The Seventeenth Century

Cooks found their Individual Voices during the seventeenth century, taking the example from earlier writers and sending echoes down to the present day. The most important genre, already well established, was cookbooks for professionals, often written by maîtres d’hôtel, stewards, or heads of great kitchens. A small but growing group of authors were independent pastry cooks and caterers running small businesses. Domestic cookbooks containing household advice were the exciting new arrival, hinted at in the late 1500s and now in full expansion. English authors, sometimes women, were the pioneers in this field with few rivals in Europe (or indeed America). In France, a sudden burst of creativity in midcentury established classical cooking on the pedestal it occupied for the next two centuries. At the same time, outside in the vegetable garden, the French were applying an intellectual framework to the huge array of fruit and vegetable species now available. Some of these varieties were ancient, some were recently developed hybrids, and most exciting of all were the band of newcomers from the New World.