On Carl Friedrich von Rumohr

Cultural History, Cooking, and the Spirit of the Goethean Age

Carl Friedrich Freiherr [i.e. Baron] of Rumohr lived from 1785 to 1843 in Saxony, Prussia, Bavaria, Holstein, and Italy. The Sattelzeit (1750-1850), the Goethean Age (1770-1830): the American colonies won their liberty from the English crown, the French ignited, quo Hegel, the inextinguishable fire that is the conciousness of freedom—Atlantic Revolutions; Napoleon rose and fell, Stendhal in his armies, the princes of Europe rose and fell, Schlegel writing their manifestos; Goethe the Sage, quo Eliot, in Weimar, Byron dying for Greek liberty; modernity found in romantic cladding—charging forward, looking backward; Humboldt established the modern university, classical philology—all paths still lead to Rome—, theology, archeology, cartography at the forefront, his brother Alexander travelled the world, Cosmos—an age voracious for knowledge, an age voracious for World. In the meantime, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr—not unaffected by the course of events—died in Dresden in the midst of his breakfast, died with the “bud of the day”, as Novalis called breakfast, died at the end of that age, died in a different world than he had been born into.

Rumohr was a strange man—but also one remarkably emblematic of his age, and this little text is written with the intention of praising this great, albeit little-known, specimen. He was a dilettant, an amateur, as Goethe had admired them: a lover of things; never the expert, but all the more passionate. Rumohr was the scion of the Holsteinian Uradel, i.e. of the oldest and best families of Northern Germany. He was born wealthy, lived independently, educated himself, a scholar out of passion, a collector of art, a patron of artists in Germany and Italy, a friend to many remarkable men, un homme du monde, a fortunate and happy and well-meaning egoist in Stendhal’s sense of the term—but he was not free of melancholy, a romantic, a man full of contradictions: accused by bourgeois friends of aristocratic arrogance, and by aristocratic friends of a democratic disposition. As an author of works on art history, cultural history, and cooking, he came to remarkably modern sociological insights; as a man of an older world, he sought redemption and eternal life. Italy—in this also he is the epitome of the Sattelzeit German—was his paradise on earth; Florence and Siena he saw in the romanticized light of the paintings of Giotto and Duccio. Rome he almost saw as the Veduta of Piranesi showed it and as Goethe had still seen it: the remnants of antiquity adorned by romantic overgrowth, cowherds in the Forum Romanum. “And so sun and moon, just as the spirit of man, show themselves here very differently than in other places, here where their gaze is faced with tremendous but well-shaped mass” (Goethe). But Rumohr had come too late; the French, with their armies, had come to Rome before, and they cleared off the romantic rubble. The “tremendous but well-shaped mass” of the Roman ruins had been cleared of overgrowth, cleaned, registered, fenced in, turned into “sights”, into matters of tourism and no longer of the actual day-to-day life and mystique of the eternal city. The many Tiepoloian characters that had dwelt in the Roman ruins: beggars, thiefs, sages, moonshiners, whores, shady figures an adventurous Roman youth would visit at night, climbing about the millenia-old opus caementitium, itself being a lost art—were thrown out. The Forum was cleared of shepherds, the idyll was destroyed, the Grand-Tourists, the humanists—and soon: the masses—now dwelt in the craters of antiquity. Rumohr, the humanist, came too late for the “old Rome”; he would have loved it: the sun and moon above the ruins would have been the stars of Hellas for him, the shepherds Homeric, Vergilian. The men who now came to Rome, around 1800, were well-educated and wealthy. Some came because of, others in spite of the French fences. They took their time—some stayed only for weeks, others for years, some for the rest of their lives. Many who left home, who left the north, to see the marbles in the Vatican, would end up buried in the desired soil, close to the pyramid of Cestius. There was fortune in the air of the city, the type of fortune that can give rise to melancholy. Rome *made* its people—and even if they returned, to Weimar, in Goethe’s case, to Dresden, in Rumohr’s, they would be different men, new men, strangers now at home. Rumohr loved Rome, he ate at the cook Palmaroli’s, who for his guests was the King of Fettucine, he praised the “rurality” of Italian cooking, moving from one Trattoria to the next, seeking the “primordial meal”. As a studied art historian Rumohr was, like all in his generation, a disciple of the great Winckelmann—but he tried, unlike many others, to free himself from the weight of Winckelmannian pronouncements, tried to find new insights, placing originality above strict classical form. But he remained true to Winckelmann in perhaps the most essential aspects: always Rome, always the morbid charm of the south, always this vague catholicity, a hint of death in all the forceful expressions of life. While Winckelmann had, piously working for Roman cardinals and applauded by the Pope, brought naked and pagan torsos to the halls of the Vatican—Rumohr, faithfully in the service of the calvinistic Prussian king, sent to Berlin the pure marble bodies of boys, of nymphs, of old gods.

Despite his popularity with educated men, Rumohr had a special “social” talent for making himself unpopular with others. A Baltic baron noted in his diary: “Visited Tieck and met there the Baron von Rumohr, the art expert, a man who lectured me about his wisdom very dryly and unbearably”. Heinrich Laube, in his Heine-pastiche—and thus polemic—travel novellas, tried to make a mockery of Rumohr: “He was entirely preocuppied by a fricassee, a large, corpulent man with dirty, travel-worn clothing, who ate quite ostentatiously. His face was hanging into the plate of strong, sauceless meat, and had no noble expression but seemed to show at best a cultivated cleverness and a lively Gourmanderie. He spoke as if his tongue was constantly mashing sweet confitures”. Furthermore, in his “History of German Literature”, Laube wrote that Rumohr, in his “The Spirit of the Art of Cooking”, had “given in his confusion to the lowest pair of sense, to smell and taste, aesthetic laws of high rank”. Karoline Schelling-Schlegel wrote that “it is terrible to hear a man like Rumohr talk about lobster with as much passion as a priest talks about Christ”. We, dear reader, have to assume that Laube—a forgettable figure, frankly—had an ill stomach, and that Karoline couldn’t cook. Now—Rumohr didn’t, from what we know, care much about these “critiques” by people who, to him, were relative strangers. If at all, only the opinions of his friends mattered to him. Bettina von Arnim, who would take long walks with Rumohr through the English Garden in Munich, considered him “one of the finest souls” and lauded his talents as a draughtsman, sending Rumohr’s drawings to Goethe, who is said to have admired them. A special friendship Rumohr had with the great poet August von Platen. Platen, though like Rumohr a nobleman, had arrived in Italy penniless, and was saved by Rumohr—who invited him to his house in Siena, where they would, so later letters tell us, stargaze together—the Italian sky!—and play cards for nights on end while talking about poetry.

Rumohr was a diligent and productive man. His written oeuvre comprises a 4-volume novel, two collections of novellas, travelogues, many volumes on the history of Greek and Roman art—titled “Italian Investigations”—, a book on etiquette, and several translations from Greek, Latin, and Italian. These works are all, I’m afraid to say, basically forgotten, merely a part of the bibliography of German letters. Though some of his novellas or art historical essays were still being collected and published in the late 19th century, the chief reason Rumohr today is more than just a footnote, is his cookbook, “The Spirit of the Art of Cooking”—among friends of literature and gourmands alike, this work has made Rumohr immortal. An early triumph, we could say, of “popular non-fiction”. Good kings were good cooks, the sage prefers a good meal to a won battle—but a nobleman like Rumohr hid the fact that he wrote a “cookbook” behind the name of his own personal chef, and so initially the book was published under the name of Josef König. But Rumohr was too proud of his achievement—and so quickly made it public that it was actually him who wrote it. And he had good reason to be proud—his cookbook was a remarkable achievement: solid, honest, passionate, with a considerable insight into cooking technique; and most importantly: a cookbook that, unlike many in Rumohr’s time, could actually be used to cook, including proper and detailed instructions. In fact, I would argue, cooking according to Rumohr’s book would still garner praise today. Besides the obvious parts, it also included a “sociology of domestic life”, passages on hygiene, a theory of nutrition, and chapters on the cultural history of cooking—a grand literary-scholarly tract appended to a cookbook.

The core of Rumohr’s “philosophy of cooking” was what he simply called “honesty”; to him, “honest cooking”—situated as a “practice” between the Hausmannskost (“home cooking”, “traditional fare”) and the gourmanderie of the “haute cuisine”—was a moral matter, a matter of reason. He did not like being called a “demanding gourmand”, he considered himself a “reasonable table guest”. His enemies were “wasteful gluttony” and “gluttonous wastefulness”—but more than those: he was against what nowadays we may call “fusion cuisine”—the mixing of different styles of cooking—, a notion he would radicalize to the point where he was against “mixing” in general. We may say this is where he went too far—he hated French cooking, Paris was to him the “seat of foolish desires”; from the “decadence” of French cooking, he concluded the degeneracy of all things French. He hated their “alchemical” approach to cooking. Honest cooking, as he called it, followed the principle of the unmixed, the pure, of the ability to taste what one eats. He was against the rise of chives, against the traditionally French overuse of onions, the Italian dependence on garlic, against anything that would rob an ingredient of its inherent flavour. This idea, however, takes us not to Europe—not to France (as should be obvious by now) with its soups and casseroles, not to England with its stews, not to Germany with its Eintöpfe and Aufläufe, not to Italy with its pasta—it takes us, unbeknownst to Rumohr, to Japan: the philosophy of sushi—to be able to taste seperately every single ingredient; a cooking that strives not for a “syncretic whole”, as we may call it, but for the purity of the particular, for the glory of the individual taste, every individual bite offering new and significant flavour. Central to this approach—purity!—is the quality of the ingredients, as nothing about their taste can be masked (by spices, by a great deal of herbs, or by sauces). We may say: to enjoy the beauty of a simple potato (for example) simply in its potatoness (which is, in a good potato, really a complexity of flavour)—this is what Rumohr advocates for. Does a good piece of beef need to be drowned in butter-sauces and a myriad of seasonings, does it need to be robbed of its beefness? And despite his love for all things Roman, Rumohr considered the beginning of the “decadence of cooking” to come from the cookbook of Coelius Apicius, the cook of the great general Lucullus: “He teaches to bring together the sweet and the bitter, the pure and the impure”. Rumohr died in 1843; when Carus, the famous painter and doctor, dissected Rumohr’s head—as Rumohr had wished for—he found certain “anomalies” in the brain.

Despite its popular success at the time, and the fact that the book is still well-regarded among those “in the know” today, it cannot be said that Rumohr was able to effect the change he sought, to “purify” cooking. As the author of this little piece, written out of a loving curiosity for the man, I must say that Rumohr’s failure in this domain does not sadden me too much—I do not agree with him “in the details”; but nontheless, it goes without saying that the tendencies of his age—the Sattelzeit—are exemplified in Rumohr very well: universality (to study all things), the amateurish (the rise of the “hobby”, of leisurely scholarship for the sake of love), the passion for the peculiar, etc. But perhaps one thing would speak for a little success: Rumohr did not notice the “fraternal” and very significant voice from no other place than his hated France: in 1823, just a few years after Rumohr's book, the great Brillat-Savarin (who, so far as I know, was aware of Rumohr) published his “Physiology of Taste”—a book that came to conclusions similar to Rumohr’s, but of course much less radical, and that initiated the rise of “bourgeois cooking” in France: of a cooking that “nourished” the great French writers and eaters from Balzac to Flaubert. Balzac eating his oysters and meats without much “ornamentation”, we may say, appears quite—Rumohrian.