French cuisine — 1533, Catherine de Medici myth

The home pantry around Mirepoix and the labour behind Baguette rarely fit a takeaway box. Are restaurant versions "authentic"? Restaurant French cuisine is one register. Home pots and market stalls are others. Authenticity is a marketing word; technique is not. Cuisine française is the local name used in this atlas beside French cuisine.

French cuisine is regional before it is Parisian: Provençal olive and garlic, Breton butter and cider, Alsatian choucroute, Lyonnais offal, Basque chili-adjacent piperade. The baguette and the stockpot are the national tools. Street France is thin: bakery queues, roast-chicken trucks, market oysters. The meal is still a table with bread, not a stool and a wok.

French cuisine is organised by wine / cheese / charcuterie and bread. Paris concentrates restaurants; it does not erase cassoulet country or the butter line west of the Loire. Butter, cream, wine, stock and cheese are the north-central bass. Olive oil and garlic take the south. Charcuterie and cheese are fermented/aged systems as serious as any Asian jar wall.