Food for Music
Laura Vaughan and Donald Nicolson gave a concert on October 7 in the wonderful Melbourne Digital Concert Hall streamed series.
She played the viola da gamba, and he was on harpsicord in a program of music from the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Some of the music was composed by Marin Marais, who was one of the musicians at the count of Louis XIV at Versailles.
They asked me if I could come up with some dishes to match the music. Of course I could. The food of Versailles is well documented, thanks to records of all kinds. The orchards and vegetable gardens were exceptional, thanks to the stewardship of the gardener Jean Baptiste de la Quintinie, who was a lawyer and agronomist before taking on the gardens. He worked on the soil, he protected the plants against wind, heat and frost, he developed hothouses. So I had to include lots of vegetables in the dishes I proposed, based also on an early cookbook by Menon, La cuisiniere bourgeoise, which was published in 1746. There were recipes for pumpkin soup, and an asparagus omelette. There was another dish to honour J.S.Bach, and we finished with something chocolate because chocolate was all the rage at the court of Louis XIV.
They were also working on the old notions people and humours. The ancient Greek physician and philosopher Galen proposed that there were humours, or bodily fluids, that characterised people – blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. That translated to the temperaments of sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholy, and was further complicated by hot and cold, moist and dry. Those of certain dispositions, should they be ill, were often treated by diet. Melancholy people, for instance, needed to avoid lemon and vinegar, and should eat sweet things. The chocolate for dessert was for the melancholy nature of the music by English composer John Dowland.