ISSUE 18, HISTORY, Part 4: Mayonnaise Arrives
Bertrand Latouche, the Man who Introduced America to Mayonnaise
Bertrand Latouche (1785-1831), the French chef who introduced mayonnaise to America
French cooks come to the United States in waves—in the wake of the French Revolution, during the Haitian Revolution, after Napoleon’s exile in St. Helena, after the failed Revolution of 1848, after the Revolt and Commune is quashed in 1871.
Bertrande and Joseph Latouche came to Philadelphia in 1816, the year after Napoleon’s final incarceration. Bertrand had been cook for General Louis-Nicolas d'Avout, Prince of Ecmuhl and Marshal of the Empire under Napoleon. Napoleon’s fall meant the Prince’s retirement and Bertrand’s discharge.
The brothers determined to seek their fortune in the United States, emigrating to Philadelphia. There they set up a “Charcuterie & Restaurateur” at 79 Front Street where they prepared “Warm and Cold Dinners, &c at the shortest notice, with the greatest punctuality. Their eating house posed an alternative vision of dining than that expressed in James Prosser’s Oyster Cellar, the city’s most popular eating house. To insure quality they secured the service of pastry chef and confectioner John Crouta until 1819. Crouta’s departure in May 1819 occasioned a decline in their business that forced a removal to New York City in November.
In Manhattan the Latouche brothers opened a pastry shop and ordinary at 1 Murray Street and Broadway. The location was superb—on the corner overlooking the green surrounding the Mayor’s House and city administration building erected in 1812. Their announcement of opening revealed n expansion of business from retail pastry to banquet ingredients—they would undertake “out Door Dinners, Desserts” and the cold pre-prepared dishes that lined the side tables of balls, fetes, and fairs. Latouche further alerted ship captains that he would prepare “Cold preserved meats” as sustenance for voyages—“Beef a ‘la mode, Turkeys, Italian and Head Cheese, Sausages in lard, &c.” They planned to have multiple revenue streams—catering, retail sails, dinners, and ship provisions. The partnership endured until autumn 1822 when Bertrand left for Boston; Joseph continued cooking in New York until at least January 1828 when he presided as chief cook over the four day existence of R. Pardessus’s “The Refectory” at Masonic Hall on Broadway, a fine dining establishment that aspired to gastronomic supremacy. Opened on January 1, The Refectory served French cuisine until January 4 when wrangles with the lease holder shuttered the establishment. Nothing further is heard of Joseph’s doings.
Bertrand removed to Boston in 1822, perhaps tempted to do so by the French counsel. While Frederic Rouillard continued French cuisine at Julien’s famous Restorator on Milk Street, that house was small, and the population of well heeled diners in Boston swelled. Latouche opened a “Pastry Shop and Restorateur” on the corner of Tremont and Court Streets on December 1. He announced he would construct pastry pyramids for display. Rouillard, spooked by the sudden appearance of a French rival, left the old Restorator and occupied the Stackpole House on the corner of Devonshire and Milk Streets. Both Latouche and Rouillard contended with the fad for flavored soda water, served at fountains opened in the city by Thomas Waite and H. Newton. In summer of 1823 Bertrand announced that he would supply private households with prepared dinners “cooked and served up in the best possible style.” Furthermore he had fitted at his house a specially decorated room to accommodate women diners. While two American hotels had prepared a women’s saloon before 1823, this is the first notice of a restaurant making such an accommodation—and making it available in summer when most hotels closed or scaled back service. Competition seethed. Rouillard hired Louis Charrier, a talented French cook whose work won a following among Boston’s young bachelors. In Spring of 1824, Latouche announced he was quitting the property and Treemont and Court.
He resurfaced in Philadelphia, scene of Latouche’s inaugural adventures in America. Securing a fashionable house at 142 Chestnut Street, Bertrand Latouche determined he would out-luxe every cook in the city. He printed a menu of the cold and hot dishes he would supply the public, as elaborate a bill of fare as survives from a place of public dining in 1820s Philadelphia. It is on this menu that mayonnaise appears in print for the first time in the American press.
The Bertrand brothers were trained as cooks under the republic, and emerged as trained professionals in 1802 and 1804. By this time the Spanish sauce made with egg yolk, oil, and acid known in its native Minorca as Aoli Bo had been embraced by French culinarians as a dressing for fowls and seafood. While the proper name for the sauce (Aoli, Bayonnaise, Mayonnaise?) was debated into the 1820s, mayonnaise was asserting its dominance in the years that Bertrand Latouche advertised that chicken dressed in mayonnaise was a regular offering at his shop and restaurant. He probably considered it a novelty, with hardly the staying power of his jellied boned turkey. Little did he know.
In June of 1831 Bertrand Latouche died in Philadelphia of pulmonary disease at the age of 46. During his fifteen year career in America he pursued success with restless energy, trying to develop event catering, restaurant dining, and ship provision simultaneously, offering charcuteries, pastries, confections, and savory dishes, cold or hot. He introduced novelty after novelty, trying to seize the distractible attention of the public. He lived and worked in the republic’s great cities, and with every new restaurant attempted to make the offerings more sumptuous, ample, and elegant. He knew all of the pain and travail of the culinary life, saw himself bested by another classic French cook in Boston. A consolation was his success in Philadelphia in the final years of his life. No establishment in the city could vie with his for excellence of food.
“B Latouche & Brother,” Philadelphia Gazette (December 30, 1816), . “John Crouta, Philadelphia Gazette (May 17, 1819), 1. “Bertrand Latouche,” Boston Intelligencer (July 5, 1823), 3. “To be Let,” Boston Daily Advertiser (May 19, 1824), 2. “Masonic Hall,” New-York Daily Advertiser (January 1 1828), 2. “Died,” Philadelphia Inquirer (June 24, 1831), 3.