from the editor darra goldstein

I had traveled through all of

Time Travels Europe, peeking into kitchens

and banquet halls

By an act of the us congress, daylight saving time began four weeks early
this spring. I quickly adjusted to the lingering evening light and its promise of
pleasures to come: summer suppers, barbecues. Still, the mandated change
disrupted my sense of the seasons, and my disorientation only increased when I
had to go through daylight saving again, two weeks later, in France.
I was visiting Château du Fey, the elegant seventeenth-century Burgundian
château housing Anne Willan’s cooking school, La Varenne. I had come not to
cook but to explore the extraordinary cookbooks and travel books that Anne and
her husband, Mark Cherniavsky, have collected over the years. Their second-
floor library is lined with glass-fronted cabinets holding volumes that date back
to the sixteenth century. Taken together, this collection reveals the evolution of
the cookbook from treatises on agriculture and health to the collections of recipes
so familiar to us today. I discovered such treasures as de la Marre’s 1757 three-
volume Dictionnaire economique, which describes half-a-dozen ways to catch
larks, and even more to catch pheasants. As Tobias Smollett noted (with some
distaste) in his Travels through France and Italy, the French loved to eat small
birds wrapped in vine leaves, offered up only half-baked—at least as gauged by
Smollett’s English palate.
Charged with identifying illustrations for a descriptive history of the Le Fey
collection, I cloistered myself in the library. The air smelled intoxicatingly of old
leather and paper mixed with the lush aromas of meals being prepared in the
kitchen below. Since this was March, the château stood shrouded in fog and mist,
among fields and ancient forests of chestnut and oak. The isolation contributed
to a sense of unreality—at any moment I half expected brigands to come gallop-
ing out of the forest or to hear the clarion call of hunting horns. (As it happened,
stag season had just ended, so my imaginings were not entirely fanciful.)
Opening one extraordinary book after another, I hardly left the library all
week. There I was, in Cristoforo Messisbugo’s sixteenth-century Ferrara kitchen,
savoring his potaccio all’italiana, a meat stew with chestnuts, coriander, and
honey. I skipped over to France, where I ogled Charles Estienne’s beautiful
 What cookbooks offer is

that true gift of time…you

can travel backwards through

recipes and descriptions

that have been set down

over the centuries.

knotted gardens from his Maison rustique and contemplated his astrological
planting charts. The 1596 Good Huswife’s Jewell, with its list of “banquetting
stuffe,” transported me to an English demesne, and then it was back to France to
cavort with the cherubs making ice cream in Emy’s L’Art de bien faire les glaces
d’office. The books’ distinctive voices made me feel right there with their authors,
learning how to spin sugar into gold or to bake a hare with a pudding in his
belly, in the accomplished manner of Robert May.
The chiming of the château’s many antique clocks, each of which announced
the hour at slight variations, heightened my sense of being lost in time. So I
passed my days, oblivious to the actual passing of time—except when I was called,
with perfect punctuality, to lunch and dinner. My sense of disconnect had little
to do with clock time, and in the end, the loss of an hour to daylight saving time
bore little meaning. I felt instead as though I had gained time. I had traveled
through France and England and Italy and Germany, peeking into kitchens and
banquet halls, discovering new methods and new equipment. I mentally savored
dishes at court and in the countryside. Then I was lucky enough to taste the real
things at dinner: roast pintade, the first beautiful fava beans of spring, endive
braised in butter, perfect crème caramel.
What cookbooks offer is that true gift of time. Reading them, you can travel
backwards through recipes and descriptions that have been set down over the
centuries by passionate cookbook writers, agriculturalists, and chefs. Like the best
histories, these books offer up a taste of the past. Yet with cookbooks, the taste is
more nearly on your palate.g