Short answers, pulled from the story.
French cuisine is the cooking traditions and practices of France, built on regional diversity, cheese and wine. In November 2010 UNESCO added French gastronomy to its lists of the world's intangible cultural heritage, and its criteria are used widely in Western cookery school boards and culinary education.
Taillevent was Guillaume Tirel, the most well-known French chef of the Middle Ages, who wrote Le Viandier, one of the earliest recipe collections of medieval France. He began as a kitchen boy in 1326, became chief cook to Charles V after 1364, and worked a career spanning sixty-six years.
Georges Auguste Escoffier created the brigade system, which divided the professional kitchen into five stations: the garde manger, entremettier, rôtisseur, saucier and pâtissier. He also published Le Guide Culinaire in 1903, establishing the fundamentals of French cookery.
The mother sauces are the base sauces named by Marie-Antoine Carême, also called fonds or foundations, and they include espagnole, velouté and béchamel. Carême made each in large quantities to form the basis of many derivatives and kept over one hundred sauces in his repertoire.
Nouvelle cuisine was a style emphasizing freshness, lightness and clarity of flavor, revived in the 1960s by Henri Gault and Christian Millau to describe chefs such as Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers. It rejected excessive complication and heavy flour-thickened sauces in favor of fresh herbs, quality butter, lemon juice and vinegar.
The French Revolution abolished the guild system, which meant anyone could now produce and sell any culinary item they wished. This change, along with the discretionary income of the French Directory period, helped sustain the fully legalized modern restaurant.
Immigrants have brought dishes such as couscous, often cited as one of modern France's most widely consumed dishes, along with falafel, pho and banh mi. Estimates suggest roughly twenty-five percent of chefs in France are immigrants, and in Paris about half of chefs are immigrants.