French cuisine

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  French cuisine is the cooking traditions and practices of France, and in November 2010 UNESCO added French gastronomy to its lists of the world's intangible cultural heritage. That recognition crowned centuries of work by named hands. A 14th-century court chef called Taillevent wrote one of the earliest recipe collections of medieval France. La Varenne and Carême later pushed the cooking away from foreign borrowing toward an indigenous style. Today the criteria of French cooking shape cookery school boards across the West. How did banquets eaten by hand with gilded peacocks become a measured system of mother sauces and named kitchen stations? Why does cheese behave differently from one region to the next, governed by appellation laws? And what happens to a national cuisine when roughly a quarter of the country's chefs were born somewhere else? The answers run from medieval ponds stocked with carp to a stew of awara palm pulp in Cayenne.

• 2. The Medieval Table

  ›

  In French medieval cuisine, banquets among the aristocracy were served service en confusion, meaning every course arrived all at once. Diners ate with their hands, slicing meat in large pieces held between the thumb and two fingers. Sauces were thick and highly seasoned, and heavily flavored mustards were common.

  Pies at these banquets were containers more than food, with the crust meant to hold rather than to be eaten. Only at the very end of the Late Middle Ages did the shortcrust pie appear. Meals often closed with an issue de table of dragées, which then meant spiced lumps of hardened sugar or honey, alongside aged cheese and spiced wine such as hypocras.

  Livestock were slaughtered at the start of winter, when meals turned sparse, while late spring through autumn brought abundance. Beef was salted, pork salted and smoked, and tongue and hams were brined and dried in the chimney. Whale, dolphin and porpoise counted as fish, so their salted meats were eaten during Lent.

  Artificial freshwater ponds called stews held carp, pike, tench, bream and eel. Pigeon and squab were reserved for the elite, and game like venison, boar and hare was prized but rare. Kitchen gardens grew herbs now rarely used, such as tansy, rue, pennyroyal and hyssop.

  Spices were treasured and expensive, including pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace. Some, like cubebs, long pepper, grains of paradise and galengale, have since vanished from French cooking. Cooks chased sweet-sour flavors with vinegar and verjus joined to sugar or honey.

  Visual display was prized above almost all. Spinach juice and the green of leeks gave brilliant color, saffron and egg yolk gave yellow, and gold and silver leaf were brushed onto food with egg whites. One showpiece, tourte parmerienne, was built to resemble a castle with chicken-drumstick turrets coated in gold leaf. Another was a roast swan or peacock sewn back into its feathered skin, feet and beak gilded.

  The most well-known French chef of this era was Guillaume Tirel, the man called Taillevent. He started as a kitchen boy in 1326 and rose to chief cook for Charles V, who became king in 1364. His career spanned sixty-six years, and his tombstone shows him in armor holding a shield marked with three cooking pots called marmites.

• 3. Guilds And The New World

  ›

  Paris was the central hub of culture and economic activity, so its markets shaped what France ate. Les Halles, la Mégisserie and the stalls along Rue Mouffetard distributed food under a guild system that reached back to the Middle Ages. A guild restricted each tradesperson to a single branch of the culinary industry.

  Two groups of guilds divided the work. One supplied raw materials through butchers, fishmongers, grain merchants and gardeners. The other supplied prepared food through bakers, pastry cooks, sauce makers, poulterers and caterers. The charcutiers and rôtisseurs straddled both, selling cooked pies and raw meat alike, which set off friction with butchers and poulterers.

  The guilds also trained the trade, conferring the ranks of assistant cook, full-fledged cook and master chef. A master chef held considerable standing and enjoyed real income and job security. Royal kitchen staff sometimes fell under this hierarchy, and the Paris cooks' Guild regulations allowed cooks to move between court and city work.

  During the 16th and 17th centuries French cuisine absorbed many foods from the New World, though slowly. Records of one banquet show Catherine de' Medici serving sixty-six turkeys. The dish cassoulet traces to the haricot bean, which did not exist outside the Americas until Europeans arrived. That bean would later anchor a southern stew built around the finest sausage in France, the saucisse de Toulouse.

• 4. Cookbooks And Codification

  ›

  Haute cuisine took root in the 17th century with a chef named La Varenne, author of Le Cuisinier françois, credited as the first true French cookbook. It holds the earliest known reference to a roux made with pork fat and splits into sections for meat days and fasting. His recipes moved away from medieval style toward lighter dishes and modest pies served as individual pastries and turnovers. In 1667 he published a pastry book, Le Parfait confitvrier, later reissued as Le Confiturier françois.

  François Massialot wrote Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois in 1691, during the reign of Louis XIV, recording menus served to the royal courts in 1690. Massialot worked mostly freelance and, like other royal cooks, escaped guild regulation, so he could cater weddings and banquets freely. His book was the first to list recipes alphabetically, and the first in print to show a marinade, one for poultry and feathered game and a second for fish and shellfish. He listed no quantities, a sign he wrote for trained cooks.

  The book kept growing through new editions. The 1703 edition added definitions, and a glass of wine entered the fish stock. The 1712 edition, retitled Le Nouveau cuisinier royal et bourgeois, ran to two volumes with extensive technique and added a third course to the meal. Ragout, still central to French cookery, first appeared here as a single dish rather than a garnish.

  Marie-Antoine Carême was born in 1784, five years before the Revolution. He worked in a pâtisserie until Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord discovered him, and he later cooked for Napoleon. He had already built a name for his pièces montées, extravagant constructions of pastry and sugar architecture.

  Carême's lasting work was the refinement of the cuisine itself. He named his base sauces the mother sauces, also called fonds or foundations, among them espagnole, velouté and béchamel. Each was made in quantity and spun into derivatives, and he kept over one hundred sauces in his repertoire. Soufflés appear for the first time in his writings, and he codified the cuisine in works including Le Maître d'hôtel français, Le Cuisinier parisien and L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle.

• 5. Bread Revolution Court

  ›

  Shortly before the French Revolution, royal cuisine produced a chicken-based recipe served on vol-au-vent under the influence of Queen Marie Leszczyńska, the Polish-born wife of Louis XV. The same queen is credited with consommé à la Reine, filet d'aloyau braisé à la royale, and the introduction of Polonaise garnishing to the French diet.

  Bread carried the late 18th century for peasants and the working class, eaten three times a day in many French provinces. According to Brace, bread was the basic dietary item for the masses and the foundation for soup. Its importance meant the French Government watched harvests, commerce, flour and prices closely.

  Famine was a constant fear among the underprivileged. From 1725 to 1789 there were fourteen years of bad yields, and in Bordeaux between 1708 and 1789 thirty-three bad harvests occurred. The Revolution then abolished the guild system, so anyone could produce and sell any culinary item they wished. That single change opened the way to the fully legalized restaurant.

• 6. The Brigade System

  ›

  Georges Auguste Escoffier is the central figure to the modernization of haute cuisine and the organizing of France's national cuisine. His influence rose with the great hotels of Europe and America in the 1880s and 1890s. He worked at the Savoy Hotel under César Ritz, then ran the kitchens at the Carlton from 1898 until 1921.

  Escoffier built a system of parties, the brigade system, that split the professional kitchen into five stations. The garde manger handled cold dishes, the entremettier starches and vegetables, the rôtisseur roasts and fried dishes, the saucier sauces and soups, and the pâtissier pastry and desserts. Instead of one cook making a whole dish, several prepared its parts.

  The dish oeufs au plat Meyerbeer shows the gain. Under the old way it took up to fifteen minutes, but split among the entremettier, rôtisseur and saucier it came together quickly. Escoffier also reorganized the menu and embraced service à la russe, serving courses on individual plates, which Félix Urbain Dubois had made popular in the 1860s. He set out the sequence in journal articles and his Livre des menus of 1912.

  Escoffier's largest contribution was Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1903 with collaborators including Philéas Gilbert, E. Fetu, A. Suzanne, B. Reboul, Ch. Dietrich and A. Caillat. The book deemphasized heavy sauces and leaned toward lighter fumets, the essence of flavor drawn from fish, meat and vegetables. He drew on his own recipes, on Carême and Dubois, on Taillevent's Le Viandier in its 1897 modern edition, and on peasant dishes refined into haute cuisine.

  Escoffier himself invented many dishes, such as pêche Melba. He updated Le Guide Culinaire four times, and in the first edition's foreword he warned that its 5,000 recipes were not exhaustive. Even a complete book, he wrote, would not stay complete, because "progress marches on each day."

• 7. Nouvelle Cuisine Rebellion

  ›

  The term nouvelle cuisine recurs across French food history, always pressing for freshness, lightness and clarity of flavor. In the 1740s Menon first used it, and the cooking of Vincent La Chapelle and François Marin was also called modern. In the 1960s Henri Gault and Christian Millau revived the phrase for Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé and Raymond Oliver.

  These chefs were rebelling against the orthodoxy of Escoffier's cuisine, and some had trained under Fernand Point at the Pyramide in Vienne before opening their own restaurants. Gault and Millau set out ten characteristics of the new style. It rejected excessive complication and cut cooking times to preserve natural flavors, with steaming a key trend.

  The rules ran through the kitchen. Ingredients had to be the freshest possible, large menus gave way to shorter ones, and strong marinades for meat and game were dropped. Heavy sauces like espagnole and béchamel yielded to fresh herbs, quality butter, lemon juice and vinegar.

  Regional dishes replaced haute cuisine as inspiration, and new equipment was welcomed, with Bocuse even using microwave ovens. The chefs minded their guests' dietary needs and chased innovative combinations. Some have speculated that World War II helped seed this turn, since animal protein ran short during the German occupation. By the mid-1980s food writers called nouvelle cuisine exhausted, and many chefs returned to haute cuisine while keeping its lighter presentations.

• 8. Regions And Newcomers

  ›

  French regional cuisine is marked by extreme diversity, with each region holding its own distinctive table. Alsace, historically Alemannic German in culture, kept dishes like choucroute and brews beers close to its German neighbors after France took the region in the 17th century. Normandy leans on its apple trees for cider and Calvados, while Brittany turns buckwheat into galettes called jalet.

  The old province of Dauphiné lent its name to gratin dauphinois, layered potatoes, salt, pepper and milk baked low for two hours in a garlic-rubbed dish. In the Rhône-Alpes the Mères lyonnaises, female cooks particular to the region, supplied local gourmet establishments, and the monks of the Grande Chartreuse still make the green and yellow Chartreuse liqueur. In Provence, the Marseillais Anibal Camous lived to 104 and credited daily garlic, mourning a son who died at eighty by saying, "He ate too little garlic!"

  France carries its cuisine far beyond the mainland. French Guianan cooking blends European, Indian, Amerindian, Chinese and Hmong influences in dishes like awara-broth stews and Colombos. Réunion's Creole cuisine draws on Malagasy and East African cooking with rougail and curries, while Martinique offers Fricassée de chatrou, an octopus stew, and Guadeloupe builds the spice blend colombo on a profile brought by Sri Lankan immigrants.

  French cuisine keeps changing in the contemporary period. La Bistronomie fuses bistro and haute cuisine beside the French taco, food trucks and growing vegetarian options. Immigrant communities have brought couscous, often cited as one of modern France's most widely consumed dishes, along with falafel, pho and banh mi. Immigrants make up an estimated quarter of chefs in France, and about half of chefs in Paris, where a person can still close a meal with one of the thirteen desserts that honor the twelve apostles and Christ.