Seventeenth-century Paris created fashion, haute couture and haute cuisine, but chamber pots were emptied into its narrow streets. The opinions of the German-born Duchesse d’Orléans cited above were often negative when it came to the food and manners of France, but her description of Paris can be confirmed through other observers. That Paris was a stinky and rather poor market town did not preclude it from becoming Europe’s capital of “taste”. If Joan DeJean has argued that modern shopping was born in Paris and that fashion was born at the court of its king, then none of it could have happened without a profound change in views held by the Parisian elite. The Duchesse d’Orléans, quoted above, married to Louis XIV’s younger brother, is most quoted when she writes against the French court’s love of exotic chocolate and coffee. She strongly expressed her own preference for beer-soup in the face of these new beverages. In doing so she was discussing taste, a most fashionable and new way to express opinion. Indeed, Jean Louis Flandrin, the foremost historian of food, has found that a real revolution took place in Paris during the second half of the seventeenth century. The concept of “taste” became prominent in daily discourse. Since the Middle Ages, food had been tied to the dietetics of Galenic medical thinking and to its influence on health and on the humors of the body, not to taste. If this traditional discourse did not entirely disappear, it was superseded in every domain by a new one, individual judgment; the taste of the consumer. Whether in the arts, in clothing, in literature or at the table, it was for the consumer to discern whether things were in good or bad taste. Flandrin writes of the birth of the concept of “l’homme de goût” or “the man of taste” who judges what is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, in painting, in furniture, in manners and especially on his plate. Cooks discussed the harmony of tastes in dishes, neglecting the classifications made by doctors about the nature of food. Previously classified as

hot or cold, dry or humid based on Galenic medicine, foods were assembled to be balanced for digestion. These hygienic precautions slowly disappeared to leave a discourse about the way the tastes of different foods harmonized to make a successful and succulent dish judged for its flavor.2 It can be safely argued that without this transformation there would not have been a novel haute cuisine or haute couture.