About Cookery as Fine Art. Culinary Literature in the XVIII Century

Abstract

One of the strategies used by some contemporary scholars who claim fine cookery should get an institutional recognition as a fine art consists in declaring that some French philosophers from the past, especially from the XVIII Century, had already made of cookery an object of philosophical reflection and had also qualified it as an artistic discipline. However, the examination of the texts quoted by them reveals the wrongness of these assertions, while showing at the same time the treatment completely different that French philosophers of the Enlightenment gave to cookery.