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France was a country impeded by civil wars and wars with the British. Cooking took refuge in monasteries and convents by 750 A.D. When the Merovingian era ended, the tradition of French cooking came to be defined.
French cooking, because it was not changed and people still used food grown from the land. French cuisine was inspired because of each chateaux or castle hoarded all the traditional recipes of France.
France's cuisine was influenced by many different factors and by the wealth and people that lived there.
The wealthy people of France showed their wealth by buying spices, new and exotic from the east, and produced that was introduced from the new world. The chateaux, collected some of the traditional recipes of France and experimented by added the exotic spices and new produce. The kitchens were more organized and planned out at the chateaux. The chef's were separated into groups, for example one would kill and de-feather a chicken, while another chef is working on a making sausages.
Gastronomy as a profession formed in the first half of the 1800's.
The rise of restaurant's culinary journalists, defining culinary knowledge with different chefs and formalizing the French cuisine made gastronomy form. The chef's during the old ancient regime cuisine were only available to private patrons and nobles. The only way they could service the public was to open up restaurants. The reason that they opened up restaurants, because after the French Revolution, Antonin Carme felt that the old cuisine, chefs that
worked just for the wealthy people, had to change. Since the old government was thrown, he wanted to bring the cuisine to the people, and other chefs followed because he was a great influence on them.
About eighty percent of France's population was subsistence farmers. The diet of the peasant's of France consisted of mostly vegetable protein because that is what they could grow. This lasted for two centuries, until the storming of Bastille. In 1789 when the Bastille (French Revolution) was stormed it changed the future of events for the French, because it helped to rid of Aristocracy, which made food a social position for the wealthy people of France. The rulers of the Bourgeoisie cuisine, after the fall of
Aristocracy, started to recreate the peasant cuisine to better fit the wealthier people. Thus came along the beginnings of Haute cuisine. There were still about two-thirds of the poor people in France still starving. It
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