Parisians who craved the grosses viandes and could afford to purchase them regularly, avoided haggling over small cuts by buying larger cuts. Unlike the governess who entered Butcher Drieux’s stall, they did not have to convince the butcher to sell them the best morsels of meat. Instead, wealthy clients contracted with butchers on a seasonal basis. These large households ordered sides of lamb and veal, hindquarters and forequarters of beef and mutton that were regularly supplied from Easter to the beginning of Lent. These large carcasses, which hung in the cellar or “chambres à chair,” away from the light and flying pests, could be dry-aged, smoked, or salted for later consumption. In well-staffed households, domestic servants skilled in carving and light butchering prepared pieces of meat for each meal.
These locations included royal residences in Paris, Versailles, Fontainebleau, Saint Germain-en-laye, and Meudon. In the contract, the two parties agreed to a list of prices for each food item. Red meat, catalogued under grosse viande, listed at 8 sous 3 deniers a pound and included mutton and veal. Other special meats such as tongue (raw, stuffed, pork, and beef), marrow, and sweetbreads demanded a greater price (1 to 2 livres a piece). The contract made the expectations of the client explicit: fresh meat in season; if any product is not satisfactory, suppliers would receive one-fourth the noted price. These suppliers agreed to meet the princess’s demands and could not ask for any price supplements due to extraordinary circumstances such as seasonal shortages, wartime losses, or epidemics. Clearly, this contract held Vollée to strict standards that did not allow room for any negotiations when faced with difficult circumstances.
Moreover, Vollée, eager for the favor of such an important client (and the prestige it would confer), would be more likely to submit to these provisos. In contrast to notarized provisioning contracts, account books serve as a less formalized record of credit transactions from a range of clientele. Despite their frequent omissions and rudimentary accounting (no double entry, no running tallies, no itemized sales), these sources provide the best evidence of consumption patterns. These account books rarely include the addresses of the butcher’s clientele; however, the few that do suggest that most Parisians frequented their local butcher. Each page of the bound registers lists every client week by week with the biggest customers (usually noblemen) heading the column, followed by names of the head of households with lesser, nonnoble titles such as monsieur, madame, or marchand. Butchers noted the amount (in pounds) of meat regularly supplied to individuals or religious houses two to three times a week.
To be sure, not all transactions were noted in the butchers’ ledgers, as many merchants were apt to engage in forms of barter. Guides to household management advised stewards of wealthy and noble houses to cultivate good relations with their butcher for the maintenance of a well-run kitchen. According to Audiger, the author of La Maison reglée (1692), himself a maître d’hôtel for the grandes maisons of Paris, the head servant’s responsibility consisted of “being familiar with meat and to make an agreement with the butcher, to oblige him in doing this by giving him two deliveries of offal a week.” Such exchange in kind existed among other butchers who kept account of meat sold to anonymous artisans such as “the tailor,” “the washing woman,” and “the leather worker” without any payment due on the account.
Likewise, a large number of butchers in this sampling noted the names of fellow butchers and amounts of meat “loaned” to them to store, butcher, or eventually sell. These were usually sides of beef, but could also include basse boucherie. Such practices point to the division of labor in meat production, contributing to a wide distribution of meat throughout the capital. Indeed, the evidence of barter agreements suggests a lively trade never recorded in butchers’ account books. The number of nonnoble clients that filled the account books of butchers (including merchants, artisans, and men and women identified as “Bourgeois de Paris”) attests to the social diversity of meat eaters. Their weekly purchases, made 2 or 3 times a week of 3 to 5 pounds of meat on average, point to a regular consumption of a household staple.Not surprisingly, butchers increased their sales in the winter months, with the biggest amounts in late December and January, in time for Christmas feasting. A good example of this pattern of consumption resides in the weekly accounts of Master Butcher Gabriel Sagot who lived on rue au Maire in the parish of Saint Nicolas des Champs. According to his 1756–57 account book, we see a typical mix of titles, both noble and bourgeois, as well as merchants and artisans. Sagot begins the season with 23 clients in his book. The number steadily increases to 35 by the middle of the season and finishes strongly at 32. The average number is 31 clients a week. The amount of meat sold each week also grows steadily throughout the season from a low of 372 pounds in week 6 to a high of 1,064 pounds in week 32.
The average amount of meat sold is 700 pounds a week; the average amount per customer is 22.5 pounds per week. The data come from accounts of separate households and do not provide the number of people within each household. Hence, these figures may be offset by a moment of feasting when a single client would make a large purchase of 40–50 pounds of meat, presumably to feed his household and guests. Yet the data do suggest a certain regularity (about three to four visits a week) pointing to consistent demand among a wide range of urban dwellers.
bucYet social hierarchies existed (and were often perpetuated) within a butcher’s clientele by virtue of his or her business practices. For example, Widow Bouchère Lemoine, who operated an extensive business that supplied the château at Versailles, kept separate books, one for the “seigneurs” and another for “bourgeois.” Among the 52 accounts of noblemen and women that she carefully catalogued appear, “The Small Apartments of the King” with anywhere from 11 to 39 deliveries a month totaling 589 to 13,655 pounds of meat consumed monthly. The second book of over 100 bourgeois clients includes names of untitled men and women who lived in Versailles as well as royal musicians, royal wet nurses, the château’s kitchen staff, and low-ranking officers. For widow Lemoine, the social distinctions among clientele went beyond accounting to pricing where the king paid 10 sous a pound, the lesser nobles paid 9 sous, and the commoners 8 sous.
Her method of dividing her customers categorically further illustrates how hierarchies in the market for meat were inscribed in merchant practices. The consumption of goods as a means of social distinction relied upon a differentiation of offerings that were clearly distinguishable to the public. Meat as a social marker could not exist without a wide selection of edibles for interested shoppers with discriminating palates. The system of ranking the taste for particular meats developed alongside the taxonomy of cuts and organ meats (also known as offal). The classification of meat became more specialized and refined with the greater sophistication in French cuisine. Likewise, the regulation of meat increasingly differentiated between these various cuts for the benefit of Parisian shoppers.
By Sydney Watts in the book 'MEAT MATTERS' Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris, University of Rochester Press, U.S.A, 2006. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
0 Yorumlar