The Rhetoric of Recipes: Remarks on Chomel’s Dictionnaire Œconomique and the Encyclopédie

In Diderot’s work on definition in the Encyclopédie one finds a great variety of relationships between the knowledge transmitted and the rhetoric of this transmission. Here we start from a work used by Diderot, in particular for cooking recipes, the abbé Chomel’s Dictionnaire oeconomique (1709), a work which was mainly concerned with domestic management, in the rustic tradition of householders. We follow, from Chomel to Diderot, some of the implications of the age-old form of the recipe. While the Encyclopédie replaced the description of “ secrets ” involved in home production with a novel description of experimentation, linked to manufacturing, the recipe itself nevertheless was still, for Diderot, one of the forms of encyclopædia definition. It led his reflection, in varicus and often unexpected ways, on to questions of art and the aim of definition.