Hearth Cooking Ideas from
“The French Cook”
By François Pierre La Varenne, 1651
La Varenne was the most influential 17th century European cookbook author. His Cuisine Francais, 1651, was the first major new collection of French recipes published since the 1540’s. French cuisine was already highly regarded in the 17th century; the book enjoyed wide commercial success, was appreciated internationally, and was influential in forming modern European cuisine.

The French Cook is full of wonderful ideas — a source of recipes that are still refreshingly bold. The recipes themselves are written in a style that is simple, clear, and direct — the have an energetic fluency. The recipes don’t include measurements — and this provides them with a sense of spontaneity that is often lacking from the modern chemistry-precise recipe style. La Varenne wrote his recipes as one actually tells recipes. In his case he assumed a telling approaching that of peer to peer, and so details that you or I might need — what, exactly is the proportion between sugar and water in a light syrup, are not included.

The recipes that I quote in full below are from the 1654 English translation of The French Cook, by François Pierre La Varenne by I. D. G. Ann Bagnall edited the edition I am using. The book was published by Southover Press, East Sussex, England, in 2001. While I do enjoy this translation — it was recognized in its own time as a poor one. John Evelyn, author, diarist, and translator, condemned this translation in his introduction to his translation of “The French Gardener” by Nicolas Bonnefons (1654) in the context of calling for a translator of Bonnefon’s companion volume “La Delice de la Compagne.” A new translation by Terrence Scully is forthcoming from Tom Jaine’s hugely important publishing company, Prospect Books.

La Varenne and Hearth Cooking

All European cuisine was born on the open hearth. Unfortunately, when people first began writing down recipes, they assumed that the technical issues of how to actually work with a fireplace could be assumed. This was true at the time, but is obviously not true today. A second unfortunately is that recipes that called for the most primitive ways of using the hearth — cooking on embers, in ashes, and utilizing a piece of glowing metal to brown a dish — were rarely included in recipe collections.

Those of you familiar with my book, The Magic of Fire, will be familiar with my recipes for baking on embers, and with my recipes for wrapping food in layers of paper and then baking them in hot ash. In developing recipes for The Magic of Fire I placed an emphasis on these simple methods because I waned to demonstrate that anyone could cook on their hearth, even without equipment. Historically, of course, the poor might own a cooking pot, but nothing else. And so, historically, ember and ash cooking was a cooking method of poverty. Recipes of poverty are recorded by anthropologists doing field research, not by the cooks writing for the gentry, or for the middle class. And so prior to the advent of ethnographers in the modern era there are virtually no records of how the poor cooked.

I thus find it striking that a chef and author of La Varenne’s stature includes baking in ashes in his book of sophisticated recipes for the gentry. He includes two recipes for ash baking. My intuition is that these two recipes suggest a whole vocabulary or ash baking that was at his disposal — and that was at the disposal of all cooks.

Pears baked in Ashes

Here, from the 1654 English translation is a recipe for pears that begins with baking the pears in hot embers — “wame cinders” in the translation. Baking the pear, rather than boiling it, concentrates the flavor. Baking in hot ashes contributes a hint of smoke to the pear. La Varenne clearly intended this flavor to be developed through ash baking.

La varenne recipe. This excerpt is from the 1654 edition
of the English translation of La Varenne’s “The French Cook.”

Hearth Method:

Use the fireplace shovel to mix embers into ash and then bury the pears in this mound of hot ashes. Seckle pears, which are small, bake in about twenty minutes. I don’t have a French edition of the text and do not know whether “warme” is the original modifier, or whether this is a mistranslation. My goal is to roast the pears in what I think of as a moderate oven. This is achieved with a mix of approximately half ash and half embers.

My own delight in ash roasted pears usually means that I don’t get to the sauce part of La Varenne’s recipe. I have not yet developed a syrup that I felt improved on the basic ash-baked pear. The sauce is obviously an elaboration on the underlying recipe for the pear. I would follow your own aesthetic in further developing the recipe.

I would add, however, that pears were a highly prized fruit in seventeenth century France, and anyone with a kitchen garden and fruit trees would be likely to have a selection of cultivars. La Varenne, and his readers, knew their pears and would certainly have matched ember baking with varieties they knew would hold up well to the additional flavor added through ember-roasting.

Liver Wrapped in Paper and Baked in Ashes

Aluminum foil is today’s paper. As I explain in my book, The Magic of Fire, foil seals whatever it wraps in a way that paper does not. Food cooked wrapped in foil tastes different from food wrapped in paper and is therefore not an equivalent method. When wrapping food in paper always rub the paper in oil first. This raises the temperature at which it will burn.

It is recipe 52 in the section Entrements.

52. Fat liver baked in the ashes

You must barde it with lard, and season it well with salt, pepper, beaten cloves and a very small bundle of herbs. Then wrap it up with four or five sheets of paper, and set it a baking in the ashes as a Quince. After it is baked, take heed you do not lose the sauce with stirring of it, take the upper sheets of paper off of it, and serve it with the undermost, if you will, on a plate.

Baking in ash is simple and requires no special equipment. Assuming a layer of ash several inches (7.5 cm) deep on the fireplace floor, dig a trench in the ash with the fireplace shove. Lay embers in the bottom of the trench, cover those embers with a layer of ash about 1/2 and inch (1 cm), put down the liver wrapped in paper, cover the paper with 1 inch of ash (2.5 cm), and then pile that with a substantial layer of hot embers. Most of the heat will come from the embers on top of the pile. With a fiercely hot pile of embers on the ash-mounded packet I would estimate a cooking time of 20 minutes. The outer layer of paper should be saturated with cooking oil — this raising the combustion temperature. I use parchment paper for the inside layers and oiled brown paper bags from the grocery store for the outer layer. I usually wrap foods in only two layers of paper - a layer of parchment paper and a layer of oiled brown paper.

Jerusalem Artichokes Baked in Ashes

Records of baking root vegetables in embers are far and few between. But here is a famous French chef — a culinary innovator — specifically calling for the Jerusalem artichokes to be baked in the ashes. It is important to remember that La Varenne was writing for the wealthy. They had options. They had ovens, and some even had pastry ovens. They also had one form of Dutch oven or another. And of course, there is always boiling. Or, as the artichokes are to be cut into thin slices anyway, the Jerusalem artichokes could have been peeled, sliced, and fried in the butter called for in the recipe’s second portion. Instead, La Varenne specifically calls for ember roasting. I think it is fair to reason that he did this because he wanted the flavor that only ember-roasting can impart. For renactors and culinary historians I think that this recipe should be considered a model — as should the other ash-baking recipes I include here — for insights into both an undocumented cuisine of poverty — and also insights into a cuisine that included an innovative fusion of the cuisine of poverty with the refined cuisine of the aristocracy.

La varrne ash baked Jerusalem artichokes

The Red-hot Shovel Toasts

This is a great technique. This method calls for heating the fireplace shovel until it is glowing red and then passing this glowing red steel over the dish to brown the top. In a modern kitchen — the broiler or salamander is used for this purpose. Restaurants sometimes use a blowtorch to caramelize the top layer of sugar — like on the ever-popular Crème Brule.

The first recipe I give here, Ramequin of Onion, is recipe 43 in the Entrements section. It is one of several recipes for toast. La Varenne first fries the bread in fat — the method for modern-day croutons. You could also grill the bread — Italian bruschetta fashion. If frying the bread, then the flavor of the bread can be subtly changed by the fat you use, butter, fresh lard, salted lard, herbed salted lard, smoked lard, herbed smoked lard, chicken fat, olive oil, etc.

43. Ramequin of Onion

Take your Onions, and stamp them in a mortar, with salt and much pepper. You may put to it some Anchovies well melted with a little butter, your onions being upon the bread fried in oil or butter. Pass the fire-shovel red hot over it, and serve.

The Ramequin of Garlic is done the same way.

16. Eggs in the moon shine with cream

Make a bed of butter in your dish, and break your eggs over it; after they are broken season them with salt. Then put some cream to them until they be hidden, or some milk so that it be good. Seethe them, and give them colour with the fire-shovell red, then serve.