Skip to content Skip to a section
The table

French cuisine — Restaurant birth · 138

Onion-carrot-celery base of stocks and stews. 138 Cheese is a course and a ferment, not a garnish. On the table, French cuisine follows “Restaurant birth” with amount 2010. Stars are not cook times. Lamination in croissant and puff; baguette crust; the silk of a proper sauce.

The home pantry around Mirepoix and the labour behind Baguette rarely fit a takeaway box. 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. Provence, Brittany, Alsace, Southwest and Lyon are mutually unintelligible tables. 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.

2010 belongs to “Restaurant birth” in 1789. French cuisine is not a sentence about taste until that measure is there. On the table, French cuisine follows “Restaurant birth” with amount 2010. Stars are not cook times. 20101789

Figures to keep

Year of the method
1789
Measure
2010
Dish
French cuisine
Cooking line
Restaurant birth

German cuisine — National cuisine talk · 139Next essayAll 1000 essays1000