Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

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As early as the 17th century,
England had a fascination with the
Continent and with French chefs.
More often than not, when English
gentry wanted to eat well, they
imported a French chef, a pattern
that continued for most of the next
350 years.
Cooking traditions were documented in
cookbooks with period recipes and
techniques, as well as in paintings like
these: a cook preparing liver alongside a
butcher in a 14th-century kitchen (left)
and an elaborate medieval Italian banquet
(right).
clientele. Common people sought to adopt some
of the finer things in life by copying the dishes
served at royal tables.
Countries with a long history of a large and
stable aristocracy or ruling class developed the
most complex, highly refined, and elaborate
cuisines. These were the people who could
employ professional chefsand use food as a
form of one-upmanship.
France is perhaps the best example. Despite
having a vibrant regional peasant cuisine, France
has been dominated by aristocratic food for
centuries. Early on, French nobles and other
members of the ruling class used dinners as status
symbols. Most of the early French chefs, such as
La Varenne and Antonin Carême (see Early
French Gastronomy, next page), climbed the
career ladder by trading up to ever more powerful
and wealthy patrons.
France is especially interesting because it
achieved renown for its cooking very early. La
Varenne’s book Le Cuisinier François, published in
1651, was translated into English in 1653. Titled
The French Cook, the English edition included the
following preface, which took the form of a dedication
to a wealthy patron (as was customary at the
time):
TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE
John, Earl of Tannet
My very good Lord. Of all Cookes in the
World the French are esteem’d the best, and
of all Cookes that ever France bred up, this
may very well challenge the first place, as the
neatest and compleatest that ever attend the
French Court and Armies. I have taught him
to speak English, to the end that he may be
able to wait in your Lordships Kitchin; and
furth your Table with severall Sauces of haut
goust, & with dainty ragousts, and sweet
meats, as yet hardly known in this Land.
Besides the quaint punctuation and spelling, this
preface clearly lays out what would be the story for
the next three centuries: France had a reputation
for having the world’s best chefs.
Chinese food is another example of an aristocratically
driven cuisine. The enormous variety of
Chinese dishes stems from the imperial court,
which governed China for more than a thousand
years (under one dynasty or another). The same sort
of thing occurred with the Moghul rulers of northern
India and with the kings of Thailand. In each
country, the monarchy and its cadre of bureaucrats
and aristocrats supported full-time, professional
chefs, who created a rich and varied cuisine.
England also had an elaborate monarchy, which
ruled for a thousand years, but the geography
made the development of a sophisticated cuisine
difficult. Plant and animal diversity is a direct
result of climate: a cold climate leads to relatively
low diversity, providing less varied ingredients for
a chef to work with.
As a result, far northern (or in the Southern
Hemisphere, far southern) cuisines do not have
the variety of dishes that equatorial regions
produce. The Viking kings of Scandinavia and
the tsars of Russia had well-established courts
T HE HISTORY O F
Early French Gastronomy
French cuisine was arguably born in the 17th century. The
surviving cookbooks before that point from France, England,
and Italy show a remarkable uniformity, describing
food heavily spiced, mainly with ginger, cinnamon, and
black pepper. The use of spices and the flavor profiles were
virtually identical in all three countries.
But in the 1650s and 1660s, French chefs and cookbook
authors began to take a radical new approach to food that
emphasized fresh ingredients and flavor for its own sake.
Writers François Pierre de La Varenne (in Le Cuisinier François,
1651) and Nicolas de Bonnefons (in Les Délices de la
Campagne, 1654) extolled the virtues of vegetables prepared
with simple seasonings that allowed their true flavors
to shine. These authors also helped systematize culinary
skills by identifying basic sauces and flavorings, such as
roux, mayonnaise, and velouté.
The next major advancement in French
gastronomy came in the early 19th century,
Le Cuisinier Francois (The French Chef) was La Varenne’s
master work.
after the French Revolution. Antonin
Carême became famous by cooking for
royalty (including Napoleon and Britain’s
future king George IV) and the extremely
wealthy (including the Rothschilds of
Paris). Carême disliked the cuisine of the
prerevolutionary regime and aimed to
create a culinary ethic befitting the new
France. In his multivolume book L’Art de la
Cuisine Française aux XIX e Siècle (1833–
1834), he advanced the notion that cuisine
was both an art and a science. The revolution
also helped spur the development of
restaurants, as the cooks of the deposed
aristocracy looked for work. Carême
Antonin Carême was a chef to royalty.
nately, Brillat-Savarin died of pneumonia
two months after the book’s publication.
A few decades later, building on
Carême’s developments, chef and author
Georges Auguste Escoffier systematized
French cooking in a way that had never
been done before. His Le Guide Culinaire
(1903) lists dishes according to their order
of presentation and includes the first à la
carte menu. Escoffier radically simplified
food service by advocating the abandonment
of elaborate garnishes and the use of
seasonal ingredients. He also streamlined
the organization of professional kitchens.
brought into French restaurant kitchens a new emphasis on
sanitation and purity, but he also prized beautiful presentations,
rich ingredients, and good service. His ideas quickly
caught on in Parisian restaurants and the rest of France.
Around the same time, lawyer and politician Jean Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin was developing the concept of gourmandise.
In his book, Physiologie du Goût (1825), he explained
that humans distinguish themselves from other animals by
treating food not only as nourishment but also as art. This
collection of recipes, essays, and stories about food instantly
became a best seller (to the great envy of Carême). Unfortu-
Escoffier’s friend Prosper Montagné, a chef in the kitchens
of high-end European hotels such as The Ritz, helped
disseminate Escoffier’s views in his 1938 book Larousse
Gastronomique. This encyclopedic tome, which remains in
print to this day, contained 3,500 recipes, plus a wealth of
information about culinary history, cooking techniques,
ingredients, and more. It is considered one of the definitive
works on classical French cuisine—a culinary style that held
sway for roughly three decades after Escoffier’s death in
1935. At that point, it was supplanted by Nouvelle cuisine
(see page 24).
8 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 9