Who invented French cuisine?

[Jonathan Day]

Adam Gopnik, in Paris to the Moon, speaks about popular views of the origins of haute cuisine: a widely held belief,

"…dating, perhaps, to Alexandre Dumas père’s famous Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, that the cooking of Câreme and Escoffier had evolved from a set of provincial folk techniques. At the heart of French food lay the pot-au-feu, the bouillon pot that every peasant wife was supposed to keep on her hearth, and into which, according to legend, she threw whatever she had, to stew for the day’s meal. French classic cooking was French provincial cooking gone to town."

Gopnik then offers the views of the deconstructionist critic Eugenio Donato (1937-1983) on this subject. Though Donato’s published works seem to have focused exclusively on literary criticism, he spoke extensively to Gopnik, who says that Donato’s

"happiest hours were spent in Paris, eating and thinking and talking. His favorite subject was French food, and his favorite theory was that 'French cooking' was foreign to France, not something that had percolated up from the old pot-au-feu but something that had been invented by fanatics at the top, as a series of powerful 'metaphors' -- ideas about France and Frenchness – that had then moved downward to organize the menus and, retrospectively, colonize the past."

Donato claims that this 'colonisation' started as late as 1855, the year the Médoc wines were classified into the famous five growths in which they remain today, "the form of metropolitan rationalization being extended to the provincial earth, in the guise of the reflection of an order locked in the earth itself."

"Not everyone can have a tante Célestine", runs the advert for the cookery school attached to the famous Moulin de Mougins, "but now you can learn the very same tricks and techniques that she taught Roger Vergé." According to Donato (via Gopnik), the idea of tante Célestine's country cooking leading to the haute cuisine practiced by Vergé is a fraud, though perhaps not an intentional one. It is similar to the view that the Victorians 'invented' many of the traditions surrounding the British royal family.

Would French cuisine be any less enjoyable if we believed that it is a constructed art, with the "back story" of peasant origins and terroir as an ex post construct?

On eGullet, also see the "Peasant Origins" thread -- here.

[=Mark]

The French.

[Really Nice!]

Shhh... Don't tell the French this, but it started with Catherine De Medici who introduced the fork and spinach to the French. She was an Italian who, at the age of 13, married a French prince (the Duke of Orleans who would become Henry II) and took about 20 chefs with her to France. History has credited these chefs as being the foundation of French cuisine.

[Tonyfinch]

Since antiquity aristocracies throughout Europe employed brigades of chefs/cooks to cook them fantastically elaborate multi course feasts and banquets based on complicated recipes and rare ingredients. The gap between what they ate and what everyone else ate was stark. Their cuisine was literally "haute" in the sense that it was only eaten by the "high born". The food at today's most elaborate restaurant would seem plain and simple in comparison to some of these recipes.

The reason why aristocratic cuisine filtered down the social scale in France,as opposed to elsewhere, was because France had a revolution, wiped out the aristocracy and all these top cooks suddenly found themselves out of a job.

Needs must and many of them drifted to Paris and other cities where they found work in public eating houses and inns and such like. They began incorporating some of the techniques they had learned in the private houses and adapting them for a growingly appreciative bourgeoisie who had directly benefited from the revolution. Some of these people made enough money to re-employ the chefs privately but most remained in the public domaine and hence began the rise of the restaurant culture the chef as retaurateur/proprieter.

There is of course more than one French cuisine, but if we are talking about classical French haute cuisine then the idea that this has its roots in peasant cooking is, however attractive it might seem to some, completely false.

Now Cuisine Terroir, or French Provincial Cooking-that's a different story.

[macrosan]

The obsession for pigeon-holing cuisine resides almost entirely with gourmets. Words like "traditional" and "authentic" and "French provincial" and "rustic" litter the pages of restaurant and food literature, but I believe their only relevance is to give interested people a generic clue as to the type of food under consideration.

I don't know who "invented" French cuisine. I don't think it is intellectually possible to define the term "French cuisine" sufficently precisely to make the question answerable. Even if it were, I don't think it is historically possible to define a snapshot in time at which the "invention" might have taken place. And I don't think it matters.

This is not to say that the conversation is not of potential value. I'm sure it will be. But perhaps the process is infinitely more important and rewarding than the result.

[Adam Balic]

Interesting, I think that I have made my views one the topic clear on the peasant food and other threads. The origins of French cuisine is extremely complex (as is in the case of most cuisine) and what facts there are tend to be hopelessly mixed up with romantic notions.

Take the above example of the pot-au-feu, which as a French example is given to indicate the inherant goodness of French cuisine. On the other hand a similar practice of putting everything into and endless pot is often cited as an example of how bad British (late 19th-early 20th C) cooking is.

The point of the peasant food thread was to illustrate that preceived notions of peasants roots of cuisine while not incorrect, tended to obscure the contributions made by other factors, such as the cooking of the middle-classes in the 19th C and the rise of the restaurant.

Maybe it would be best to define exactly what aspect of French cuisine is to be discussed, before the dicussion goes any further?

[Jonathan Day]

Adam, I was aiming at French cuisine as a category -- which in France, of course, it really isn't, it's just "cuisine". It has acquired a series of romantic notions and a "back story": the life lived close to nature, fresh-from-the-garden vegetables, and so on. Not that these things aren't good. In our place in France, last summer, we had a vegetable and herb garden, and very good it was too. But it was planted and maintained at enormous effort and expense. Those shiny aubergines, those perfect courgettes each cost a fortune compared to what we would have paid at the local supermarket, or even at our greengrocer. We will do it again this year, in part because the children enjoyed it so much. But the romantic ideas, no matter how pleasurable, are constructed.

For a very recent example from The Washington Post, click here. Here we have the "French housewife" who

is at the village market when it opens, fiercely prowling the stalls with her straw basket slung over her shoulder. She terrorizes the butcher and greengrocer to get the best quality at the lowest price. She peers suspiciously into the cavity of a roasting chicken, pokes a flounder, sniffs the melons and pinches the tomatoes. One by one she selects carrots, mushrooms, eggs and stalks of celery, examining each critically. Finally, after driving a hard bargain, she reluctantly goes for her purse. As the vendor counts her money, she waits for the extra carrot or the bunch of parsley he is intimidated into offering her.

Then, when she gets home,

she sets about squeezing every tasty bite, every nourishing drop, every last crumb of sustenance from the carefully considered contents of her market basket. Nothing -- I repeat, nothing -- will be wasted. When she puts out the family trash at the end of the week, it could fit into a coffee can.

Well, perhaps I get to the market too late to witness these paragons of efficiency in action. But I don't think so. And to be clear, I don't think Marcia Mitchell is making all this up. But I suspect she is reading a lot into what she sees. And I think we tend to do that with French cooking more than with some other cuisines.

[Adam Balic]

Well, perhaps I get to the market too late to witness these paragons of efficiency in action. But I don't think so. And to be clear, I don't think Marcia Mitchell is making all this up. But I suspect she is reading a lot into what she sees. And I think we tend to do that with French cooking more than with some other cuisines.

Ah, I see. Interesting quote, but is it really true in itself or is a construct? I similar story could be said of a housewife in Tuscany, except in this case the store holder would be extremely angry as it is not done to handle the produce (at least in the villages where I have stayed).

I suspect that the general case is that any French housewife worth her salt would have built a relationship of trust with vendors that she frequents and relies on this relationship to ensure that she will get excellent quality produce. I can't see people going through there lives being so mistrustful of individuals that they have day to day intereactions with.

So I see much of French Cuisine as a construct, as is most everything.

[Jonathan Day]

My experience is surely biased because I live in a village that is extremely bourgeois, not really in the country.

Nonetheless, a few observations:

• most French shoppers go to the supermarket, where the consumption of pre-made foods is very high. Our village is going through a major crusade to cut down on household trash and encourage recycling. The idea that a week's kitchen trash would fit into a coffee can is laughable.
  the artisanal shops (butcher, baker, fishmonger, greengrocer) are very good but very expensive.
  the itinerant and fixed markets (e.g. Forville in Cannes) are still more expensive than what you find in the supermarket.
  

And yet this is all overlaid with a romantic PeterMayleish idea of "Provence", countryfied living, red-tiled roofs and stone walls. At his sermon at midnight mass in 2001, the village curé (a cantankerous intellectual who loves to annoy his congegation) delivered a harangue about how Provence "no longer exists", that it is a romantic idea foisted on us by the media. He repeated this several times: "Provence n'existe plus." The Moulin de Mougins, which I referred to in the topic starter, promulgates this Provençal idea: a romantic, countrified hideaway, where you enjoy the plats doucement mijotés, quietly simmered on the stove, that Vergé learned from his aunt Célestine. In reality, it sits next to the Cannes-Grasse motorway, and the ingredients arrive in refrigerated trucks.

Some cousins of mine, visiting from Missouri, put it perfectly. They were sitting in an outdoor restaurant in Mougins, a village so achingly perfect that it sometimes feels like a movie set. Water splashed in a fountain in the square. "Jeez," said one, "I keep waiting for the Pirates of the Caribbean to pop out from around the corner."

All this said, the experience is pleasant, the food very good (though not at the Moulin) and the pirates never arrive, so I have no problem spending time in this particular constructed reality.

[oraklet]

sure, the french shop in supermarkets for a lot of produce. there's even a lot of pre-made stuff consumed, and perhaps this is a growing trend. still, if i look at my experience from living in bayonne in the early 80's, and knowing quite a few frenchmen, and besides the experience of my mother and grandmother who both have lived in france, there is more to it than that. what i see is a tradition of being interested in gourmandise. this is often on an "intellectual" level rather than everybody being able to cook - but: as a frenchman, you're supposed to be a gourmet. it's part of their identity, or at least the upper and middle class identity. i use the term "intellectual" because food and wine is discussed in the same way as is philosophy or politics. you could say, perhaps, that it is part of the general french love of things intellectual, classifying etc.

of course, this does not make "the mythical provence" any truer. but the stuff you can buy in a nice french supermarket - i'd love be able to get it in my local supermarkets here in copenhagen...

[Jonathan Day]

Oraklet, you've just summarised the main point of the starting post. This "nation of gastronomes" is a part of the French identity; it is an assumed persona.

Now the myth, as I understand Donato's claim, is that this gastronomic acuity arises from the land, terroir, life lived in agrarian simplicity. Grande or haute cuisine was an aristocratic and therefore urban sophistication of simple, provincial cuisine. And therefore there may be benefit in stripping away the frills and furbelows of haute cuisine and getting back to basics, back to terroir.

Whereas--again, according to Donato-- the reality may be that the "back story" is a construct, an after-the-fact rationalisation of something very different.

Is the "Betty Crocker" story a similar idea in American cooking? -- i.e. a big food company (General Mills?) came up with a range of dishes that would somehow promote their products, and invented a housewife/cook (Betty) who had supposedly created them. Somehow the French "back story" seems more subtle than this.

[oraklet]

"you've just summarised the main point of the starting post. This "nation of gastronomes" is a part of the French identity; it is an assumed persona."

assumed. hmm. that's not what i meant to say. rather, that it is bred into them. their educational system is doing a very good job at making them think and express themselves in an "intellectual" way. by "as a frenchman, you're supposed to be a gourmet. it's part of their identity, or at least the upper and middle class identity.", i mean that they DO eat well, and a good deal of them ARE fine cooks. nothing assumed about that, really. and the "going back" is probably only going back to the cuisine grande mere of the first half of the 20th cent., but never the less a going back. i have a feeling that you're making this an either-or issue - either truth or myth - where it is rather, as i see it, something in between: the cuisine grande mere was largely dependant on terroir, seasons etc., and this is seen by the likes of verge to be at one time a virtue and a challenge. i don't think this makes "celestine a fraud".

am i still just summarizing?

[Jonathan Day]

Forgive me, oraklet. My opening sentence was not clear. I did not mean "you have done no more than summarise", but rather "You have neatly summarised"..."just'" as in "just now".

And I agree, it is not black or white. Donato states it that way, but that's the kind of bold statement that deconstructionists like to make.

I am sure that there was a Tante Célestine. I doubt that Vergé simply made her up. The question is whether his cooking was influenced more by her or by his experience of "city cuisine".

[Tonyfinch]

The food eaten by the aristocracy in pre revolututionary France had infinitely more in common with that eaten by the aristocracies in Italy, Austria, Britain etc than it had with that eaten by the peasantry in France.

I cannot understand how the idea that Grande Cuisine developed out of peasant cuisine has gained any credibility whatsoever. There are lots of histories detailing how cuisine in France was shaped and developed by social and political change. Jeanette Strang's 'Garlic and Goose Fat' about food in Gascony, for example, tells how well into the first part of the 20th century peasants in an area we now revere gastronomically were literaly ill with hunger for much of the time, surviving in Winter on scraps and soup and coarse bread.

"French Cuisine" as we now think of it was made possible by the redistribution of wealth begun by the French Revolution and continuing on through the development of an industrialised middle class in the cities and agrarian reform in rural areas. Although begun by earlier pioneers it cannot really be called a national cuisine until well into the 20th century when the "belle epoque" in Paris saw the nouveau riche enjoying en masse that which had only previously been accessible to the very rich.

[macrosan]

The mini-debate between Jonathan and Oraklet is interesting. It moves the subject, quite properly, away from a discussion of historical and legendary events, and more towards the present reality and myth.

I would accept that the interest level in food amongst the general population of France is probably at least as high as in any country of the world. That is because, whether through history or legend, French youngsters are brought up to believe that food is a crucial part of their cultural heritage. It matters not how, why or indeed whether this is true. Their self-perception is that it is true, and that provokes the interest.

Of course the "typical French housewife" described by the Washington Post article referenced by Jonathan is romantic nonsense. But I do believe the principle is valid. When I was visiting France regularly twenty to thirty years ago, the variety and quality of foods found in the shops was immensely superior to England, and that was because French "housewives" insisted on that variety and quality. I find now that they France has not kept ahead of the field. The quality of produce in French supermarkets is no better than anywhere else I have been to in the world. And the same is almost certainly true of the generality of their "food culture". The rest of the world, notably the USA and Britain, but also Italy and Belgium, have seemingly caught up with France, and overtaken them.

It is interesting to ask now "What is American cuisine and who invented it" because the answer seems clearly to be "There is no such definable thing as American cuisine, and it is impossible to determine who invented it". Well surely the same was true once of French cuisine.

[John Whiting]

Shhh... Don't tell the French this, but it started with Catherine De Medici who introduced the fork and spinach to the French. She was an Italian who, at the age of 13, married a French prince (the Duke of Orleans who would become Henry II) and took about 20 chefs with her to France. History has credited these chefs as being the foundation of French cuisine.

Damn! There's so much to say on this ever-fascinating topic. But no time to offer more than the observation that virtually all modern food historians reject the tradition that Catherine de Medici brought the French their haute cuisine from Italy.

There's much more interest in what took place around the Mediterranean regions which are now in separate countries but whose borders were once much more permeable.

[Gavin Jones]

Donato’s

"happiest hours were spent in Paris, eating and thinking and talking. His favorite subject was French food, and his favorite theory was that 'French cooking' was foreign to France, not something that had percolated up from the old pot-au-feu but something that had been invented by fanatics at the top, as a series of powerful 'metaphors' -- ideas about France and Frenchness – that had then moved downward to organize the menus and, retrospectively, colonize the past."

Donato claims that this 'colonisation' started as late as 1855

The Restaurant & Farming chapters of Bouvard & Pecuchet ironise the French myth of cuisine fairly comprehensively.

When's that, 1880?

In fact the unifying account of French society (cuisine binds France together) skips lightly over the huge fault lines in society which necessitated such unifying steps as guillotining 20,000 or so, repeated failure in war, complicity with a Nazi regime and a limited facility in dealing with the legacy of empire. The myth of French cuisine lies at the heart of France - as pernicious and deluded as 'Merrie England'.

[Jonathan Day]

When I was visiting France regularly twenty to thirty years ago, the variety and quality of foods found in the shops was immensely superior to England, and that was because French "housewives" insisted on that variety and quality. I find now that they France has not kept ahead of the field. The quality of produce in French supermarkets is no better than anywhere else I have been to in the world. And the same is almost certainly true of the generality of their "food culture". The rest of the world, notably the USA and Britain, but also Italy and Belgium, have seemingly caught up with France, and overtaken them.

Martin, we must be visiting very different parts of France and Britain.

The quality of produce in the French supermarkets has definitely declined, but on average it is still far better than anything I find at Sainsbury's and Tesco's in London. And the customers are fussier: they are more likely to reject limp vegetables, for example. For example, pre-sliced salads in polyethylene bags are becoming more popular, but nothing like they are in England.

The traiteurs and charcutiers in France are still miles ahead of anything I have found in Britain or the USA -- though not necessarily Italy. And the supermarket fish (which we tend not to buy, because there is a splendid fishmonger in our area) is far better than anything I've seen in a UK supermarket.

That said, I agree that there is a myth that every French person is a discriminating gourmet and a fine cook. I have had some amazing meals in French homes; equally I have had some dreadful ones. British home cooks (again, speaking in broad generalities) tend to attempt simpler and less ambitious dishes, often with superior results.

[macrosan]

Martin, we must be visiting very different parts of France and Britain.

I think that's almost certainly correct, Jonathan.

My visits to France in recent years have been restricted to central Paris, Le Touquet, Hardelot, Calais, Wimereux, and Boulogne, all in Northern France and all fairly touristic areas. The supermarkets seem to me to be little different in terms of variety and quality of food than Waitrose or Marks & Spencer. The food shops seem little different from our local fishmonger, speciality butcher and cheese shop.

I'll grant you that wouldn't be true in the small villages of England, and it may not be true in other English cities, but it is true in London. Priobably there are more speciality shops per capita in a French town than in an English town, but I suspect that even in those terms England is catching up.

Incidentally, why would anyone with an interest in food shop at Tesco or Sainsbury ?

[John Whiting]

I'm off to Paris on Tuesday for another week. This time I'll be eating at half a dozen of the bistros most highly spoken of in Le Pudlo Paris, which, I'm told, is the guide that Parisians are most likely to consult. I'm interested in what, if anything, these well-thought-of-bistros have in common. Almost none of them are in the English language guide books, nor are most of them in either Michelin or Gault-Millau.

But I'm happy to take the gamble because there are so many Parisians who eat out constantly as a matter of course and who pay attention to what they consume. It's no big deal; more like the level of expertise at playing an instrument that people routinely had a hundred years ago and more. But it provides a foundation of diners who, if they are fed rubbish, know it and will make a noise.

That's not precisely on topic. I apologize.

[Jonathan Day]

Martin, my preferred shopping site in London is the Northcote Road, which has become an extraordinary high street for food: two butchers (one of them of superb quality, the other above average), artisanal baker, very good cheesemonger, two fishmongers, good to very good wine shops, two Italian food shops (including Stefano Cavallini's place), organic produce, plus a fine street market for fruit and veg. This is where I go on the weekends, though sometimes I go to Borough Market.

But daily life requires large purchases of what I sometimes call "chemicals": washing powders, paper goods and the like. And with three children, two working parents and a busy household, my wife and the nanny tend to head to a supermarket. Our local M&S has a small food section, and there isn't a Waitrose in easy striking distance. We also use Tesco home delivery.

I mention all this not to defend my foodie credentials but to illustrate the problem of the "back story": it just doesn't fit the pace of modern life.

I see much of the same in France. People are living faster and busier lives; for many, there isn't time to stop and smell the haricots verts or find the perfect peach. The result is that phony stuff does appear, whether in "industrialised" bakeries or supermarkets pushing tasteless Dutch peppers. The average quality in France is still better than in the UK, as is the quality at the top of the range. The trend, on the other hand, may be negative in France and positive in England.

[Bux]

Martin, we must be visiting very different parts of France and Britain.

I may not be addressing the important question of the thread, but it seems to me that in France today, as in the US and I suspect in the the UK, what you have is anything but a monolithic cuisine. It is not even monolithic in a small town in France where part of the population shops in stores that favor artisanal producers and part of the population shops in the supermarket where the supply may run a range of choices in terms of quality and style. Some small percentage of the population eats in fine restaurants and a larger percentage looks for value in terms of platefuls for the money. It is rather difficult project an image when one speaks of French cuisine. It's more likely one just raises a preconception to the fore in the listener or reader's mind

Admittedly I thought it was more monolithic in the sixties, and it may well have been, but in answer to whether the cuisine trickled down from the aristocracy after the revolution or whether chefs refined the techniques of their grandmothers I suspect you will prove neither or perhaps you will be able to prove both. In France today, you have Alsatian food, Provencal cuisine, Southwestern dishes, grandmother's cooking, etc. and a class of dishes referred to as restaurant food. This speaks not only to my first point that it's not a monolithic cuisine, but also to the fact that it's filtered down and been refined upwards, but that there are always gaps.

Who invented French cuisine is a question that can only be answered after you define French cuisine.

[John Whiting]

Bux sums it up accurately, I think. Just back from another week in Paris, we were impressed yet again with how much evidence there is for either an optimistic or a pessimistic view of the future of French cuisine. There is truly awful food in abundance, and not only tourists eat it. But the street markets still thrive and are crowded with patrons of all ages.

A representative experience: I misjudged the closing time of a bistro where we had planned to go for lunch, and so we found ourselves without anywhere to eat except a down-at-heel bar/brasserie near the metro station. The decor and the patrons were, shall we say, not quite comme il faut. I ordered a salad with chicken gizzards and Mary a cheese omelette. The salad was not exactly imaginative but the vegetable ingredients were as fresh as one could wish and the gizzard slices hot and tasty. Mary's omelette was -- well, flawless. If I got such quality for such money in any ordinary London eatery I would probably have a heart attack.