France

The Revolution of 1789 fundamentally changed the culinary scene, as it did so many other fields. The great royal and noble kitchens disappeared, while conspicuous consumption was imprudent for anyone else, particularly after the bloodshed of the Terror that started in 1793. A few chefs fled to England, but most, particularly the younger men, adjusted to the new conditions (women cooks were less at risk, concealed among the other domestics in a household). The narcissistic self-praise of prefaces to earlier cookbooks was left behind. This was a time of comradery within the culinary community, when cooks stood by each other to survive. Antonin Carême describes how colleagues would arrive the night before a great dinner to help with preparations for the stocks and sauces that were the foundations of so many of the dishes. (By now, espagnole had replaced coulis as the basic brown sauce, but it still took up to eighteen hours to simmer to perfection.)