What is Haute Cuisine

[Suzi Edwards]

I don't know if any of you are following the thread about Manresa Restaurant in California but it has thrown up an interesting question for me.

Pim wrote:

No, I don’t think Manresa can beat the top *** in France, but to call them not even fitting the category of haute cuisine, I entirely disagree with. I found Jeff’s offending sentence –at best- misguided, and entirely unsubstantiated.

(excuse me, but I do not know how to quote from one thread to another)

So, what is Haute Cuisine? What elements have to present in a dish or a restaurant to qualify. Should we really even be talking about "qualifying" for Haute Cuisine?

[Pan]

I'll give you the semi-ignoramus's rough-and-ready view of what constitutes haute cuisine:

Rich food with lots of butter and cream

Luxe ingredients and impressive, beautiful preparations and platings

Staff dressed impeccably in formal wear, providing smooth, expertly coordinated team service

Customers dressed in suits and formal dresses

Very expensive prices

Long, expensive wine list, including a good selection of dessert wines

Excellent sommelier to recommend wines and do quality control for them

Full-course meal with at least several courses (including amuses and pre-desserts)

The food will probably be subtle or at least complex and expertly balanced, will go well with whatever wines the sommelier recommended, and unless explicitly vegetarian or otherwise changed for dietary reasons, will almost definitely include some ingredient(s) derived from pig, even if only as part of a sauce or accompaniment (bacon, some kind of ham, etc.)

The meal will probably end with some kind of small post-dessert like chocolate truffles, pates de fruit, madeleines, petit fours, or all of the above

There will also be an excellent cheese course, if desired

Now, drive your truck through the exceptions to these.

Edited December 18, 2004 by Pan (log)

[Ptipois]

Hello Tarka,

I'm sorry my answer will be something of a no-answer, for several reasons.

— The more I learn about cooking, the less I understand the motives that lead people to classify cuisines at all costs. Now there may be some guidelines and there are, definitely, styles, but I believe those styles are meant to be played with and not to be taken seriously. Least of all do I wish - and that should be obvious from my recent posts - that cuisines should be classified on a vertical scale, with "high" and "low", mostly related with social and financial values. This may have had a "raison d'être" at some point but I think it is no longer valid. The only classification I admit for cuisine — and this is nothing but my personal view but I hold strongly to it — is based on its being good, mediocre or bad. This transcends all styles and all social levels. And I don't agree with the opinion that dining on High Cuisine is dining on History, for the presence of History is just as obvious in ethnic, country, family cuisines, cuisine bourgeoise and bistrot foods.

— I've taken a look at the thread that you're mentioning. I nearly drooled at the pictures and at the descriptions of the dishes. This looks incredibly yummy and I'm pretty sure it was. The fact that it may be or not worthy of being written in the books as "haute cuisine" seems pretty irrelevant to me compared to the evidence that it is superior cooking. One may eat very badly indeed in a certified Haute Cuisine restaurant.

— Also, I don't really know, after all, what "haute cuisine" means. There is the French context and the international context. I don't know what criteria rule the use of the term in an international context, so I cannot really help there.

About the French context: in everyday French language, one hardly ever hears the words "haute cuisine", it is much more frequently read and heard in English; the usual expression is "cuisine gastronomique". However, something called "haute cuisine" does exist in France, as in the corporate organization "Chambre syndicale de la haute cuisine française"; it seems to be defined by a level of learning, skill and craftsmanship, a general agreement on a certain style of cooking and general views on the trade. As a French phenomenon, that's what it is now. Sometimes it does remind me of our ENA (Ecole national d'administration) in the way it implies some sort of formatting. I don't really see the relationship between this phenomenon and the luscious Californian meal that is described in the other thread.

[Fat Guy]

Haute (aka haut) means high but it also means elegant, and in the culinary sense I would say it means artful, which also happens to be what Merriam-Webster says. I believe the descriptor haute cuisine is quite useful and describes actual levels of cuisine that really exist in many of the best culinary cultures, not just French but also Chinese and others. Were this a legal issue, we'd probably want to develop a multi-pronged test to determine whether or not something is haute cuisine. It might be interesting to speculate about what some of those factors would be. I'd especially be interested in distinguishing the form (the fancy china and the waiters in the penguin suits alluded to by Pan) from the substance (the actual elegance, artistry and as Ducasse would say savoir faire of the cuisine).

[Bux]

To continue with Ptipois' train of thought that says it is "defined by a level of learning, skill and craftsmanship," I'd say that at its core, it is the most skillful cuisine. Many of the trappings that Pan mentions are just that, trappings. The mailman usually wears a uniform, but he is a mailman because he delivers the mail. The butcher is a butcher whether he's wearing his apron or dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

"Rich food with lots of butter and cream"

Hardly necessary at all. This really mark another period in time more than anything else. Lots of butter and cream will date a restaurant.

"Luxe ingredients and impressive, beautiful preparations and platings"

To an extent bu custom, but even common ingredients handled with the utmost skill will qualify. Christian Parra's blood sausage qualified, but let's face it with so much talent in the kitchen and so many working on the production of a meal, the cost of ingredients becomes a relatively less important factor and at those prices, why not work with and offer luxury ingredients.

"Staff dressed impeccably in formal wear, providing smooth, expertly coordinated team service"

No to the formal wear. I have service staff dressed in all sorts of manners deliver haute cuisine to my table. That dress includes all sorts of contemporary designer attempts at being trendy, informal or cute.

"Customers dressed in suits and formal dresses"

It's a rare three star restaurant even in Paris that will not admit you without a tie. It's been quite a few years since Mrs. B has worn other than pants (with a top and often a blazer) to a restaurant serving bonfide haute cuisine. Once out of Paris, a male diner in an elegant sweater would not be treated differently than one in a suit.

"Very expensive prices"

The most skilled handicrafts are rarely otherwise.

"Long, expensive wine list, including a good selection of dessert wines"

Probably. Fine wine is closely associated with most haute cuisine, although I've been in restaurants with a very short wine list that still qualify in my book.

"Excellent sommelier to recommend wines and do quality control for them"

Excellence and skill go hand in hand.

"Full-course meal with at least several courses (including amuses and pre-desserts)"

Haute cuisine comes to us from the French who have always seen meals as having courses. Even at the most banal level, courses were traditional. I recall a meal maybe thirty-five years ago in a relatively impoverished mountain area in France. The meal was seven or eight courses. It mistified me. Basically, it was a blue plate dinner with meat and vegetables. The meat was served as one course. The vegetables came one at a time. As we finished each one, another was brought to the table. If both French cuisine and haute cuisine are both foreign to us, we need to understand their differences as well as their commonalities.

Etc.

[FaustianBargain]

For whatever it is worth, wikipedia defines Haute Cuisine:

Haute cuisine (literally "high cooking" in French) is a cookery style that originated in Napoleonic France under the influence of the great chef Antoine Carême and was elaborated by Auguste Escoffier. It was a refinement of traditional French cookery techniques and also included a radical reorganization of the way kitchens were run. Chefs were organized in a series of brigades, with under-chefs, in charge of sauces, fish, and so forth.

[...]

The style was characterized by complex dishes requiring elaborate preparation. Sauces were used extensively. Portions were often small to allow for multiple courses. Characteristically, the food was quite rich, incorporating a generous amount of butter and heavy cream. Desserts were particularly elaborate and rich.

[Bux]

For whatever it is worth, wikipedia defines Haute Cuisine:

←

It's a worthy contribution for a few reasons. It offers a good impartial definition for one. Even better is it's choice to define haute cuisne in the past tense.

"It was a refinement . . .

Chefs were organized . . .

The style was characterized . . .

Sauces were used . . .

Etc.

This is not to say the style no longer exists, but if it does, it no longer adheres to the rigid definition of other times. Even my minimal definition of a cuisine marked by the skill of its preparers is a personal one.

[Ptipois]

There are a few things to correct in the Wikipedia definition, but I haven't much time, suffice it to say that Haute Cuisine didn't rise from scratch like Athena fully armed in the martial days of Napoleon. It probably got codified and its hierarchy stiffened, but as a French tradition Haute Cuisine (even if the term wasn't used) digs its roots several centuries before. It is related to courtly culture and can be traced to the Valois and the Medici, very probably much earlier. Some of our dishes bear the names of du Barry, Pompadour, Richelieu, Colbert. Also, Haute Cuisine today, if it is possible to define such a thing, is by no means what it used to be in the days of Escoffier, let alone of Carême. Its "three secrets" are no longer Escoffier's secrets (du beurre, du beurre et du beurre), much less a river of cream. It no longer relies on overcooked fish and thick mayonnaise maskings, fried rissoles, cromesquis and pâtés, long-simmered sauces and the heavy use of flour. It has abandoned elaborate puddings of candied fruit and sweet liquors. It no longer cooks vegetables to death. In one word, today's haute cuisine is very far away from 19th-century haute cuisine.

One thing that puzzles me in Pan's description is the mention of "something derived from pig". This is by no means constitutive of elegant French cooking, even if pig things may sometimes be used. But they're more at ease in country and bourgeois cookery. With a few exceptions, the most refined versions of "cuisine gastronomique" tend to avoid anything porky.

Briefly, Pan's definition of "haute cuisine" strikes me as not being the definition of any kind of cuisine at all but the description of a meal in an expensive "restaurant gastronomique" (perhaps a bit old-fashioned too). Which is a very different thing. Now such places generally justify their high prices, but they may also very well deliver most of the items on Pan's list without delivering anything deserving the name "haute cuisine".

Now if I were to try a short definition of haute cuisine *in a French context*, it would be: a style of professional cuisine commonly admitted to be the highest in a particular period, in terms of skill, craftsmanship, cost, and social level. It can be described even more simply as "Top-class restaurant cooking". Of course, the culinary criteria fitting the definition may vary with time.

Edited December 17, 2004 by Ptipois (log)

[Jon Tseng]

Two things

1) complexity of preparation

2) Luxury ingredients

you will find a lot of the other factors mentioned (expense, complex menu structure, emphasis on balance within dishes &tc &tc) stem from these two principles

The optional 3) would be all the social froufrou stuff ie dressing up, posh surroundings, sommeliers, long wines lists etc. Though I am not convined these are essential

cheers

J

[Pan]

Ptipois, not necessarily pork but bacon or some type of ham or sausage in sauces, etc. The reason I'm conscious of this is that my mother doesn't eat pig products and it was sometimes hard to get all of them to be left out of her food in fancy restaurants in France.

[Fat Guy]

Two things

1) complexity of preparation

Non-haute cuisine dishes can be extremely complex, and haute cuisine dishes can be minimalist compositions.

2) Luxury ingredients

It's entirely possible -- and not all that uncommon -- to make haute cuisine dishes from cheap, crummy ingredients.

[Pan]

Haute cuisine from crummy ingredients? Really? Please elaborate!

[Ptipois]

Ptipois, not necessarily pork but bacon or some type of ham or sausage in sauces, etc. The reason I'm conscious of this is that my mother doesn't eat pig products and it was sometimes hard to get all of them to be left out of her food in fancy restaurants in France.

←

I hear you. But I'm still surprised. I think it may depend on what you consider "fancy" cuisine. Pork is a rather rare ingredient in French cuisine gastronomique, and when there is some, it is clearly mentioned as part of the dish (i.e. Alexandre Blanc's sautéed abalone with pork stock, "Ormeau sauté au jus de cochon"). I rewrite and adapt many, many recipes from several Michelin-starred chefs, and I hardly ever meet any pork products in them. However, when I do work on their bistrot and brasserie cooking, there is quite a lot of pork and bacon. What characterizes French top-class cuisine is the use of stocks and glazes based on veal, beef and poultry, very rarely pork. Pork is more frequently found in regional cooking styles, but this is not considered haute cuisine. There is pork in lyonnaise fancy cuisine, but fancy as it may be, it remains a regional style. Even there, the stocks are still based on veal or chicken.

[Fat Guy]

Haute cuisine from crummy ingredients? Really? Please elaborate!

←

Just as Mozart's music is brilliant whether you play it beautifully on your flute or I play it badly on a harmonica, Dover sole a la meuniere is a haute cuisine dish whether it's made from a freshly caught Dover sole or a crappy frozen one.

To use an American example: Just like every other American restaurant and home outside California during most of the year, American haute cuisine restaurants for most of the 20th Century used frozen vegetables and frozen fish -- and the freezing technologies were damaging to those products, not like the fancy blast freezing they do to tuna for sushi these days. By today's standards, all but a few locally grown ingredients in season (as well as meat and poultry, which were better back then) were crap -- worse than what you'd get in an average suburban supermarket today.

But that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not the food served at those restaurants was haute cuisine. It had bearing only on the question "Was it well executed haute cuisine, or badly executed haute cuisine?" Certainly from a classical standpoint, haute cuisine that sucks on the plate is still haute cuisine, and non-haute cuisine no matter how well prepared still isn't haute cuisine (unless it is fundamentally altered, such as by the addition of a foie gras, short rib and truffle stuffing in Daniel Boulud's "db burger"). The artistry, elegance and savoir faire of haute cuisine exist at a level above execution.

[Bux]

Just as Mozart's music is brilliant whether you play it beautifully on your flute or I play it badly on a harmonica, Dover sole a la meuniere is a haute cuisine dish whether it's made from a freshly caught Dover sole or a crappy frozen one.

←

You make a valid argument and you state it well, but I think it's at best a debatable point and therefore it supports the contention that we won't agree on what is haute cuisine. I suppose it is what we are willing to pay for, but perhaps that's not true either as I might pay more for some simply prepared succulent shellfish, or for that matter some raw shellfish, than I am willing to pay for a lesser quality product that's received skilled attention. Furthermore that willingness has shifted over the years and shifted left and right, as I've developed my own preferences and standards by eating and reading. Is it really of consequence if one is called haute cuisine and the other not? I'm tempted to say who wants to know and why. Tarka's second question, "Should we really even be talking about "qualifying" for Haute Cuisine?" may be the more important one.

[Pan]

I find the argument a little bizarre. Mozart ruined by a totally inept performance wouldn't sound the least bit brilliant.

[Bux]

I find the argument a little bizarre. Mozart ruined by a totally inept performance wouldn't sound the least bit brilliant.

←

But of course it would still be Mozart and inherently brilliant even if poorly interpreted. Thus Fat Guy is saying that haute cuisine, even when poorly done, is still haute cuisine. It may depend on one's own definition of haute cuisine. Of course there are those who will contend that Mozart poorly done, is not Mozart at all. The challenge might be not to find a universal definition of haute cuisine, but to cover this ground in an even smaller circle and arrive at the beginning even faster.

[FaustianBargain]

I don't know if any of you are following the thread about Manresa Restaurant in California but it has thrown up an interesting question for me.

Pim wrote:

No, I don’t think Manresa can beat the top *** in France, but to call them not even fitting the category of haute cuisine, I entirely disagree with. I found Jeff’s offending sentence –at best- misguided, and entirely unsubstantiated.

(excuse me, but I do not know how to quote from one thread to another)

So, what is Haute Cuisine? What elements have to present in a dish or a restaurant to qualify. Should we really even be talking about "qualifying" for Haute Cuisine?

←

I just got around to reading the Manresa thread. The issue is clearer now. Re 'Haute Cuisine', in the present context, I think that it simply means 'highest cuisine' for the current times. I still think that it implies(or at least imo, it should imply) first class dishes made with first class(may i also add *seasonal*..for me, at least) ingredients that involves some creativity, flawless technique and precise translation of intended flavours/textures. My 2c.

[Jonathan Day]

The debate on this topic suggests that "haute cuisine" is no longer as clear cut a category as it once was.

It wasn't that long ago -- perhaps as late as the 1960s -- that most French people would have agreed an operational definition: haute cuisine was the cookery practiced in large, expensive restaurants. It was haute because of the effort and skill that it took to prepare it: making and refining stocks, preparing sauces, turning vegetables, and the like. Haute cuisine was defined by the métier (profession) of the people who prepared it. Home cooks would not practice haute cuisine, any more than they would bake bread. They didn't have the training, and they didn't have the time to do so.

Home cooks, no matter how enthusiastic, practiced cuisine bourgeoise, which didn't require the layered, labour-intensive preparations of the haute cuisine. Many restaurants offered cuisine bourgeoise, by the way. Haute cuisine wasn't inherently better, as Steven points out above. It might require a large brigade to prepare lièvre à la royale (a complex preparation of hare requiring elaborate sauce work) but if the products that went into were of poor quality, the resulting dish would be poor; anyone who has visited many of the fancy (but poor quality) restaurants in top French hotels will have experienced this. Guy Gateau's essay on the Nouvelle Cuisine pointed out that part of the "renaissance" in this movement was a sharper focus on quality ingredients. Richard Olney described much of haute cuisine as "antigastronomic" and called attention to simpler dishes, prepared with the finest ingredients.

Today, a number of changes have blurred what was once a clear distinction between haute and bourgeois cuisine.

First, the "secrets" of haute cuisine became, over time, more accessible to the public, initially through television and more recently through the Internet. Raymond Oliver, chef of the 3-star Grand Vefour, presented cookery courses on television in the 1960s and published a popular book, La Cuisine. Unlike Julia Child's television series and books, Oliver's were more oriented to the haute cuisine. The methods and culinary mannerisms of the haute cuisine could be accessed, if not mastered, without serving a formal apprenticeship in a top restaurant.

Machines became available -- for example, the vertical cutter (= Robot Coupe, Cuisinart) -- rendering some of the time-consuming practices of haute cuisine more accessible to home cooks, or to restaurant chefs who didn't command a large brigade.

Over the same period, the cost of labour (including social taxes) increased, pushing up the labour cost proportion of any item sold in a restaurant. True, high quality haute cuisine became less and less economical, except in restaurants at the very top of the scale. Menus, especially in mid-range restaurants, grew smaller and simpler, a trend that continues today with the increasing emphasis on the set, prix-fixe menu.

Another trend, again one continuing to the present, involves home cooks. Not only did machines make formerly inaccessible procedures (e.g. preparation of fish mousses) possible, but a growing number of home cooks moved toward what sociologists have termed "amateur professional" status. This is part of a larger trend that has seen people grow deeply serious about activities other than their principal profession: lawyers who see their true identity as novelists; dental hygienists who seek to attain professional levels of competence on the viola da gamba; accountants who try to make pastries as though they were in the pastry kitchen of a 3 star restaurant. Bread baking is a good example: some of the most accomplished baking I am aware of is being done either by home bakers or by career changers who started as passionate home bakers. This hasn't taken root in France as deeply it has in the US or UK, but a scan of the French internet (e.g. fr.rec.cuisine on USENET) will turn up requests for bread recipes and responses from enthusiastic home bakers.

There are other trends at work here -- for example, the move toward lower fat, simpler dishes, the mania for "Mediterranean" cuisine.

The overall outcome, though, is that haute cuisine, as it once was practiced, only turns up in a few restaurants at the very top of the scale in France -- and in the homes of enthusiastic "amateur/professional" cooks, the kind who post details of their multi-course dinners here on eGullet.