What many of us think of as “French cuisine” is actually haute cuisine, the cuisine that evolved from the aristocratic cuisine of the royalty. This cuisine was centered mainly in Paris and Versailles. Regional cuisine as we know it today did not even exist at the time, since regions didn’t exist until after the Revolution. Until the Revolution, there were provinces and feudal “kingdoms,” abolished afterward. Cuisine bourgeoise, the cooking of the upper middle classes and later middle classes, developed after the Revolution, and gradually filtered down to the broader population.
Regions didn’t formally exist by name until 1890, so there was little meaning attached to the word “region”. One cooked and ate what was available, what one grew and raised and that varied widely. Even the gruel was made with different grains in different regions. Regions only formed an identity after this. Knowledge of regional cuisines increased as travel became easier and accessible to all, especially after the generalization of cars.
French cuisine has always consisted of two tiers: haute cuisine and regional cuisine. Elements of haute cuisine — the cuisine that we inherited from the courts and later the affluent bourgeoisie, the cuisine that elevated sauce-making to an art form — have over the centuries infiltrated the cuisine of the regions, and regional cuisine is the lifeline and wherein lies the future.
Sauces were once the domain of French haute cuisine, aristocratic food. This started changing after the Revolution, first in the bourgeoisie, who copied the ways of the former royalty, and eventually in restaurants.
In France, there have always been sauces. Even the Franks and the Gauls moistened their food with a “flavored liquid.”
French cuisine, influenced by Roman cuisine, saw the first sauce recipes using meat jus in the fifth and sixth centuries, and were then called saulce. To the jus was added vinegar, wine, acidic fruits and spices. The Romans had already used ginger and cloves, but in the eleventh century, the Crusaders brought back others from the Levant, including cinnamon, the most commonly used, galangal (or ginger), coriander seeds, cumin, nutmeg, cardamom, saffron, grains of paradise and pepper. The acidic quality was often given to sauces through the addition of verjus, made from green grapes, which are not yet sweet in flavor and remain acidic, or with other acidic fruit such as apple, lemon or plums. Verjus is still used in French sauces.
Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent (after whom a Paris palace of gastronomy is named), wrote the first known cookbook, Le Viandier, around 1375. Stews and other slow-cooked dishes didn’t yet exist; most meat was boiled or cooked over a spit, i.e. quite plain, so sauces were a way to liven them up. About thirty sauces have been recorded during the medieval period. They of course featured in the cuisine of the well-to-do; most common people were still eating gruel, as they always had.
During the Renaissance, spices dropped out of French cuisine. It was the halcyon days for sauces, which proliferated. Slow-cooked sauces were invented using fonds, mirepoix, butter and flour for thickening. Simple jus and coulis became common. Recipes for green sauces from Italy using new ingredients and herbs were also popular and easy to make since herbs were plentiful and grew wild in even the coldest parts of France.
It was La Varenne in the seveneenth century who started precisely defining sauces and how they’re made and documented roux, which then consisted of a paste of flour and lard for thickening:
Thickening of flowre
Melt some lard, take out the mammocks; put your flowre into your melted lard, seeth it well, but have a care it stick not to the pan, mix some onion with it proportionably. When it is enough, put all with good broth, mushrums and a drop of vinegar. Then after it hath boiled with its seasoning, pass all through the strainer and put it in a pot. When you will use it, you shall set it upon warm embers for to thicken or allay your sauces.—The French Cook, Francois Pierre La Varenne
To the “low-fat” sauces of the Middle Ages were added bread, eggs and cream, making them much heavier, and herbs replaced spices from the Orient. Roux was the thickener of choice. Beurre blanc and hollandaise sauce accompanied pike, a popular dish.
In the eighteenth century, Carême perfected the art of sauce making and was the first to classify the mother sauces: béchamel, espagnole, velouté, and allemande. Auguste Escoffier later refined this list to the contemporary five mother sauces by dropping allemande as a daughter sauce of velouté, adding hollandaise and sauce tomate, in his classic Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1903.
Today, French people of all social and economic classes eat sauce. It is not restricted to the wealthy or the aristocrats. Just about anyone can whip up mayonnaise without a recipe.
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Jonell Galloway grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She is a freelance writer. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris and the Académie du Vin, worked for the GaultMillau restaurant guide and CityGuides in France and Paris and for Gannett Company in the U.S., and collaborated on Le tour du monde en 80 pains / Around the World with 80 Breads with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France; André Raboud, Sculptures 2002-2009 in Switzerland; Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, and a biography of French chef Pierre Gagnaire. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. She organizes the Taste Unlocked bespoke food and wine tasting awareness workshops with James Flewellen, is an active member of Slow Food, and runs the food writing website The Rambling Epicure. Her work has been published in numerous international publications and she has been interviewed on international public radio in France, Switzerland, and the U.S. She has just signed on at In Search of Taste, a British print publication, and is now working on two books, The French and What They Eat and What to Eat in Venice.
We sponsored a Twitter chat “Is French Cuisine Dead?” a couple of months ago. You can view the discussions here or by searching the hashtag #FutureFrenchCuisine.
Haute cuisine may well be unaffordable for ordinary people — it always has been — but regional cuisine is what the people eat and remains affordable. It is eaten in local bistros, which are reasonably priced and nowhere near disappearing; it is eaten in homes. French regional cuisine is a reflection of the soil, people and language, a reflection of the seasons and family; it is what memories are made of. It is the product of a place and of a people and the French people are very much alive.
“…..an ignorant and pretentious bunch try to improve on what is already the finest….. The improviser sets himself up at the stove just as he does anywhere else. With his eyes turned to heaven instead of on his saucepans, he drops in a pinch of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette powder here, a spoonful of brandy there, and somewhere else, something even worse — a few drops of custard! He uses any old stuffing, he dribbles in some frightful additive. . .. Old words, classic terms, and traditions are all flouted by these priests of improvisation — it seems that we are a long way removed from the discreet combinations of flavors, thought out at length, that were once the basis of French gourmandise. . . “.–Colette (Sidonie Gabrielle), French novelist, in Prisons et Paradis, 1933
Known as Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, born into an upper middle class family, in France. She spent most of her childhood in Burgundy, and also maintained her taste for the freedom that country life lent. In Paris, she lived the Bohemian life and frequented the salons of the period. She started by writing for musical halls, signed by her first husband, and even showed up at the Moulin Rouge dressed as a man, but went on to journalism and literature. Her books remained in the spirit of music halls, often shocking the public with their explicit descriptions of sex and the senses.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine.
