Kathmandu:

Every chef has one but they don’t dip into it as they should. For here in the Larousse Gastronomique billed as The World’s Greatest Cookery Encyclopedia are facts, historical figures, recipes and almost anything related to cooking. You don’t read it at one go, you savour it. And you come up with priceless gems from a treasure trove.

Of Angelica or Angelique, we learn that it is an aromatic plant bought from the Scandinavian country to France by the Vikings and cultivated by monks and used for cakes and confections. We have Austin de Croze saying of it, “Have a dozen choice brioches, kept hot, a fruit dish filled with sticks of candied angelica, a bottle of angelica liqueur, a carafe of iced water, and a box of Egyptian cigarettes. Light a cigarette, take a draught of iced water, cru-nch a piece of Niort angelica with a mouthful of very hot brioche, inhale, draw in and distil a few drops of angelica liqueur in the mouth, then start again. Then you only need the room to be sprayed with a light fresh perfume, such as verbena or citronella, to know what blissful enjoyment a discreet sybaritism can give.”

Bernadette Vasseux, a long time Kathmandu resident first fed me Camembert, and the Larousse says it was invented during the French Revolution in Normandy by Marie Harel, who had hidden a run away priest from Brie, and with his help developed a new cheese by co-mbining the method used in Normandy with that used in Brie. Harel settled in Camembert village and while passing through it Napoleon III tasted it, fell in love with it, and named it Camembert.

The 50’s term about sharing the expenses of a meal was called ‘Going Dutch’. Larousse states that the original term was de fructu, where in former times meant the minor expenses (fruit, service, et cetera) incurred by a person who lent his table for a meal at which all the participants paid a share, were in fact, looking after “the provisions of food” or curare de fructu. Yet another explanation comes from the 17th century and from clergy visiting homes on the night before Christmas and chanting the prayer containing the words de fructu ventris tui or, “from the fruit of Thy womb”.

Try let’s go de fructu instead of let’s go Dutch.

The French word for lunch is dejeuner and concerns the French revolution and the Constituent Assembly. Until that time, the midday meal was called dinner but because the Constituent Assembly began at 12 noon and finished at 6: pm, so dinner had to be eaten by the deputies of the Assembly at 11:00 am. A Madame Hardy, who ran a café, invented the dejeuner a’ la fourchette (fork lunch) offering her customers meats and other grills. Breakfast was always petit dejeuner but a revolution caused dejeuner.

Larousse talks about the great chef Escoffier, who invented amongst ot-her things the peach Melba in honour of the Australian singer Nellie Melba. Of him, Emperor William II said, “I am the Emperor of Germany, but you are the Emperor of Chefs.”

There are even poems in Larousse, and I will end by quoting one by Saint-Amant of the 16th century, who wrote —

“The dear apricot which I love,

The strawberry cover’d with cream,

The manna which falls down from heaven,

The savour of honey’s pure food,

The heavenly pear grown in Tours,

The sweetness of any green fig,

The plum with its delicate juice,

The very grape of Muscat,

(A very strange title to me),

All are mere sourness and mire

Compar’d with this melon divine”.