied under the legendary French chef Marie-Antoine Carême. Francatelli’s French Cookery was first published in the United States in 1846.