Marcel Rouff

Based on Wikipedia: Marcel Rouff

In 2023, Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng released a film called The Taste of Things that swept through awards season, winning Best Director at Cannes and earning an Academy Award nomination. The movie tells the story of an obsessive gourmet and his equally obsessive cook, their relationship deepening over decades through the medium of exquisitely prepared food. What most viewers didn't realize was that they were watching an adaptation of a novel written exactly a century earlier by a Swiss pipe-smoker who died of throat cancer at fifty-seven, a man who helped invent the very concept of food tourism.

His name was Marcel Rouff.

A Publisher's Son Discovers Gastronomy

Marcel Gabriel Rouff was born on May 4, 1877, in Carouge, a suburb of Geneva that sits just across the Arve River from the old city. His father, Jules Rouff, was a well-known publisher, and the family moved to Paris when Marcel was still an infant. This detail matters: Rouff grew up steeped in books and publishing, surrounded by authors and manuscripts and the peculiar business of turning ideas into objects that people would buy.

He was clearly bright. After attending the Lycée Carnot—one of the prestigious Parisian secondary schools—he continued to the Sorbonne, where he earned a Docteur-ès-lettres. This degree, roughly equivalent to a modern PhD in literature, required original scholarly research and a formal thesis defense. Rouff wasn't just a dilettante scribbling about food; he was academically trained in the rigorous analysis of texts.

In 1911, he married Juliette Bloch-Tréfousse, a French woman. They had two children: Nicole in 1913 and Jean-Jacques in 1916—this last birth occurring in the middle of the First World War, with German armies not far from Paris. Rouff retained his Swiss citizenship throughout his life while also becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1930, a useful dual status that reflected his position straddling cultures.

The Friendship That Changed French Cuisine

Sometime in the early twentieth century, Rouff befriended a man who went by the pen name Curnonsky. Born Maurice Edmond Sailland, Curnonsky had invented his pseudonym as a kind of joke—during the Russo-Japanese War, when things Russian were fashionable, he combined the Latin word cur (meaning "why") with non ("not") and the Russian suffix -sky. The result, roughly translated, meant "why not be Russian?" It was the sort of playful wordplay that characterized both men.

French newspapers would later call them "twin brothers in literature in general and in gastronomy in particular." This wasn't just flattery. Curnonsky and Rouff genuinely seemed to share a brain when it came to food, and their collaboration would reshape how the French—and eventually the world—thought about eating.

Between 1921 and 1928, the two men produced an astonishing twenty-eight volumes of La France gastronomique: Guide des merveilles culinaires et des bonnes auberges françaises. The title translates to "Gastronomic France: Guide to the Culinary Marvels and the Good Inns of France." Twenty-eight volumes. Think about that for a moment. This wasn't a pamphlet or a slim guide—it was an exhaustive, region-by-region inventory of everything worth eating in France, including more than five thousand recipes and restaurant recommendations.

The Invention of Food Tourism

Before Curnonsky and Rouff, guidebooks certainly existed. The Michelin Guide had started in 1900, primarily as a way to encourage automobile travel (and thus tire purchases). But the Michelin Guide was about where to stop, not what to eat. It rated restaurants, but it didn't celebrate regional cuisines as worthy destinations in themselves.

What Curnonsky and Rouff did was different. As the historian Julia Csergo puts it, they "invented the 'gastronomic guide'" as a distinct literary form. Their work argued, implicitly and explicitly, that the specific dishes of specific regions were treasures worth traveling to experience. The cassoulet of Toulouse was different from the bouillabaisse of Marseille, and both were different from the coq au vin of Burgundy—and these differences mattered.

Jean-Robert Pitte, a French geographer and food historian, explained the significance: "Of all the tourist guides appearing since the nineteenth century, this was the first to be expressly devoted to good regional dishes, good wines, and good restaurants. The influence of this work was immense. Henceforth, right beside Parisian haute cuisine, there would be a place of honor for the ultimate in regional cooking. Foreigners and the French never forgot it and would make eating well one of the driving forces of tourism in France."

This might seem obvious today, when food tourism is a multi-billion-dollar industry and people fly across oceans to eat at specific restaurants. But someone had to argue for it first. Someone had to make the case that regional French cooking wasn't inferior to Parisian haute cuisine, that it was equally worthy of reverence and pilgrimage. Curnonsky and Rouff made that case, exhaustively, over twenty-eight volumes.

The Fictional Gourmet Who Became Immortal

While the gastronomic guides were collaborative, Rouff's most enduring work was his alone. La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet—"The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet"—was written before the First World War but not published until 1924. Rouff dedicated it to Curnonsky and to Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the great nineteenth-century French gastronome whose Physiology of Taste remains one of the foundational texts of food writing.

The novel tells the story of a fictional gourmet, Dodin-Bouffant, and his relationship with his cook, Eugénie. French newspapers at the time described it variously as "a charming gastronomic fantasy" and "a small masterpiece." More recently, the literary scholar Lawrence R. Schehr called it "a hybrid work that sits somewhere between fiction and cookbooks, menus, and Food TV."

The book defies easy categorization. It's a novel, yes, with characters and plot. But it's also deeply concerned with the philosophy and practice of eating well—with what it means to approach food as an art form worthy of a lifetime's devotion. Dodin-Bouffant isn't just a character who happens to like good food; he's an embodiment of gastronomy as a way of life, a quasi-religious practice requiring discipline, knowledge, and aesthetic sensitivity.

The novel's enduring popularity is remarkable. Between 1924 and 2010, it went through fifty French editions—an average of more than one new edition every two years across nearly a century. It was first translated into English in 1961 by someone identified only as "Claude" (a mystery in itself), published in London with a preface by the novelist Lawrence Durrell and later an introduction by the American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten.

From Page to Screen, Twice

In 1973, French television adapted Dodin-Bouffant, with the journalist and food writer Jean Ferniot handling the adaptation. But the novel's most significant second life came fifty years later.

Trần Anh Hùng's 2023 film The Taste of Things (released in France as La Passion de Dodin-Bouffant) brought Rouff's creation to international audiences who had never heard of the original book. Starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, the film is essentially a love story told through food—long sequences of cooking, of selecting ingredients, of the choreographed dance between cook and gourmet. It won Best Director at Cannes, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film, and introduced Dodin-Bouffant to millions.

The film's success raises an interesting question about literary immortality. Rouff wrote dozens of works: novels, plays, poetry, biographies, histories. He produced the twenty-eight-volume gastronomic guide with Curnonsky. He contributed to newspapers and magazines. Yet when he died in 1936, his obituary in Le Petit Journal praised him as "one of the princes of gastronomy"—not as a novelist or historian, but as a food writer.

And nearly a century later, it's the food that endures. Specifically, it's this one novel about a fictional gourmet that keeps getting rediscovered, reread, and now reimagined on screen.

The Socialist Gastronome

Here's something that might surprise anyone who imagines gastronomy as an inherently bourgeois pursuit: Marcel Rouff had socialist leanings. This wasn't a secret or a private matter—it showed up clearly in his writings on social history.

He was influenced by Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader who helped found the French Socialist Party and opposed France's entry into World War I (and was assassinated for his pacifism in 1914). Rouff contributed to Jaurès's Histoire socialiste, a massive multi-volume socialist history of France, which his own father Jules published.

This political dimension adds complexity to Rouff's gastronomic work. The celebration of regional cuisines wasn't just about pleasure—it was also about valuing the traditions and labor of ordinary people across France, the farmers and cooks and innkeepers who preserved local food traditions. Against the centralization of Parisian haute cuisine, which was the domain of wealthy elites, Curnonsky and Rouff's regional approach had an implicitly democratic dimension: good food existed everywhere, not just in expensive establishments in the capital.

One of Rouff's non-gastronomic works, Les Mines de charbon en France au XVIIIe siècle ("Coal Mines in France in the Eighteenth Century"), published in 1922, examined the development of French coal mining from 1744 to 1791—serious labor history, not the work of someone interested only in fine dining.

The Académie des Gastronomes

In 1928, Curnonsky and Rouff co-founded the Académie des Gastronomes, an organization modeled on the Académie française but devoted to food rather than language. Where the Académie française was (and is) charged with maintaining the purity of the French language, the Académie des Gastronomes took on the task of preserving and celebrating French culinary traditions.

The concept of an "academy" for gastronomy might sound pompous, but it reflected a genuine conviction that food deserved the same institutional respect accorded to literature, music, and the visual arts. If France had academies for painting and architecture, why not for cooking? The argument was that cuisine was an art form requiring skill, knowledge, taste, and creativity—and that French cuisine in particular represented an achievement worth preserving and defending.

Throughout 1924, Curnonsky and Rouff also wrote and edited a special weekly section of the newspaper Comœdia called "Le Beau Voyage et la Bonne Auberge" ("The Beautiful Journey and the Good Inn"). Appearing every Saturday, the section featured articles on gastronomy, regional cuisines, and tourism—essentially a newspaper version of their guidebook philosophy, bringing their ideas about food tourism to a regular readership.

Recognition and Early Death

In 1921, Rouff was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor—a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, France's highest civilian honor. Napoleon had created the order in 1802, and being named to it meant official recognition by the French state of significant contributions to France. For a Swiss-born writer to receive this honor indicated how thoroughly Rouff had been embraced by his adopted country.

But Rouff was a heavy pipe smoker, and the habit caught up with him. He died of throat cancer on February 3, 1936, at the age of fifty-seven. His children, Nicole and Jean-Jacques, were twenty-two and nineteen.

Twenty-three years later, in 1959, Maurice Heurteux delivered a formal eulogy for Rouff at the Académie des Gastronomes, published the following year as Eloge de Marcel Rouff. By then, Curnonsky had also died (in 1956), and the first generation of French gastronomic writers had passed into history.

The Other Works

Beyond the gastronomic writing that made his reputation, Rouff produced an impressively varied bibliography. His first published work was Les hautaines in 1896, when he was just nineteen. Les Moulins à vent ("The Windmills") appeared in 1919, Voyage au monde à l'envers ("Journey to the Inverted World") in 1923.

He wrote biographies, including one of Brillat-Savarin (1926) and one of Chateaubriand (1929). He examined French social history in works like La vie de fête sous le second Empire ("Festive Life Under the Second Empire," 1930). He wrote about Balzac and produced novels with titles like L'homme de cinquante ans ("The Fifty-Year-Old Man," 1929).

He also wrote for numerous newspapers and magazines: the Tribune de Genève (maintaining his Swiss connections), Comœdia, Paris-Midi, Excelsior, Mercure de France, and La Revue du Touring-Club de France. This last publication was significant—the Touring-Club de France promoted automobile tourism, and Rouff's contributions helped connect food tourism with the growing culture of motoring.

What He Meant

Marcel Rouff matters because he helped create something that didn't exist before: the idea that eating well could be the point of travel, not just an incidental pleasure along the way. Before Curnonsky and Rouff, you might travel to see the cathedrals of France or the châteaux of the Loire. After them, you might travel to eat the cassoulet of Castelnaudary or the tarte Tatin of the Sologne.

This seems obvious now. Entire television networks are devoted to food travel. Restaurants receive stars that determine whether people will fly across continents to eat there. Food writers are celebrities, and "foodie" has entered common usage as a term for people who organize significant portions of their lives around eating well.

But someone had to make this argument first. Someone had to insist, systematically and persuasively, that regional cooking deserved respect equal to haute cuisine—that a perfect bouillabaisse in a seaside restaurant in Marseille was as much a cultural achievement as anything produced in a Parisian palace.

Rouff and Curnonsky made that argument in twenty-eight volumes, and then Rouff made it again in fiction, creating a character who embodied the philosophy of gastronomy as a life's work. That character, Dodin-Bouffant, has now outlived his creator by nearly a century, appearing on screens in 2023 to audiences who had no idea they were watching an adaptation of a novel written before the First World War by a Swiss socialist with a PhD in literature and a fatal pipe habit.

History works in strange ways. Rouff wrote histories of coal mining and biographies of famous men. He founded an academy and earned France's highest honor. Yet what survives most vividly is a fictional gourmet, a character who understood that eating well wasn't a frivolity but a form of art—and that pursuing that art with devotion and discipline was as worthy a calling as any other.

Upon Rouff's death, Le Petit Journal called him "one of the princes of gastronomy." Nearly ninety years later, that title still fits.