Direct French influences on American cooking date from Huguenot settlements in the late seventeenth century. Except at rarified tables—such as that of Thomas Jefferson, who had French-trained cooks, or the handful of wealthy urban or plantation households that had cooks skilled enough to use The French Cook (1828) by Louis Eustache Ude or Domestic French Cookery (1832) by Eliza Leslie—French sauces seemed beyond the ken of Americans. Most cooks accepted the conclusion of eighteenth-century English cookery writers that French cooking was too extravagant for the home, and Menon’s best-selling La Cuisinière bourgeoise (first edition, 1746), although known in the colonies, was seldom cited. According to Sarah Rutledge in The Carolina Housewife (1847), the available French (and French-influenced English) cookbooks were designed for foreign servants “and almost always require an apparatus either beyond our reach or too complicated for our native cooks.”
