It’s the day after Thanksgiving, the tryptophan has worn off, and there are towers of Tupperware crammed with turkey, stuffing and potatoes in your fridge.
If you depend on your microwave, you would possibly simply resign yourself to eating the identical meal, over and all over again, until the leftovers run out.
But you don’t need to get stuck in a cycle of nuke and repeat. This Thanksgiving, take inspiration from the French, who saw leftovers as an outlet for creativity.
My research on the history of French home cooking reveals how restyling dinner scraps first became fashionable greater than a century ago.
Reheating ‘with art and discernment’
In Nineteenth-century France, leftovers were a lifestyle for the lower classes.
In the countryside, the broth from the evening beef stew would develop into the idea of breakfast the following morning. In cities, street hawkers generally known as “harlequins” purchased dinner scraps from restaurants and wealthy households to resell them to the poor. For these Frenchmen and -women, repurposing previous meals wasn’t about style but survival. Because of their association with poverty, leftovers were stigmatized up until the late Nineteenth century.
But by the turn of the twentieth century, it had develop into hip to whip something up with the stays from last night’s meal.
In 1892, French chef Alfred Suzanne wrote that “there are dishes which, when reheated with art and discernment, transformed with taste and presented in an appetizing manner… may be nearly as good as, if not higher than, the primary time they’re served.” In the preface to his encyclopedic cookbook, “150 Ways to Accommodate Leftovers,” the previous chef to British royalty declared that the “deep-seated prejudice that many individuals have” against leftovers was “an error.”
Suzanne’s colleagues and culinary connoisseurs concurred. French food critic Fulbert-Dumonteil praised the chef for explaining “all of the ingenious and charming ways to revive mutilated bits and pieces from epic feasts” and switch “cumbersome stays” into something that delights the palate.
Marketing to the masses
Why did “leftovers” make the leap from insipid plates peddled by “arlequins” to inspired dishes perfected by culinary artists?
In 1882, France’s recent republican government passed laws mandating education for all children ages 6 to 13. Many public schoolchildren got here from the lower and lower-middle classes, and educators designed home economics lessons with this in mind. Girls learned the way to preserve and prepare their leftovers safely, nutritiously and economically. They were also taught that their talent for accommodating leftovers was a mirrored image of their thrift and resourcefulness – the markers of middle-class French femininity.
As the share of literate females spiked in France, the publishing industry pounced on this potential market. The late Nineteenth century saw increasingly domestic manuals geared toward “ménagères” – wives and moms from the working and lower-middle classes. Many guides featured a chapter on fixing leftovers, while some, equivalent to “100 Ways to Accommodate Leftovers” and “The Art of Accommodating Leftovers, Dedicated to Those of Meager Means,” made revamping stays their central focus.
France’s top chefs take part
In the Eighteen Nineties top chefs also began to contribute recipes to domestic cooking magazines. This genre of culinary literature proliferated within the late Nineteenth century during a period of rapid growth for the favored press.
Royal Academy of Arts
Chefs desired to appeal to a large audience, and their contributions ranged from columns on economical cooking to instructions for assembling “showpieces,” that are elaborate edifices fabricated from confections. Many of those journals designated a special section for accommodating leftovers, with titles like “Utilizing Leftovers” and “Delicious Ways to Accommodate the Scraps.”
The repetitive nomenclature belies the range of the recipes printed under these rubrics. Some were easy and modest and reflected the unique rationale for leftovers, which was economical.
For example, a July 1907 recipe for “Lisette’s Cake” within the magazine Family Cooking offered a sweet solution for yesterday’s bread. The cook needed only to soak the loaf in sweetened milk, strain the mixture through a high-quality sieve, add two eggs and bake within the oven for 20 minutes.
But some recipes got complicated and dear. Family Cooking also published a leftovers recipe for “Veal à la Russe,” which required, along with veal chops, 1 / 4 pound of butter, anchovies, tomato coulis, jus and truffles for garnish. The Cordon Bleu Magazine suggested repurposing leftover pheasant in a way that required an hour of boiling in high-quality demi-glace and two hours of cooling on ice, before being pureed by hand, seasoned, molded and fried.
Such recipes would hardly qualify as time- or cost-saving. But practicality wasn’t the one point anymore. Scholars have shown how women on the turn of the century read popular and prescriptive literature as a “type of escapism” that encouraged them to “fantasize” about what modern domestic life may very well be.
By turning leftovers into an art form, early home cooking magazines inspired a contemporary generation of home cooks to be creative and think critically about cooking. And they left their legacy to us and our leftovers.
So this 12 months, as a substitute of scraping together one other tiresome turkey sandwich, try a turkey recipe adapted from Alfred Suzanne’s “150 Ways to Accommodate Leftovers.”
Samantha Presnal, Author provided
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