by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: January 03, 2009

France is famous for its cuisine simply because it is a country which has acquired a "reputation" for placing great emphasis on the art of preparing and consuming food. As one who has spent many years studying the culinary art forms and sampling different foods, of different types, from all around the planet, I personally believe French cuisine to be decidedly below average, in that it is generally extremely unhealthy - prepared as it is with an excess of saturated fat - and includes recipes far too complex to be considered of decent quality. Please allow me to explain...

The art of food preparation is not about who can devise the most complex recipe known to man and present it in a way which is aesthetically pleasing enough to merit its inclusion in a display in a modern art museum. Quality food preparation is about using the freshest of healthy ingredients and combining them in a simple and delicious way which tantalises the pallet without overwhelming the flavours of those same component ingredients.

I will give you a perfect example of what I mean in order to hopefully illustrate my point. I was eating in an extremely popular and well known French restaurant one evening when I happened to notice scallops on the menu. Being a great lover of fresh seafood, I immediately plumped for this option and looked forward with relish to the arrival of the dish. I was horrified! The scallops came with a thick, creamy sauce, which totally overwhelmed their delicate and natural flavours and essentially ruined them beyond repair. My meal - if not my entire evening - was ruined and I have never again set foot in that restaurant.

It is my perception that French chefs have a compulsion for outdoing one another in that each wishes to be the one who serves the most elaborate, most technically difficult and - consequently - the most gastronomically repulsive concoction on the menu. Why do they feel the need to have a list of ingredients the length of their forearms? Why do they have to drown beautiful fresh produce in those rich and over-powering sauces? Why can't those supposedly highly qualified chefs stop for a moment, look at what they are doing and realise how they are totally destroying food in the way which nature intended us to enjoy it?

I will never know precisely how or why France attained the reputation it has in the culinary world but until it can stand back and look at its own cuisine, learn from masters of the craft such as the Chinese, and put these principals in to practise, it will never be worthy of that reputation it to this day so widely enjoys.

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