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1600 BCE
cuisine bourgeoise (home cooking), and haute cuisine (high cooking.)
The haute cuisine is refined, complicated cooking done by highly trained people. But nowadays, with kitchen appliances and tools, more haute cuisine cooking can be imitated in homes.
French sauces are based on fat and starch. While it’s now fashionable to look down on these sauces.They replaced Medieval sauces, which were all at once vinegary, sweet and spicy, and overwhelming in taste. In the 1600s, the use of many spices such as cumin, cardamom, anise, etc, diminished in French cooking. -
1500 BCE
the historical background of French food goes back to the medieval times.
French cuisine was fundamentally the same as Moorish Cuisine. It was availed in a manner called service en confusion, meaning that meals were served at the same time. Meals comprised of spiced meats, for example, pork, poultry, beef, and fish. -
Restaurant-ing around French restaurants in the 1700s
By the 1700s, every aristocrat had a room designated as a dining room and a permanent, dedicated dining table. Fork use in France also began at this time. It’s acknowledged by everyone now,it’s a myth that Catherine de Medici introduced the fork to France. Its introduction simply came through contact between Italy and France.By the early 1700s in France, the use of a fork in good society was though some nobility, such as King Louis XIV, couldn’t be bothered with one would still eat with fingers. -
1783, Marie-Antoine Carême
Marie-Antoine Carême
was a French chef and an early practitioner and exponent of the elaborate style of cooking known as grande cuisine, the "high art" of French cooking: a grandiose style of cookery in Paris.
The French Revolution was very important to the culinary world because it abolished the guilds.
Now, any chef could produce and sell any food he wanted without being restricted by the government. -
First French cookbook
Late 18th through early 19th centuries
French chef who wrote the first French cookbook in 1651 started a change in French cuisine after the Middle Ages- worked toward lighter dishes and more modest presentations; published another book on baking in 1667.
marinade is first seen in print in La Varenne's 1691 cookbook, with one type for poultry and feathered game and a second for fish and shellfish. -
Miscellaneous French Food History Facts
By 1790, the French were eating 1.8 pounds of sugar per head per year. In France, by 1830, wheat was 51% of the grain consumed. Rye and buckwheat combined were 39%; By 1812 in France, potato consumption per year was 45 pounds per head by 1844, 4 times that; by 1913, 350 pounds per head.
In 1876, Charles Tellier, a French engineer who designed meat refrigerators on land, built a refrigerated ship called “Le Frigorifique”, and used it to transport meat from Buenos Aires to France in 105 days. -
Georges Auguste Escoffier
Georges Auguste Escoffier
revolution of the preparation of food
Escoffier is known for modernizing the way to prepare a dish, especially in restaurants.
Before, one restaurant cook would take a long time to prepare every component of a meal by himself.
Escoffier created the modern 'brigade system,' where there are separate cooks to prepare each component of a dish, making cook time faster. -
Le Guide Culinaire
French cookbook written by Escoffier, with the help of Philéas Gilbert and many other chefs laid out the fundamentals of French cuisine. This book is very noteworthy because of the fact that so many high-profile French chefs got together and agreed on these fundamentals and on new styles of French cooking deemphasized the use of heavy sauces and leaned toward lighter fumets
1960, Nouvelle Cuisine - 'New Cuisine'
