Information about the author: 

Abstract:

A minor French writer of the 18^th century, A.G. Meusnier de Querlon (1702–1780), a polymath, journalist, and prose writer, is now best known as the author of the libertine novel “The Portress of the Carmelite Convent” (1745), which was reprinted many times. The article examines the reflection of “gastrological” (the word “gastronomy” had not yet existed at that time) issues in the work of Meusnier de Querlon. The focus is primarily on his short essay “Apology of the Moderns, or The Answer of a French Chef, the Author of ‘The Gifts of Comus’, to an English Pastry Chef” (1740). Meusnier de Querlon’s participation in the so-called “controversy of the gluttons” (la Querelle des bouffeurs) is quite paradoxical. At first, enthusiastically entering into the polemics of the adherents of the “new” cuisine with the apologists of the “old”, he quickly loses interest in it and turns from “gastrology” itself to the general aesthetic “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” (which gradually died down by the middle of the 18th century, but still attracted the attention of writers, including Montesquieu). The erudite and rhetorical aspects of the “Apology of the Moderns” dominate over the solution of any ideological or even purely practical (identifying the optimal style of nutrition) problems. The works of Meusnier de Querlon, created in 1745–1756, are also marked by a desire to minimize the “gastrological” discourse and (in line with the general trend of the time) to question the productivity of the “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” itself.