What Did Renoir's Paris Taste Like?Food, Flavor, and the Tables Behind the Paintings, 1865–1885
- michel1492
- 11 minutes ago
- 22 min read
Look long enough at a Renoir table and a second question begins to surface. We can see the wine glasses catching the afternoon light, the bottles waiting on a white cloth, the fruit set out after lunch, the friends leaning toward one another while boats move along the Seine below. What we cannot see is the kitchen. Paintings preserve light beautifully and aroma not at all.
So what was coming through that door? What did the butter smell like when it hit a hot pan? Was someone softening onions behind the dining room? Was a bundle of parsley, thyme, and bay disappearing into a pot of stock? Was wine being poured into a pan and reduced into a sauce, or a chicken turning slowly in front of a fire? In other words: what did Renoir's Paris taste like?
It sounds like a fanciful question. It isn't. Renoir painted during two decades for which we have an extraordinary culinary record. French cooks were publishing detailed instructions for both household and professional kitchens, restaurants were becoming central to modern social life, and markets, cafés, riverside guinguettes, and new habits of leisure were binding food to the changing rhythms of nineteenth-century Paris and its surroundings. Renoir painted people sitting right in the middle of it.
The 2027 exhibition Renoir and Love, organized by the Musée d'Orsay with the National Gallery, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focuses on exactly this period, the mid-1860s through the mid-1880s. The Boston presentation gathers forty paintings exploring friendship, family, flirtation, and human connection across social classes and across the gardens, streets, cafés, restaurants, and theaters of modern life. Those twenty years give us a remarkably precise window through which to enter a French kitchen.
Rather than ask what French food tastes like to us today, then, we went looking for the cooks who were writing while Renoir was painting. What we found was not quite the France we expected.
Stepping Into Renoir's World, 1865–1885
Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century was a city learning new ways to spend its time. The transformation was visible in the streets and parks, but it was just as visible around tables. Cafés and restaurants became places not merely to eat but to meet, watch, talk, flirt, celebrate, and be seen. Beyond the city center, the Seine offered a different kind of escape. Rail connections made the river towns west of Paris increasingly accessible to day-trippers, and places along the river filled with boating, swimming, dancing, drinking, and eating. Renoir was drawn to precisely this world. He painted it at Bougival, where a couple turns mid-dance amid the bustle of an open-air café, and he painted it a few bends upriver at Chatou.
There, on an island in the Seine, stood the Maison Fournaise. Alphonse Fournaise had bought land on the island in 1857 and opened a boat-rental business, restaurant, and small hotel to serve the new tourist trade arriving by rail. The place drew the canotiers, the recreational boaters who became such recognizable figures of nineteenth-century riverside life, and Renoir knew it well. He painted the proprietor; the proprietor's daughter, Alphonsine; the landscape around Chatou; and the people who gathered there.
In Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise of 1875, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, three people sit beneath the restaurant's awning after time on the water. The Art Institute, which believes the painting was made during an extended stay at the restaurant, describes what Renoir put on the table: bottles on a silver tray, fluted wine glasses, and a compote of fruit, all on a white cloth. Several years later he returned to the same setting for Luncheon of the Boating Party of 1880–81, now in the Phillips Collection. Again the river, again the conversation, again wine and fruit on the table. The people in these pictures are not posed at some imagined banquet from antiquity. They are Renoir's contemporaries, artists, actors, writers, friends, and members of the Fournaise family, connected by conversation and leisure.
That matters, because food in these paintings is more than still life. The table is part of the social architecture. People gather around it, relationships unfold across it, and eating and drinking belong to the experience of being together.
What Was Actually on the Table?
This is where historical restraint becomes important. The Musée Fournaise states plainly that no menu from the restaurant has survived, and neither have any recipes from Mère Fournaise, who ran the kitchen. We cannot tell you how Mère Fournaise seasoned a chicken served at her restaurant, much less claim that a particular recipe was Renoir's.
What the museum has collected instead are contemporary recollections. The fullest of them appeared in the newspaper Le Matin in August 1898, in an unsigned reminiscence attributed to the critic Francisque Sarcey, looking back at the years before the war of 1870. Tastes were simple then, the writer recalls, and one feasted at Fournaise for a hundred sous a head: on Thursdays, the traditional cabbage soup with bacon and sausage, small fish fried straight from the Seine, and a leg of lamb or a roast chicken, with, into the bargain, a smile from the proprietor's daughter, Mademoiselle Alphonsine.
Two things are worth saying about that passage. It was written down nearly three decades after the meals it describes, and it recalls a moment slightly earlier than Renoir's own summers at Chatou. It is memory, not a menu. But if the attribution to Sarcey is correct, it is the memory of someone who knew Fournaise, and it fits the broader picture of how riverside guinguettes fed their guests. The Musée Fournaise adds that the restaurant's cooking drew on the products of the surrounding countryside: market gardening, fishing, and hunting.
Suddenly the paintings smell different. The river outside the restaurant was not simply scenery; fish from the Seine could become dinner. The recollection invites us to imagine smoke and roasting meat, fat rendering from poultry, cabbage and pork simmering together, and small fish meeting hot fat. And wine, which is one of the few parts of this culinary world Renoir himself lets us see directly. Bottles and glasses occupy the table in the 1875 painting, while glasses, bottles, grapes, and the remnants of a finished meal become part of the composition in Luncheon of the Boating Party. Conservators at the Phillips Collection, studying that canvas with X-radiography and infrared imaging, have shown that Renoir kept adjusting the scene as he worked, including the objects on the table. The meal mattered to him visually.
What interests us, though, is what happened before any of it reached the table. How might a French cook in 1875 have turned that chicken, lamb, or river fish into dinner? For that, we have to leave Renoir for a while, not because the paintings have failed us, but because the answer isn't hanging on the gallery wall.
It's waiting in the cookbooks.
Four Cooks, One Method
To understand what was happening in a French kitchen while Renoir was painting, it helps to meet four men. None of them can tell us what went into the roast chicken at Chatou. They can tell us something different and, for our purposes, more useful: how French cooks of Renoir's generation were being taught to build flavor.
Jules Gouffé published Le Livre de cuisine with Hachette in 1867. He deliberately wrote for two kitchens at once and separated them in the book itself: cuisine de ménage, the careful, economical cooking of the household kitchen, and the more elaborate grande cuisine of the professional kitchen. He is particularly valuable to our investigation because of his attention to quantities and method.
Alexandre Dumas spent his last years on an enormous Grand dictionnaire de cuisine, intended as the culinary capstone to his extraordinary literary career. He delivered the manuscript to his publisher, Alphonse Lemerre, in March 1870. The Franco-Prussian War interrupted publication, and Dumas died that December without seeing the book in print. His friend, the chef Denis-Joseph Vuillemot, participated in preparing the work, which Lemerre finally published in 1873. Part encyclopedia, part cookbook, part memoir, and thoroughly opinionated, it is also an extraordinarily rich record of sauces, marinades, ingredients, and culinary technique.
Urbain Dubois published École des cuisinières in 1876, subtitled Méthodes élémentaires, économiques. His book gives us another important perspective: professional French culinary knowledge translated for practical household use.
Baron Brisse is our reality check. His menus had already found an audience in the newspaper La Liberté when they were gathered into Le Calendrier gastronomique pour l'année 1867, a menu for every day of the year. Its introduction explains the purpose plainly: to help the maîtresse de maison with the morning task of ordering that day's dinner. Brisse aimed for menus that were seasonal, simple, and varied. This was food intended to solve the recurring household question: what are we having for dinner?
These four were not documenting every French kitchen, and their recipes are not transcripts of what ordinary Parisians ate. Gouffé and Dumas in particular reach well above the tables at a riverside inn. But Dubois's household economy and Brisse's daily menus sit much closer to the ground, and when the four books are set beside one another, patterns appear that hold across all of them, and those patterns are not quite what a modern cook expects.
If you go looking for the taste of nineteenth-century France expecting something resembling a jar of modern “French herbs,” you will be disappointed. What you meet instead, again and again, is parsley. Onions and shallots. Butter and animal fat. Stock and concentrated meat juices. Wine, vinegar, garlic, thyme, bay, mushrooms, pepper. More important than the ingredients, though, is what the cooks did with them. They browned. They infused. They simmered, strained, and reduced. Flavor was not simply put onto food; it was built into it. And sometimes the most important herbs in the kitchen never appeared on the plate at all.
The Little Bundle That Flavored France
One of the simplest tools in that kitchen was a bundle of herbs. The bouquet garni was not decorative. It was a piece of working equipment: herbs gathered, tied or enclosed, and dropped into a soup, sauce, stock, braise, or cooking liquid so that they could perfume and flavor the surrounding liquid and fat. Then the bundle came back out.
That last step is easy to overlook when we think about seasoning. We often imagine herbs by what remains visible in the finished dish: parsley scattered over potatoes, thyme clinging to a roast, dried seasoning coating vegetables. But many nineteenth-century French preparations show another way of working. The herbs could be used for what they released and then taken away: infuse, extract, remove.
Gouffé's ordinary bouquet is revealing on this point. His 1867 formula calls for 30 grams of parsley sprigs wrapped around just 2 grams of thyme and 2 grams of bay (Le Livre de cuisine, 1867, p. 36). The parsley is not an insignificant green garnish here. It forms the working body of an aromatic bundle Gouffé describes as being in general use for seasoning. The thyme and bay are placed inside the parsley, the whole bundle is tied, and after it has done its work in the cooking liquid, it can be removed.
Dumas gives us the same principle in more elaborate dress. In one of his foundational sauces, parsley and green alliums are bound around bay, garlic, basil, thyme, and clove, and the whole bundle cooks in a deeply savory mixture of meat, stock, vegetables, and fat. Later the sauce is strained. The herbs disappear. Their flavor stays. Elsewhere Dumas has cooks pull bouquets from sauces, pass cooking liquids through sieves or cloth, and reduce what remains until it concentrates.
That should change how we imagine these dishes. A nineteenth-century French sauce did not need to be visibly flecked with thyme in order to taste of thyme. A piece of fish did not need crumbled bay across its surface to carry the scent of bay. The herbs could vanish from sight while becoming more thoroughly part of the dish. And among them, humble parsley turns up with remarkable persistence.
Perhaps the flavor of Renoir's France was never hidden in some exotic spice. Perhaps a good deal of it was tied together with string.
How Renoir's France Built Flavor
Once we stopped looking for a single “French seasoning,” the cookbooks made considerably more sense. The recurring ingredients turned out to form a sequence.
First came fat. Butter appears constantly, joined as the dish requires by lard, ham fat, beef fat, or the natural fat and juices of the meat itself. Fat supplied richness, certainly, but it also carried flavor: aromatics were softened in it, herbs perfumed it, meat browned in it, and later a little more butter might return to the pan to finish a sauce and give it body.
Then came the aromatics. Onions and shallots appear again and again. Garlic appears more often than we expected, usually as part of an ensemble rather than as the dominant voice, a clove alongside onion, parsley, thyme, bay, wine, and stock. The distinction matters. Garlic belonged in this kitchen. Garlic did not own it.
Then came the herbs. Parsley was the workhorse. Thyme and bay recur throughout, frequently inside a bouquet. Green alliums appear beside parsley, and depending on the preparation, basil, tarragon, chervil, and others enter the conversation. There was no single herb formula applied indiscriminately to everything; the cook chose according to the dish.
Then came depth. Stock and consommé were more than liquids added to a dish. They were concentrated repositories of flavor. Meat juices were deliberately captured, mushrooms supplied another savory layer, and bones, trimmings, vegetables, and aromatics could be cooked for hours, then strained, clarified, and reduced. Dumas describes preparations in which meat and vegetables cook until their juices concentrate against the bottom of the pan before any more liquid is introduced, the cook building depth before the dish proper has even begun.
Then came brightness, which is the easiest part of the system to overlook. Richness needed opposition. White wine appears with fish and poultry, red wine in darker preparations, vinegar in marinades and sauces, lemon against butter and stock. A sauce could therefore be rich without being dull: fat provided weight, acid provided lift.
Then came warmth. Black pepper turns up repeatedly, with clove, nutmeg, mace, and others in supporting quantities rather than as the identity of a dish. This was warmth, fragrance, and complexity, not the chile-driven heat a modern cook may associate with the word “spice.”
And then came time. Simmer, braise, infuse, strain, reduce, finish. A cook might spend hours building a liquid only to strain away the solids that made it. Wine was reduced; stock became glaze; the bouquet came out; fresh butter or parsley arrived only at the very end. The result was never simply the sum of the ingredients, because the method changed the flavor.
That gives us a very different picture of what “seasoning” meant in Renoir's France. The flavor was not sitting in one mixture waiting on a shelf. It existed in relationships: fat with aromatics, herbs with liquid, stock with meat juices, richness with acidity, heat with time, and finally reduction with restraint. Renoir's France did not simply season food. It built flavor.
Wait, Where's the Lavender?
At some point in this research we had to ask the obvious question. Where is the lavender?
For many modern American cooks, lavender seems almost inseparable from the idea of French country cooking. A jar labeled “French herbs” or Herbes de Provence can summon an entire landscape before we even open it: stone farmhouses, blue shutters, Mediterranean light, endless purple fields. Surely lavender would be waiting for us somewhere in the nineteenth-century kitchen.
It wasn't, at least not in the recurring savory vocabulary that emerged from the sources we examined. We found parsley, a great deal of it. We found thyme and bay, onion and shallot, garlic, basil, tarragon, chervil, mushrooms, pepper, clove, nutmeg, butter, stock, wine, vinegar, and lemon. Lavender did not surface as part of the recurring savory architecture in the sources we examined.
That does not prove nobody in nineteenth-century France ever cooked with lavender. Historical absence is notoriously hard to demonstrate, France is far larger than a handful of cookbooks, and our sources lean heavily toward published Parisian, professional, and bourgeois culinary culture, the wrong instrument for detecting what a household in the Vaucluse might have done. Lavender unquestionably belonged to the landscape and domestic culture of southern France. But belonging to a landscape is not the same as belonging to a stewpot.
There is also a complication that is much easier to check. The commercial mixture now familiar as Herbes de Provence is far younger than Renoir's world. Ducros, the French spice company, dates the creation of its blend to the 1960s and gives its original composition as rosemary, savory, oregano, and thyme. The term is generic rather than a protected appellation, and lavender can appear in modern versions but is not necessary to the mixture. In other words, the commercial mixture many Americans now associate with “old France” belongs to the twentieth century, not Renoir's nineteenth.
That leaves a rather delicious historical reversal. The nineteenth-century kitchen we expected to smell of lavender kept handing us parsley instead.
And perhaps that is exactly why old cookbooks are worth opening. They interrupt memory. They remind us that what feels “traditional” today is often a blend of genuine old practice, later codification, commerce, tourism, nostalgia, and the stories generations have told about a place. Lavender smelled like Provence long before Provence supposedly tasted like lavender. Renoir's France, at least through the kitchen door we have opened here, smelled considerably more of butter, onions, stock, wine, parsley, thyme, bay, and garlic.
Which leaves one final question: could that flavor system still work in a modern kitchen?
There was only one reasonable way to find out.
From Their Kitchen to Ours
Once the cookbooks were closed, we were left with a practical problem. How do you translate a nineteenth-century way of building flavor for a modern cook who has no pot of consommé simmering on the stove, hours to construct a sauce, or bundle of fresh herbs waiting to be tied with string?
The answer was not to invent a seasoning that never existed. It was to translate the architecture. The parsley that appeared again and again became the herbal foundation, with chives beside it. Onion and shallot supplied the aromatic base. Garlic stayed deliberately supportive rather than dominant. Thyme and bay echoed the herbs we kept meeting inside bouquets and cooking liquids. Black pepper supplied warmth. No lavender. No rosemary. No attempt to make the mixture conform to what a twenty-first-century American cook expects something labeled “French” to taste like.
We called the experiment La Cuisine 1875.
La Cuisine 1875 is a modern dry seasoning inspired by the recurring aromatic vocabulary documented in French culinary sources of the late nineteenth century. It does not reproduce a historical seasoning mixture. Instead, it gives today's cook a practical starting point for the older method of building flavor with aromatics, herbs, fat, stock, wine, and reduction.
But a historically interesting seasoning that doesn't make delicious food is merely an interesting seasoning.
So we took it to the stove.
Cook the History: Butter-Braised Chicken with La Cuisine 1875
This is not a nineteenth-century recipe. It is a modern kitchen experiment built around what the nineteenth-century sources taught us: flavor develops in layers. The seasoning begins in butter rather than being rubbed heavily onto the chicken. Wine lifts the browned flavors from the pan. Stock supplies savory depth. Gentle cooking gives the herbs and aromatics time to move through the sauce. Reduction concentrates everything, and cold butter finishes what warm butter began.
The result surprised us. The seasoning didn't sit on top of the chicken. The flavor seemed to travel through it.
Bloom Classification
Gentle + Butter
Why the Bloom Works
La Cuisine 1875 contains dried parsley, chives, shallot, onion, thyme, garlic, black pepper, and bay. Briefly warming the blend in butter begins drawing out its fat-soluble aromas while softening the dried alliums and waking the herbs. But blooming is only the first step. Wine, stock, simmering, reduction, and finishing butter continue the work, mirroring the larger principle we found throughout the period sources: flavor is constructed gradually rather than applied all at once.
Prep: 10 minutes
Cook: 25–30 minutes
Total: 35–40 minutes
Yield: 3–4 servings
Ingredients
1 lb boneless, skinless chicken thighs (454 g)
1/2 tsp fine sea salt (3 g)
1 tbsp unsalted butter (14 g)
2 tsp La Cuisine 1875 (about 3 g)
1/4 cup dry white wine (60 ml)
1/2 cup chicken stock (120 ml)
1 tsp fresh lemon juice (5 ml)
1 tbsp cold unsalted butter (14 g), for finishing
Method
Season the chicken. Pat the thighs dry and season lightly with the salt.
Begin with the fat. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat.
Bloom the seasoning. Add La Cuisine 1875 and stir continuously for 20–30 seconds, just until fragrant. Do not brown the herbs. This brief contact with warm butter begins releasing their aroma and gives the dried onion, shallot, and garlic a chance to soften.
Brown the chicken. Increase the heat to medium. Add the chicken and cook for about 2–3 minutes per side, just until lightly browned. The chicken does not need to be cooked through at this stage. Those browned bits in the pan are not something to wash away. We are about to use them.
Deglaze with wine. Transfer the chicken temporarily to a plate. Pour the white wine into the hot skillet and scrape the bottom with a wooden spoon, releasing the browned bits into the liquid. Let the wine simmer until reduced by roughly half.
Build the cooking liquid. Add the chicken stock and return the chicken, along with any accumulated juices, to the skillet.
Braise gently. Partially cover and simmer gently until the chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165°F (74°C). Avoid a hard boil. We want the chicken cooking gently while the seasoning continues to infuse the butter, wine, stock, and meat juices.
Reduce. Transfer the cooked chicken to a plate. Leave the skillet uncovered and simmer the sauce until slightly reduced and concentrated.
Finish the sauce. Remove the skillet from the heat. Stir in the lemon juice, then the cold butter, until the sauce turns glossy.
Bring it together. Return the chicken to the skillet and spoon the sauce generously over the top. Taste before adding additional salt.
Best With
Serve this with something willing to catch the sauce. Rice is particularly good because it absorbs the butter, wine, stock, and aromatics without competing with them. Mashed or boiled potatoes and crusty bread work beautifully for the same reason.
La Cuisine 1875 has also been tested with mushrooms. Sautéed in butter with the seasoning, they emphasize the savory side of the blend and demonstrate that the flavor architecture does not depend on meat to work.
These are modern applications, not historical reconstructions.
Blooming Notes
Butter is only the beginning. This recipe demonstrates an extended bloom. The dry seasoning first meets fat. Wine then releases the browned flavors from the pan and introduces acidity. Stock provides savory depth. Gentle simmering lets the elements mingle. Reduction concentrates them. Lemon restores brightness, and cold butter rounds and carries the finished flavor.
Think of the sequence rather than any single ingredient:
Butter → aromatics → browning → wine → stock → simmer → reduction → finish
That sequence is the real lesson of La Cuisine 1875. The seasoning gives us the vocabulary; cooking turns it into a sentence.
Through the Kitchen Window
Return to Renoir's world. To a couple turning through the open-air café at Bougival. To friends gathered beside the Seine. To tables set with glasses and bottles, to conversation, dancing, flirtation, and the particular pleasure of having nowhere else to be for the afternoon. The paintings have not changed, but perhaps something beyond their frames has.
Renoir could give us sunlight on fabric, the movement of a dress, a hand resting on a shoulder, a glass waiting on a table. What he could not preserve was aroma. Somewhere beyond these scenes, cooks were working. Onions softened in fat. Bundles of herbs disappeared into pots. Stock simmered. Wine struck hot pans and rose in steam. Meat browned. Sauces reduced. Butter went in at the beginning and sometimes returned at the end.
At Maison Fournaise in nearby Chatou, surviving recollections allow us to come particularly close to one of those kitchens. We know something about the foods served there, but we cannot reconstruct them exactly. No surviving Fournaise recipe tells us how its cook seasoned the chicken remembered by guests, and no cookbook can tell us what Renoir smelled when he walked through the restaurant. The responsible historian has to leave some doors closed. But the surviving evidence lets us stand surprisingly close to one of them.
Contemporary recollections tell us something about the food that came from the Fournaise kitchen. Renoir shows us the people and places of this riverside world. And cookbooks published while he was painting reveal the culinary language surrounding them: butter, onions and shallots, parsley, thyme and bay, garlic, stock and meat juices, wine and vinegar, pepper, time, and reduction.
None of it belongs to Renoir. It belongs to cooks, to people whose names were far less likely to be preserved than the names of the artists and diners they fed. Perhaps that is why looking through the kitchen window matters at all. History is not only what survives on canvas. Sometimes it is what simmered behind it.
So the next time you stand before a Renoir, look beyond the brushwork for a moment. Look at the people, at where they have gathered, at the tables, the cafés, the gardens, and the river. Then imagine what the painting cannot show you. Somewhere nearby, there was a kitchen. And if we listen carefully enough to the cooks who left their words behind, we may almost smell dinner.
Sources & Further Reading
This article began with a simple question, but answering it meant looking beyond Renoir's paintings and into the culinary world that surrounded them. The sources below include nineteenth-century cookbooks, museum scholarship, contemporary recollections, and historical material connected directly to Maison Fournaise. Wherever possible, links lead to digitized original editions or to the museums and institutions responsible for the works and historical material discussed.
Primary Culinary Sources
Gouffé, Jules. Le Livre de cuisine: comprenant la cuisine de ménage et la grande cuisine. Paris: L. Hachette, 1867. One of the principal culinary sources for this article. Gouffé divides the work between cuisine de ménage and grande cuisine and provides unusually precise quantities and methods. His description of the ordinary bouquet garni, including 30 grams of parsley, 2 grams of thyme, and 2 grams of bay, appears on p. 36.
Dumas, Alexandre, with D.-J. Vuillemot. Grand dictionnaire de cuisine. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1873. Dumas's vast culinary dictionary was published posthumously, with the participation of his friend, the chef Denis-Joseph Vuillemot. It was particularly valuable to this research for its descriptions of sauces, marinades, bouquets, stocks, wine, vinegar, herbs, straining, and reduction.
Dubois, Urbain. École des cuisinières: méthodes élémentaires, économiques: cuisine, pâtisserie, office, 1500 recettes. 2nd ed. Paris: Dentu, 1876. Dubois provides an important household perspective, translating professional French culinary knowledge into practical and economical cookery. His work helped us compare the techniques found in more elaborate culinary sources with instructions intended for domestic kitchens. The 1876 edition is digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and available through Gallica.
Read the 1876 École des cuisinières at Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Brisse, Baron [Léon Brisse]. Le Calendrier gastronomique pour l'année 1867. Paris, 1867. Brisse's calendar offered a menu for every day of the year. Its introduction explains that it was intended to help the maîtresse de maison with the recurring morning task of ordering dinner, with menus designed around seasonality, simplicity, and variety. It provides a useful counterweight to the more elaborate cooking represented by Gouffé and Dumas.
Renoir, the Exhibition & Maison Fournaise
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Renoir and Love. February 28–June 13, 2027. The Boston exhibition brings together forty paintings from the mid-1860s through the mid-1880s exploring love, friendship, family, flirtation, and social relationships in the modern world Renoir inhabited. The exhibition provided the starting point for our question: what did this world taste like?
Art Institute of Chicago. Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers' Lunch), 1875. The Art Institute's research establishes Maison Fournaise as the setting for Renoir's 1875 painting and identifies details of the table, including bottles on a silver tray, fluted wine glasses, fruit, and the white tablecloth. These details provide some of the strongest visual evidence for the dining world Renoir encountered at Chatou.
The Phillips Collection. Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–81. The Phillips Collection's technical study of Renoir's painting uses X-radiography, infrared imaging, and other methods to examine how Renoir developed and altered the composition, including elements of the table setting.
Musée Fournaise. “À la table de Renoir et des canotiers.” An especially important source for understanding the food served at Maison Fournaise. The museum preserves historical recollections associated with the restaurant and also makes an important limitation clear: no menu from the establishment and no collection of Mère Fournaise's recipes is known to survive. The museum's material includes an unsigned reminiscence published in Le Matin on August 16, 1898, attributed to Francisque Sarcey and recalling the years before the Franco-Prussian War. It describes Thursday meals of cabbage soup with bacon and sausage, small fish from the Seine, and leg of lamb or roast chicken. Because the recollection was recorded decades later and concerns a period slightly earlier than Renoir's summers at Chatou, we have treated it as historical memory rather than as a surviving restaurant menu.
Modern Context: Herbes de Provence
Ducros. “Les Herbes de Provence.”
Ducros's history of Herbes de Provence was used to investigate the modern association between lavender and French country cooking. Ducros dates its commercial blend to the 1960s and describes the original combination as rosemary, savory, oregano, and thyme. This much later history helped us avoid projecting a familiar twentieth-century commercial idea of “French herbs” backward into Renoir's nineteenth-century culinary world.
A Note on Historical Interpretation
No surviving Maison Fournaise menu or collection of Mère Fournaise's recipes has been identified in the sources consulted for this article. We therefore do not claim that La Cuisine 1875 reproduces a seasoning used at Maison Fournaise, eaten by Renoir, or documented in any nineteenth-century recipe.
Instead, the blend grew from comparing contemporary French culinary sources and identifying recurring ways in which cooks combined aromatics, herbs, fats, stocks, meat juices, wine, acids, spices, and cooking techniques.
La Cuisine 1875 seasoning from Oak City Spice Blends is an interpretation of documented flavor architecture, not the reconstruction of a lost recipe.
From the Spicekeeper
I thought I knew what we were looking for when this research began. Renoir, France, the nineteenth century. Surely somewhere among the old recipes we would find the flavors that today announce themselves as “French”: rosemary, thyme, perhaps lavender, perhaps something resembling the Herbes de Provence sitting in our modern spice cabinets.
Instead, the old cooks handed me parsley. Lots of parsley. Then onions and shallots, a little garlic, thyme and bay bundled together and dropped into a pot, butter, stock, meat juices, wine, vinegar, mushrooms, and pepper. And instructions. Brown this. Simmer that. Tie these herbs together. Take them back out. Strain the sauce. Reduce it further. Add the butter now.
The more recipes I read, the more I realized I had been asking the wrong question. I had begun by asking what spices they used. The better question was how they built flavor. And that distinction changed everything, including the seasoning that eventually became La Cuisine 1875.
I did not want to make something that merely tasted “French” to a modern American palate and then search backward through history for a justification. The history had to come first. So when lavender didn't make the case, it stayed out. When parsley kept appearing, parsley moved to the center. When garlic appeared repeatedly but usually surrounded by other aromatics, I resisted the temptation to let garlic take over. And when the cookbooks kept showing that herbs alone weren't enough, the cooking method became part of the seasoning's story too.
Then came the moment every bit of food scholarship eventually has to face in my kitchen. I cooked it. I bloomed La Cuisine 1875 in butter, browned chicken in that fragrant fat, lifted the browned flavors from the pan with white wine, added stock, let everything cook together, reduced the sauce, and finished it with butter and lemon. The kitchen smelled extraordinary. But aroma wasn't enough, so I tasted the chicken. The flavor wasn't sitting on the surface. It seemed to have worked its way through the whole dish. There wasn't one herb shouting above everything else. The butter, wine, stock, aromatics, herbs, and chicken tasted as though they belonged together. I tested the blend again with mushrooms, then with rice. It worked there too.
That was when I understood what this project had actually produced. Not a reproduction of something Renoir ate. Not a nineteenth-century seasoning rediscovered in an old cookbook. Something I find more interesting than either: a conversation between their kitchen and ours.
That is what I hope historical food can be. We cannot taste 1875 exactly. Too much has changed, including ingredients, agriculture, kitchens, equipment, expectations, and us. But we can listen carefully to the cooks who left their instructions behind. We can notice what they did repeatedly. We can question the traditions we thought we understood. And then we can carry what we learn back to the stove.
Because food history should not only tell us what people once ate.
Sometimes it can teach us how to taste differently now.
From my kitchen to yours,
The Spicekeeper
Oak City Spice Blends
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