Charles Perrault at the table

At the table of a wealthy Parisian bourgeois under Louis XIV, the meal unfolds in successive services where all dishes of a given service cover the table at once: first the potages, then the entrées and the grand roast, next the entremets, and finally the dessert with fruits, dried preserves, and spiced wines. One does not eat in the order we know: one picks according to one's place and rank. This is the era when French cuisine, under the pen of La Varenne, abandons the heavy spicery of the Middle Ages for butter, fine herbs, and sugar that has become a mark of distinction.

Cinnamon, ginger, orange blossom water, and refined sugar perfume both the wines and the pastries of this pivotal era, when sugar ceased to be an apothecary's remedy and became a table luxury. It is the gourmet thread linking the princess's cake, the evening hypocras, and the street wafers.