History of French cuisine: 4 golden phases
With unforgettable and unrivaled chefs of all time such as Carême, Bocuse, Escoffier, La Varenne, Fernand Point and Taillevent, French cuisine is considered the foundation of all basic forms of Western cooking.
French cuisine is as old as the days when dinner began to become a fun time for families. From being just another meal, in the fifteenth century French cuisine created a new wave in Renaissance Europe.
It was then that common foods began to be decorated. The flavor was emphasized with new, improved storage techniques. With regular new discoveries in food preparation, food preparation was now becoming an art form. Even less or less used vegetables were served presentably with artistic carvings; for example, garlic, truffles, mushrooms, etc.
In a lesser known fact is that French cooking was effected quite a lot with the Italians. For various reasons, French cuisine shares a lot with Italian cuisine.
Here are the varied auras of French cuisine.
1. The Medici era of French cuisine
It dates from 1540. Around this time, Catherine de Medici (pronounced MED-a-chee), daughter of the Duke of Urbino, married the future King of France, King Henry II. As she traveled to France, she brought with her a host of skilled cooks. Experts in the way of Florence, the new queen became a great instrument of change. She regularly hosted lavish banquets and made sure that all the influential women in the city attended these banquets dressed in her best attire. These parties had become almost a fashion saga.
Just a few years later, another Medici married another French king. Food ideas kept coming and the culture kept growing. Dining gradually became an important activity in France.
At this time, like the Italians, the French began to decorate their tables with fine china, glassware, and modern crockery. All in all, dining has become an indispensable part of French culture.
2. Le Cuisine François era of French cuisine
As food culture had already taken root deep in France, La Varenne, a well-known French chef, wrote the first ever cookbook in 1652. This book was later considered as the bible of French cooking. This book featured detailed instructions on preparation methods along with recipes arranged in alphabetical order.
3. Louis XIV era in French cuisine
French cuisine experienced another milestone in this era when the ‘fork’ became an essential and common part of having food. Also Louis XIV came up with a new idea of serving food. Unlike before, when all the dishes were placed together on the table and ended up getting cold, Louis XIV introduced the sequential service of the dishes. That’s when cooks began experimenting with oddly sized assorted utensils and containers to add that flavor to the look and improve food preparation.
4. Nouvelle Cuisine era in French cuisine
As the newly introduced changes began to seep into homes across the country, the two cultures blended together in quite a Western fashion. The mixture of the old and the new became known as the New Cuisine or Nouvelle Cuisine. Classic French dining methods were quite expensive, time consuming and tedious. Here people settled on some simple, modest and practical methods of eating.