French cuisine is the cooking traditions and practices from France. It has been influenced over the centuries by the many surrounding cultures of Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium, in addition to the food traditions of the regions and colonies of France.
Larousse Gastronomique is an encyclopedia of gastronomy. The majority of the book is about French cuisine, and contains recipes for French dishes and cooking techniques. The first edition included few non-French dishes and ingredients; later editions include many more. The book was originally published by Éditions Larousse in Paris in 1938.
In cooking, a sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi-solid food, served on or used in preparing other foods. Most sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavor, moisture, and visual appeal to a dish. Sauce is a French word taken from the Latin salsa, meaning salted. Possibly the oldest recorded European sauce is garum, the fish sauce used by the Ancient Romans, while doubanjiang, the Chinese soy bean paste is mentioned in Rites of Zhou in the 3rd century BC.
Fines herbes designates an important combination of herbs that forms a mainstay of French cuisine. The canonical fines herbes of French haute cuisine comprise finely chopped parsley, chives, tarragon, and chervil. These are employed in seasoning delicate dishes, such as chicken, fish, and eggs, that need a relatively short cooking period; they may also be used in a beurre blanc sauce for seasoning such dishes. Fines herbes are also eaten raw in salads.
A mirepoix is a flavor base made from diced vegetables cooked—usually with butter, oil, or other fat—for a long time on low heat without coloring or browning. Further cooking, with the addition of tomato purée, creates a darkened brown mixture called pinçage. It is not sautéed or otherwise hard-cooked, because the intention is to sweeten the ingredients rather than caramelize them. It is a long-standing cooking technique in French cuisine.
Marie-Antoine Carême, known as Antonin Carême, was a leading French chef of the early 19th century.
Haute cuisine or grande cuisine is the cuisine of "high-level" establishments, gourmet restaurants, and luxury hotels. Haute cuisine is characterized by the meticulous preparation and careful presentation of food at a high price.
Hollandaise sauce, also called Dutch sauce, is a mixture of egg yolk, melted butter, and lemon juice. It is usually seasoned with salt, and either white pepper or cayenne pepper.
Blanquette de veau is a French veal stew. In the classic version of the dish the meat is simmered in a white stock and served in a sauce velouté enriched with cream and egg. It is among the most popular meat dishes in France.
Béarnaise sauce is a sauce made of clarified butter emulsified in egg yolks and white wine vinegar and flavored with herbs. It is widely regarded as the "child" of the Hollandaise sauce. The difference is only in the flavoring: Béarnaise uses shallot, chervil, peppercorns, and tarragon in a reduction of vinegar and wine, while Hollandaise is made of a reduction of lemon juice or white wine vinegar, with white peppercorns and a pinch of cayenne instead of the above seasonings.
Nouvelle cuisine is an approach to cooking and food presentation in French cuisine. In contrast to cuisine classique, an older form of haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine is characterized by lighter, more delicate dishes and an increased emphasis on presentation. It was popularized in the 1960s by the food critic Henri Gault, who invented the phrase, and his colleagues André Gayot and Christian Millau in a new restaurant guide, the Gault-Millau, or Le Nouveau Guide.
A velouté sauce is a savory sauce that is made from a roux and a light stock. It is one of the "mother sauces" of French cuisine listed by chef Auguste Escoffier in the early twentieth century, along with espagnole, tomato, béchamel, and mayonnaise or hollandaise. Velouté is French for 'velvety'.
An éclair is a pastry made with choux dough filled with a cream and topped with a flavored icing. The dough, which is the same as that used for profiterole, is typically piped into an oblong shape with a pastry bag and baked until it is crisp and hollow inside. Once cool, the pastry is filled with custard, whipped cream or chiboust cream, then iced with fondant icing. Other fillings include pistachio- and rum-flavoured custard, fruit-flavoured fillings, or chestnut purée. The icing is sometimes caramel, in which case the dessert may be called a bâton de Jacob. A similar pastry in a round rather than oblong shape is called a Religieuse.
Beef bourguignon or bœuf bourguignon, also called beef Burgundy, and bœuf à la Bourguignonne, is a French beef stew braised in red wine, often red Burgundy, and beef stock, typically flavored with carrots, onions, garlic, and a bouquet garni, and garnished with pearl onions, mushrooms, and bacon. A similar dish using a piece of braised beef with the same garnish is pièce de bœuf à la bourguignonne.
Prosper Montagné was one of the most renowned French chefs of the Belle Époque and author of many books and articles on food, cooking, and gastronomy, notably Larousse Gastronomique (1938), an encyclopedic dictionary of the French culinary arts. While Montagné was once as famous as his friend Auguste Escoffier, and was one of the most influential French chefs of the early twentieth century, his fame seems to have faded somewhat over the years. In the 1920s, Montagné, Escoffier, and Philéas Gilbert -- their close friend and collaborator, and an acclaimed chef and writer in his own right -- were the French chefs and culinary writers esteemed above others by many French journalists and writers. After Montagné's death, the chef and author Alfred Guérot's description of the troika as the "celebrated contemporary culinary trinity: Auguste Escoffier, the father; Philéas Gilbert, the son; Prosper Montagné, the spirit" reflects the reverence in which all three were held by the French culinary community.
À la Maréchale is a method of food preparation in haute cuisine. Dishes à la Maréchale are made from tender pieces of meat, such as cutlets, escalopes, supremes, sweetbreads, or fish, which are treated à l'anglaise ("English-style"), i.e. coated with eggs and bread crumbs, and sautéed.
L'Art culinaire was a biweekly gastronomical magazine for professional chefs founded in Paris in 1882 by Maurice Dancourt, who later used the pseudonym Châtillon-Plessis. Its first issue appeared as a supplement to La Petite Revue illustrée: littéraire, artistique et gastronomique in January 1883. Its editors and contributors included Philéas Gilbert, Auguste Escoffier, and other leading chefs. In the 1890s, it was edited by Châtillon-Plessis and became "the leading professional culinary journal in the world", with contributors across Europe and North America, and a claimed readership of 10,000. During the first World War, it was published irregularly, and after the war, it lost prestige and contributors, including Escoffier, Gilbert, and Prosper Montagné, to La Revue culinaire. Its last issue was in 1953.
In French cuisine, the mother sauces, also known as grandes sauces in French, are a group of sauces upon which many other sauces – "daughter sauces" or petites sauces – are based. Different sets and classifications of mother sauces have been proposed since at least the early 19th century.
