PART ONE

As a former chef and a current history teacher, I love this question! I think it's important to note that what we think of as modern "French Cuisine" is really a synthesis of many different European food cultures, evolving social and material conditions in the 19th/20th centuries, and practical changes in the way food is prepared. In general, and as a gross simplification, you could think that the prominence of France in the canon of global food traditions is not because the French invented cooking, but they may well have invented cuisine - a clearly defined, replicable system for producing multi-step dishes, especially outside the home (in restaurants and hotels, for instance). To illustrate this idea (in an admittedly simplified way), we can look at the lives of two essential French culinarians - François Pierre de la Varenne (1615–1678) and Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935).

To look quickly at the world of French cooking in the medieval and renaissance period, we can see that it, like the food cooked by most of Europe, revolved around the domestic hearth and the aristocracy. As an example of the former, 'Pottage' is a catchall term used to describe any number of dishes cooked in a clay pot in the home oven/hearth. Pottage in this sense referred not to the ingredients in question, but rather to a method of cooking (much like today we might describe a large, oven-cooked piece of meat generically as a 'roast') - the ingredients used were more a reflection of the resources of the people preparing it. In general, that responsibility fell to women, as in a 1392 recipe for 'Green Porray' (a sort of cabbage/cheese/fish soup cooked in an oven in a clay pot) from a proto-cookbook called Les Ménagier de Paris (roughly, a book for the ‘Householder of Paris’). Notably, this recipe (which lacks ingredient quantities, cooking times/temperatures, or clarification about techniques) is presented alongside practical advice for wives, for instance, “Protect him (your husband) from holes in the roof and smoky fires, and do not quarrel with him, but be sweet, pleasant, and peaceful with him.” In other words, cooking was seen as an integral part of the role women played in maintaining the home. The dishes served at peasant tables were largely repetitive presentations of the same basic ingredients - pottage, gruel, hearth-baked bread, pies, and (location-dependent) spit-roasted game meats and fish.

On the aristocratic end of things, we can see that the nobility was eating pretty comparable meals, with two key caveats. The first was the emphasis on foreign spices and exotic ingredients, and the second was the introduction of a specialized role in the noble house - the personal cook, a sort of proto-Chef. As an example of both the tendency to use exotic ingredients and trained cooks making food professionally, we can look at Guillaume Tirel, aka Taillevent (ca. 1310 - ca. 1395), the master cook for Charles V, who built on existing texts to produce one of the most influential early French cookbooks, Le Viandier. In one recipe for a ‘pear of pies,’ Taillevent stresses the use of saffron and black pepper, both expensive and relatively rare ingredients. Moreover, he describes creating a dish inside of an edible crust - a major innovation to the then-standard practice of cooking meats, fruits, and vegetables in a crust that was largely discarded after cooking in a kiln. This might seem bizarre to a modern audience used to eating tasty, edible pie crusts, but at the time it reflected a major shift from pie as a vessel to cook and transport food to a complete, edible dish in its own right. In order to reach this innovation, Taillevent had to not only have the time and resources to perfect this dish, but also the motivation from an employer who expected exciting and novel food. These innovations lay the groundwork for culinary shifts to come but were still very restricted to the nobility. It would be some three hundred years before they would more profoundly shift the overall eating culture of France.

As we come to the early seventeenth-century, French cooking culture at the time was still highly enamored with using exotic spices and recreating the lavish feasts and dishes of Italian cooks like those in Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare (ca. 1570), a nine-hundred-page magnum opus listing over a thousand recipes that the author had created while working as the master cook for a series of Popes. While this text was not translated into French, it was printed in Italy and recipes were shamelessly plagiarized from it in a number of French-language cookbooks, such as Lancelot de Casteau’s Ouverture de cuisine (1604), which contains early recipes for iconic French dishes like haricots verts (here presented as feves de Roma) and spinach quiche (here called tourte genoise). The emphasis was also largely on preparing elaborate meals for specific events or feasts - Scappi’s Opera has dozens of full menus created for Papal coronations, Saint’s Days, and other major religious events. In all cases, the dishes were clearly intended to be served simultaneously and communally, in much the same manner they had been served since the medieval era, and recipes contained as much or more information about the necessary flatware, servants, candles, and decor for a feast as specific cooking instructions (Scappi almost never uses ingredient quantities, for instance).

Enter François Pierre de la Varenne (1615–1678). Varenne was a lifelong cook, starting as a boy scrubbing pots and turning the meat-spit, and was initially schooled in the preeminent cooking style of the era - Italian. Varenne demonstrated remarkable gifts in logistical organization, cooking, and personal presentation from an early age. This was evidenced by his securing a position as a kitchen steward for the Marquis d’Uxelles, a friend and advisor to the King - that a commoner was elevated to this position speaks volumes to his personal talents. Varenne worked for decades before producing the first major French cookbook since Taillevent’s Le Viander - Le Cuisiner Français (1651). In this text, Varenne not only described many of the Italian dishes from Scappi and his contemporaries, he did so using rich and sensual French language, emphasizing local produce, and referring to standardized base components (i.e. stocks and sauces). In one representative recipe for ‘Asparagus with White Sauce,’ Varenne explicitly tells the reader to use the (French, local) vegetable, ‘as they come from the garden,’ and stresses that they are cooked as minimally as possible to preserve color and flavor. He then goes on to effectively copy-paste a recipe for a 'white sauce' (an early version of a sauce hollandaise) - one of several standardized sauces that are precursors to the modern French ‘mother sauces.’ Varenne also gave new, French names to existing techniques 'borrowed' from Italian and Spanish cuisine, refined a number of other cooking methods (using flour and butter to make roux instead of bread crumbs and lard, for instance), and, perhaps most importantly, liberally inserted quotes, prominent names, and instructive or amusing anecdotes throughout the work. In other words, Varenne wrote something more than just a collection of recipes - he wrote a book offering an overarching idea about the role that food played and what cooking should mean - not merely ‘food cooked in France’ but French cuisine. Varenne followed up his first book with two more dealing with pastries and confection-making, in both cases codifying a specific vision of French food and inventing a larger narrative about what that food said about an emerging national culture.

Edited for grammar/formatting.