History of French Cooking

History of French Cooking

Over the years, French cuisine has been given many titles. Some of these titles are New American cuisine, Nouvelle Cuisine, Fusion Cuisine, Intuitional Cooking, etc. Historically, Auguste Escoffier is believed to be the first person to make it important in the 20^th century (Notaker, 2017). Since then, many chefs have acknowledged many times that there is nothing new when preparing French Cuisine, only interpretation of what was in the past. Again, contemporary cuisine is strongly based on French Cuisine. The Cuisine of France has reigned the professional cooking world over the centuries. The reason is simple. Perhaps, the French were the only culture to categorize their cuisine on the planet. Another reason may be that French was the only handful of cultures to developed two separate levels of cooking.

In medieval French cuisine, the ingredients depended strongly on the church calendar and the type of the seasons.  For instance, food items like fish were preserved by preservatives for next spring, and winter meal was sparser. Some of the spices that were used in middle age that are used today in French cuisine are hyssop, rue, tansy, and pennyroyal. Cooking, pounding and straining mixtures into mushes and fine pastes were the ordinary food preparations that people used at this time. In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, French cuisine espoused many new food items across Europe and America. In fact, during this period, Chef François Massialot and La Varenne wrote published French cookbooks that give systematic steps on how to prepare French cuisine (Notaker, 2017). In 1691, Chef François Massialot updated his Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois, which involved essential refinement like adding one glass of wine to fish stock when preparing French cuisine.

In the 1950s, the most famous revolution of modern cuisine took place when Nouvelle Cuisine was developed. The Chef Ferdnand Troisgros was the one who inspired the young French chefs to develop Nouvelle Cuisine. The cooking had more vegetables and fruits and also was less dependent on heavy meat dishes. Also, Escoffier organized and simplified the modern menu and structure of Nouvelle Cuisine. In the 1960s, Henri Gault and Christian Millau discovered a new formula that involved ten features of preparing Nouvelle Cuisine (Poole, 2019). The first feature in the formula was to discard excessive complication in cooking. The second feature in the formula was to reduce the time used to prepare game birds, green vegetables, most fish, and pâtés. However, in the 1980s, most chefs started using haute cuisine style for cooking French cuisine after they concluded that there is no new styles can be used to cook it. Chef La Varenne founded Haute cuisine style in 1667.

Today, most chefs also agree that Haute cuisine style is the best when preparing French cuisine. Nevertheless, most practitioners of the modern kitchen believe that to generate another style; one needs to understand various ethnic and international cuisines (Park, 2017). This means that the ingredients, tools, and cooking techniques are a multitude of ethnic and international cuisines. Few examples of modern cuisines are Croque monsieur, Foie gras, etc. Actually, we are blessed with several choices of international and ethnic cuisines from Laotian to Ethiopian to Lebanese, but we must not forget that it all started in France.

Reference

Notaker, H. (2017). A history of cookbooks: from kitchen to page over seven centuries (Vol. 64). Univ of California Press.

Park, K. (2017). Ethnic foodscapes: foreign cuisines in the United States. Food, Culture & Society, 20(3), 365-393.

Poole, B. H-France Review Vol. 19 (December 2019), No. 266.