A Feast for a King: Le Grand Couvert

Photo Janine Marsh — *Table fit for royals, photo taken at the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte © Janine Marsh*

A Feast for a King: Le Grand Couvert: The tradition of official royal dining during the reign of the Bourbon Kings during the 17^th and 18^th centuries was a sight to behold…

It’s Sunday night, 10pm. At Versailles in the eighteenth century, the party was only just getting started. The King, having formally invited his wife, the Queen, and their children to dinner, sits down at the smartly dressed table in his antechamber. The room is absolutely packed with people, yet he and his family are the only diners. Everyone else is there to watch in silence as the royal family feast.

During the reign of Louis XVI, this was a typical Sunday night. By this point in history, however, such a formal dining practice was already an antiquated custom and one that Marie Antoinette loathed, hardly eating and yawning widely in order to hurry the event along.

This royal public meal was called Le Grand Couvert and was an occasion honoured throughout the Ancien Régime. The three royal Louis either celebrated or barely tolerated it (Louis XV detested it and preferred intimate dinners with his mistresses). Its biggest proponent was Louis XIV, the Sun King, whose gargantuan appetite preceded him and was said, after his death, to have had a stomach and intestines twice the size of a regular man. I am just speculating here, but it could be because Louis XIV dined au Grand Couvert every single night.

The ritual demonstrated the King’s power – his enormous capacity for food was understood as “healthy”, representing the nation’s own wellbeing. Before him, served on golden platters, stretched the bounty of France. All for just one family.

Each night, a host of servants were responsible for the smooth operation of the occasion. This team was known as the Bouche du Roi (the King’s Mouth) – a department within the Maison du Roi, the royal household of up to 2,000 servants – which itself was divided into seven subsections including bakers and fruits (yes, fruit had its own group!), and service was a well-oiled machine. The meal was served in choreographed waves in what is known as service a la française, a buffet-style meal delivered at staggered intervals.

Louis XIV's vegetable garden at Versailles — *Louis XIV’s 23-acre vegetable garden next to the palace of Versailles, where fruit, vegetables and salads were grown for the royal table © Janine Marsh*

Louis XIV’s 23-acre vegetable garden next to the palace of Versailles, where fruit, vegetables and salads were grown for the royal table. It was feted for its innovation and head gardener Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie was able to produce exotic fruits such as bananas, as well as out of season bounty like asparagus in December and strawberries in March. It cost a fortune to create and maintain and it was Louis’ pride and joy.

Up to eight dishes were served at once. There were hors d’oeuvres and at least four soups, followed by roasted meat and salads, then desserts and pastries, and always gracing the table were towers of hard-boiled eggs, on which the still-peckish King would snack as he went to bed. Each course was simply added to the already groaning table, plates only being cleared once the dish had been devoured. The procession of courses had to travel a great distance from the enormous kitchens to the dining room, so goldsmiths were tasked with creating innovative tableware to keep the food warm. Unfortunately for the royal family, the food was usually cold on arrival, but this could have also been due to the King’s paranoia.

Louis XIV was terrified of being poisoned. Despite the dishes having an armed guard as they were marched through the palace, Versailles employed food tasters. The King’s food was sampled by at least two people before reaching the royal mouth, and allegedly, this is why the famous leek and potato soup, vichyssoise, is to this day served cold. According to legend, the fashionably new soup (created to promote consumption of the peculiar and foreign potato) required such thorough tasting before it was deemed adequate for the royal stomach that it was at last served stone cold.

Vaux le Vimcomte cellar — *The old way of storing fruit in a cellar*, *photo taken at the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte © Janine Marsh*

Not only that, but amongst the endless serving dishes and fancy crockery, there was not a single glass from which to drink. Provided on request, a drink required an entire ceremony. The royal Cupbearer would first shout, “A drink for the King!” and, accompanied by an armed guard, would busy himself at the sideboard where the King’s glass stood waiting – covered, naturally, should a poisoner take a chance. Into it he would decant wine and water, and it would be finally presented to the King at least seven minutes later due to the time taken for the Head of the Wine Chamber and the Cupbearer to taste it. The King had to quaff the wine in one before returning the empty glass to the Cupbearer who immediately covered it again, and the whole ceremony was repeated every time the royal was thirsty. Imagine having a tickle in your throat.

Photo Wikimedia — *Champagne was ‘invented’ by Dom Pérignon during the reign of Louis XIV and became a hit with the royals and aristocracy © Johann Wilhelm Preyer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

But we have merely scratched the surface of the mountain of food Louis XIV consumed. His dining habits were famously described by his sister-in-law Princess Palatine: “I have often seen the King eating four full plates of soup, a whole pheasant, a partridge, a big dish of salad, two slices of ham, mutton with jus and garlic, a plate of pastries and then fruit and hard-boiled eggs.” To cater to such an appetite, and to feed 3,000 to 10,000 courtiers a day, the kitchen employed 500 members of staff. In 2009, Dom Pérignon took on the challenge of hosting a typical dinner served to Louis XIV, inviting forty guests, and the event took a whole year to plan and execute. And yet, Louis’ kitchen staff achieved this and more every night.

Of course, even Louis couldn’t eat everything. And two generations later, Marie Antoinette ate nothing. The leftovers were given to the court, the first being ranking officers. Once they’d demolished their share, the food moved down the pecking order until the last remaining food was sold to merchants who set up stalls outside the castle. In their final guise, the King’s leftovers were sold with heavily spiced sauces, possibly masking or adding flavour, as in this era, French cuisine was notoriously bland.

A ceremony so distinguished by gratuitous excess and stifling etiquette was not to last much longer, yet Le Grand Couvert influenced courtly dining throughout Europe, as it was a privilege to see your royal family chow down on twenty to thirty courses. Monarchs’ lives, after all, were not their own – King Louis was the symbol of France, and a happy, well-fed King meant a happy and well-fed nation, the epitome of blissful ignorance in the face of reality.

Ally Mitchell is a blogger and freelance writer, specialising in food and recipes. She lives in Toulouse and writes at: NigellaEatsEverything.