Louis XV. was a great gourmet; and his reign saw many developments in the culinary art. The mayonnaise (originally _mahonnaise_) is ascribed to the duc de Richelieu. Such dishes as "_potage à la Xavier_," "_cailles à la Mirepoix_," "_chartreuses à la Mauconseil_," "_poulets à la Villeroy_," "_potage à la Condé_," "_gigot à la Mailly_," owe their titles to celebrities of the day, and the Pompadour gave her name to various others. The Jesuits Brunoy and Bougeant, who wrote a preface to a contemporary treatise on cookery (1739), described the modern art as "more simple, more appropriate, and more cunning, than that of old days," giving the ingredients the same union as painters give to colours, and harmonizing all the tastes. The very phrase "_cordon bleu_" (strictly applied only to a woman cook) arose from an enthusiastic recognition of female merit by the king himself. Madame du Barry, piqued at his opinion that only a man could cook to perfection, had a dinner prepared for him by a _cuisinière_ with such success that the delighted monarch demanded that the artist should be named, in order that so precious a _cuisinier_ might be engaged for the royal household. "_Allons donc, la France!_" retorted the ex-grisette, "have I caught you at last? It is no _cuisinier_ at all, but a _cuisinière_, and I demand a recompense for her worthy both of her and of your majesty. Your royal bounty has made my negro, Zamore, governor of Luciennes, and I cannot accept less than a _cordon bleu_" (the Royal Order of the _Saint Esprit_) "for my _cuisinière_."
The French Revolution was temporarily a blow to Parisian cookery, as to everything else of the _ancien régime_. "Not a single turbot in the market," was the lament of Grimod de la Reynière, the great gourmet, and author of the _Manuel des amphitryons_ (1808). But while it fell heavily on the class of noble amphitryons it had one remarkable effect on the art which was epoch-making. It is from that time that we notice the rise of the Parisian restaurants. To 1770 is ascribed the first of these, the _Champ d'oiseau_ in the rue des Poulies. In 1789 there were a hundred. In 1804 (when the _Almanach des gourmands_, the first sustained effort at investing gastronomy with the dignity of an art, was started) there were between 500 and 600. And in 1814, to such an extent had the restaurants attracted the culinary talent of Paris, that the allied monarchs, on arriving there, had to contract with the two brothers Véry for the supply of their table. Among the great gastronomic names of Napoleon's day was that of his chancellor Cambacérès, of whose dinners many stories are told. Robert (the eponym of the _sauce Robert_), Rechaud and Mérillion were at this period esteemed the Raphael, Michelangelo and Rubens of cookery; while A. Beauvilliers (author of _Art des cuisines_) and Carême (author of the _Maître d'hôtel français_, and chef at different times to the Tsar Alexander I., Talleyrand, George IV. and Baron Rothschild) were no less celebrated.[1] Perhaps the greatest name of all in the history of the literature of cookery is that of Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), the French judge and author of the _Physiologie du goût_ (1825), the classic of gastronomy.