Haute cuisine
Haute cuisine (French: [ot kɥizin]; lit. 'high cooking') or grande cuisine is a style of cooking characterised by meticulous preparation, elaborate presentation, and the use of high quality ingredients. Typically prepared by highly skilled gourmet chefs, haute cuisine dishes are renowned for their high quality and are often offered at premium prices.
Early history
Haute cuisine represents the cooking and eating of carefully prepared food from regular and premium ingredients, prepared by specialized chefs, and commissioned by those with the financial wherewithal to do so.[1] It has had a long evolution through the monarchy and the bourgeoisie and their ability to explore and afford prepared dishes with exotic and varied flavors and looking like architectural wonders. Haute cuisine distinguished itself from regular French cuisine by what was cooked and served, by obtaining premium ingredients such as fruit out of season, and by using ingredients not typically found in France.[2]
Trained kitchen staff was essential to the birth of haute cuisine in France, which was organized at the turn of the 20th century by
Haute cuisine is influenced by French cuisine with elaborate preparations and presentations that serves small, multiple courses prepared by a hierarchical kitchen staff, historically at the grand restaurants and hotels of Europe. The cuisine was very rich and opulent, with decadent sauces made out of butter, cream, and flour, the basis for many typical French sauces still in use today.[4] The 17th-century chef and writer La Varenne (1615-1678) marked a change from cookery as known in the Middle Ages, to somewhat lighter dishes, and more modest presentations. Subsequently, Antonin Carême (1784-1833) also published works on cooking, and he simplified and codified an earlier and even more complex cuisine. Nineteenth-century French haute cuisine interacted with the development of fine dining in Britain.[5]
Contrary to popular belief, Catherine de' Medici did not introduce Italian food to the French court to create haute cuisine.[6]
Cuisine classique
Nouvelle cuisine
The 1960s were marked by the appearance of nouvelle cuisine, as chefs rebelled from Escoffier's "orthodoxy" and complexity. Although the term nouvelle cuisine had been used in the past, the modern usage can be attributed to authors André Gayot,[7] Henri Gault, and Christian Millau, who used nouvelle cuisine to describe the cooking of Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé and Raymond Oliver, many of whom were once students of Fernand Point.[8]
In general, nouvelle cuisine puts an emphasis on natural flavours, so the freshest possible ingredients are used, preparation is simplified, heavy sauces are less common, as are strong marinades for meat, and cooking times are often reduced. Nouvelle cuisine was a movement towards conceptualism and minimalism and was a direct juxtaposition to earlier haute cuisine styles of cooking, which were much more extravagant. While menus were increasingly short, dishes used more inventive pairings and relied on inspiration from regional dishes.[8]
Within 20 years, however, chefs began returning to the earlier style of haute cuisine, although many of the new techniques remained.[8]
See also
The dictionary definition of haute cuisine at Wiktionary
References
- ^ "What is Haute Cuisine?". 6 December 2021.
- ISBN 978-0807046296.
- ISBN 978-0812217766.
- ISBN 978-0415936286.
- ^
Trubek, Amy B. (4 December 2000). "The British". Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (reprint ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (published 2000). p. 46. ISBN 9780812217766. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
The Reform Club's stellar culinary reputation reveals the profound interconnection between fine dining and French haute cuisine that consolidated in Britain during the 1800s.
- ^ Wheaton, Barbara. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. Simon and Schuster. pp. 43–51.
- ^ André Gayot, "Of Stars and Tripes: The True Story of Nouvelle Cuisine"
- ^ a b c Mennel, Stephan. All Manners of Food: eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present. 2nd ed., (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 163-164.
Further reading
- Cooking, Cuisine and Class, A Study in Comparative Sociology, Jack Goody, University of Cambridge, June 1982, ISBN 978-0-521-28696-1
- Food and love: a cultural history of East and West By Jack Goody, Verso (April 1999), ISBN 978-1-859-84829-6
- Tasting food, tasting freedom: excursions into eating, culture, and the past by Sidney Wilfred Mintz Beacon Press (1997) - ISBN 0-8070-4629-9
- Taillevent, medieval manuscript
- Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession By Amy B. Trubek, ISBN 978-0-8122-1776-6
- Food culture in France By Julia Abramson, Greenwood Press (November 2006), ISBN 978-0-313-32797-1
- Patrick Rambourg, Histoire de la cuisine et de la gastronomie françaises, Paris, Ed. Perrin (coll. tempus n° 359), 2010, 381 pages. ISBN 978-2-262-03318-7
