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Culinary Legend
The myth that Catherine de’ Medici introduced a long list of foods, techniques and utensils from Italy to France for the first time is amongst the most enduring and widespread in food history. The Oxford Companion to Food cites it first among such persistent falsehoods. Items whose introduction to France have been spuriously attributed to Catherine include the dinner fork, parsley, the artichoke, lettuce, broccoli, the garden pea, ices, pasta, Parmesan, as well as the turkey and tomato of the New World. She has also received false credit for introducing sauces and a variety of dishes such as duck à l’orange and deviled eggs. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton and Stephen Mennell lead the list of scholars who provided the definitive arguments that should have squelched this long-standing legend. They point out that Catherine’s father-in-law, François I of France, and the flower of the French aristocracy had dined at some of Italy’s most elite tables during the king’s Italian campaigns (and that an earlier generation had done so during Charles VIII of France’s invasion of 1494); that a vast Italian entourage had visited France for the wedding of Catherine de’ Medici’s father to her French-born mother; and that she had little influence at court until her husband’s death because he was so besotted by his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. In fact, a large population of Italians — bankers, silk-weavers, philosophers, musicians, and artists, including Leonardo da Vinci— had emigrated to France to promote the burgeoning Renaissance. Nevertheless, popular culture frequently attributes Italian culinary influence and forks in France to Catherine. The earliest known reference to Catherine as the popularizer of Italian culinary innovation is the entry for “cuisine” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie published in 1754, which describes haute cuisine as decadent and effeminate and explains that fussy sauces and fancy fricassees arrived in France via “that crowd of corrupt Italians who served at the court of Catherine de’ Medici.” The Encyclopédie provides no evidence for why these innovations should be attributed to the foreign-born queen infamous as the presumed author of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre rather than to the beloved king remembered as the father of the French Renaissance. The legend lost its pejorative connotations as evidenced in M. F. K. Fisher’s essay, “Catherine’s Lonesome Cooks,” of 1937. Nevertheless, it continues to flourish.