Gourmet or Gourmand?

by DONALD MOFFAT

JUST when gourmand and gourmet became synonymous respectively with glutton and epicure it is hard to say, but there is no question that these false meanings are today pretty thoroughly imbedded in the English language, and even, according to certain evidence, in the French as well. Forty years ago — a moment in gastronomic history—the sound of the bastard word gourmet set up a wave of shuddering that registered on sensitive ears like an earthquake on a seismograph, annoying the judicious the way contact as a verb and drapes as a noun do today. Whether it is ever possible to head off a word, once it has started down the road to hell, and shoo it back on its course, is doubtful. The least one can do, however, is to point to the truth and hope for the best.

Gourmand is old, gourmet is new, in any sense. According to Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, gourmand is of Scandinavian origin, whence it passed into French and English. In England, home of Thackeray’s gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy, it has always been synonymous with gluttony (“To that great gormond, fat Apicius” — Ben Johnson), as also in Ireland, where gioraman meant a man of good appetite; while in France, as Maurice des Ombiaux remarks in his L’Art de Manger (1928), its epicurean sense was already well established by the thirteenth century. There the definition of gourmand is as clear as its derivation. Till the middle of the nineteenth century it never meant anything but a connoisseur of food, an amateur or dilettante of the art of the table — dilettante meaning, of course, not an elegant trifler but a lover of the fine arts: another good word gone off the rails.

Gourmet came along much later, and its origin is much less certain. According to Skeat, it has the same root as the English word groom, “a servant, lad” — which in England is now of course confined to one who tends horses. In its brief history as part of the French language it has always had to do with wine, passing through various forms such as gromet, grummet, groumet (Spanish grumete, a ship’s boy), before settling down to its present spelling. Always, however, it retained its connotation of serving-lad, and not till the sixteenth century did it assume its special application of wine merchant’s apprentice — a sort of bottle fetcher and washer, a very humble link in the glorious oenological chain.

In picking up a lance in this dubious battle, I am merely one of a number who have tried to restore the two words to proper usage. The editor of Le Carnet d’Epicure, a French culinary magazine published in London between 1911 and 1914 under the patronage of the great Escoffier, saw red whenever he came across gourmet in print — “ce mot bâtard, ce mot prétentieux.” Maurice des Ombiaux devotes an entire chapter to the heresy. Both quote Littré and the Académie française with obvious satisfaction, pointing out that they agree in defining gourmand as “celui qui aime la bonne chère,”and gourmet as “celui qui se connait en vins, qui sait les goûter.”

They scornfully emphasize the fact that gourmet is so young a word that it not only hasn’t had time to work up a synonym, but hasn’t even a feminine form, while the good old gourmand has its gastronome and its feminine gourmande. (It is not hard to understand, by the way, why gastronomy, with its connotation of gastric juices busily working away in the stomach, of ulcers, bellyache, and bicarb, has never become a popular word in English.) Gourmette? There is no such word, except in its special form which means the curb chain of a horse’s bit — a fine thing to call one of those “pretty gourmandes who add so immeasurably to the pleasure of dining,” as M. des Ombiaux remarks. (I was sorry to see so distinguished a gourmand as Crosby Gaige fall into the error of using gourmette in one of his sensible articles in the Atlantic.)

So — let us have no more nonsense: gourmand means a connoisseur of food, gourmet a connoisseur of wine. In France, where dining without wine is like washing without water, la gourmandise or la gastronomic embraces the whole art of dining, including appreciation of food and wine — and still unborn is la gourmetise or la gourmeterie or any such illegitimate substantive.

When, after the French Revolution, the great French prophets of gourmandise like Grimod de la Reynière and Brillat-Savarin and their nineteenth-century disciples brought literature to the service of the table, one of their principal aims was to educate the people, suddenly democratized, to an appreciation of the arts of cooking and dining, formerly a monopoly of the upper classes. They hoped to raise the standards of French cookery, to re-establish its reputation on the democratic level. in elucidating their thesis they both (whatever their practice at table may have been) continually stressed the fact that gourmandise is utterly opposed to excess, and insisted that it requires as fine a training in the diner as in the cook who prepares his dinner.

“La gourmandise,” declares BrillatSavarin, in one of his much-quoted aphorisms, “means an impassioned, reasoned, and habitual preference for food which flatters the taste. Morally, it implies the fear of God, who ordains that man must eat to live, by inviting him to do so by the gilt of appetite, encouraging him by flavor, and rewarding him by pleasure.”And “the title of gourmand,” wrote Grimod, “demands an exquisite judgment, a profound knowledge of every branch of the culinary art, a sensuous and delicate palate cultivated by long experience, and a thousand other qualities that are very difficult to combine.”

Reading them, I confess to wondering whether they don’t protest too much. Is it possible that they, and not the great cooks and gourmands, were the true inventors of gastronomy? Perish the thought.

Yet it is interesting to note that neither of them ever used the word gourmet. It never occurred to them. They both had respect for the language, and gourmet was only just beginning its pretentious career. Des Ombiaux, tracing its history from Revolutionary days, makes clear how it worked its way insidiously into popular usage: “The word first began to take on its improper sense in the last decade of the eighteenth century, a time when certain noble lords, not to mention the nouveaux riches (who are always with us), were quite ignorant of true gastronomy. Yet they longed to impress the poets, artists, and philosophers whom they invited to their ostentatious dinners and so, to avoid social blunders, they sought expert advice in the choice of the wines they served. These experts, quite naturally, were the sommeliers or wine stewards; in other words, the gourmets” — who had apparently come up out of the cellar by then. “The custom grew till finally gourmet picked up its meaning of a man capable of appreciating good wine.

“But it was not till well on in the nineteenth century that this word was applied to the gastronome, or connoisseur of the table. Then the stupid, pretentious, and ill-mannered new rich of the Second Empire (18511870) began to feel squeamish over the shameful word gourmand, and soon it was replaced, among these ridiculous snobs, by gourmet. It is easy to understand Flaubert’s contempt for such people. They loved to speak a windy pompous language, dreamed of reviving the courtly manners of Marie Antoinette’s day, and aped the fashions of that period while superimposing their own bad taste and affected speech. A cat no longer was a cat. Banished from conversation was the simple word, welcomed the equivocation — and God knows they were master of the art of equivocation! The honest word gourmand was unbearable to their hypocrisy; and so they picked up and used the handiest substitute.

“Let us not fear gourmand. It has only one meaning. La gourmandise is and always has been celebrated as a virtue among the kind of sensitive people who despise gluttony as they do drunkenness. Let us forget gourmet in relation to everything concerned with la bonne chère, and leave it to its proper function as designating a connoisseur of wine. The Academy and Littré join in showing us the way.”

Et voilà — there you are! I don’t expect my remarks to have any effect whatever, except to cleanse my reformer’s conscience. So shines a good deed on a naughty word.