Start Date
28-5-2024 11:15 AM
End Date
28-5-2024 11:30 AM
Description
In April 2023, an interview was conducted with the Provençal chef, Gui Gedda, to interpret his life story and determine his contribution to Provençal cuisine. During the course of the interview, Gedda recounted a compelling story about a meeting which took place between his grandmother and Jean-Baptiste Reboul, chef and author of La Cuisinière Provençale (1897), a book that is regarded as the bible of Provençal cuisine. According to Gedda, the recipes within the book are far from a fair representation of Provençal cooking. Gedda claims that Reboul himself had in fact confessed to his grandmother that he did not write the book. This story may highlight a discrepancy in the origins of the recipes and possibly even the authorship of the seminal cookbook. The research used a combination of Wheaton’s framework, close reading, and hermeneutics, to investigate three books on Provençal cooking written in the second half of the nineteenth century: La Cuisinière Provençale (1897); Manuel Complet de la Cuisinière Provençale (1886); and Manuel de la Cuisinière Provençale (1858). The key findings were compared with the data gathered in Gedda’s interview and the research identified significant links between La Cuisinière Provençale and Manuel de la Cuisinière Provençale, published almost forty years prior by a different publisher but at the same address. The findings support the validity of questioning Reboul's authorship of La Cuisinière Provençale, thus reinforcing Gedda’s argument.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/effz-5v86
Gui Gedda: Memories of a Great Provençal Chef – An Investigation into the Origins of Reboul’s La Cuisinière Provençale
In April 2023, an interview was conducted with the Provençal chef, Gui Gedda, to interpret his life story and determine his contribution to Provençal cuisine. During the course of the interview, Gedda recounted a compelling story about a meeting which took place between his grandmother and Jean-Baptiste Reboul, chef and author of La Cuisinière Provençale (1897), a book that is regarded as the bible of Provençal cuisine. According to Gedda, the recipes within the book are far from a fair representation of Provençal cooking. Gedda claims that Reboul himself had in fact confessed to his grandmother that he did not write the book. This story may highlight a discrepancy in the origins of the recipes and possibly even the authorship of the seminal cookbook. The research used a combination of Wheaton’s framework, close reading, and hermeneutics, to investigate three books on Provençal cooking written in the second half of the nineteenth century: La Cuisinière Provençale (1897); Manuel Complet de la Cuisinière Provençale (1886); and Manuel de la Cuisinière Provençale (1858). The key findings were compared with the data gathered in Gedda’s interview and the research identified significant links between La Cuisinière Provençale and Manuel de la Cuisinière Provençale, published almost forty years prior by a different publisher but at the same address. The findings support the validity of questioning Reboul's authorship of La Cuisinière Provençale, thus reinforcing Gedda’s argument.