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Lyonnaise cuisine refers to cooking traditions and practices centering on the area around the French city of Lyon[1] and historical Lyonnais culinary traditions.
In the 16th century,
Catherine de Medici brought cooks from Florence to her court and they prepared dishes from agricultural products from many regions of France
. This was revolutionary, as it combined the fresh, diverse and indigenous nature of regional produce with the know-how of Florentine cooks.
The result was that regional specialities were elevated in status among royalty and nobility. Lyonnaise cuisine became a crossroads of many regional culinary traditions. A surprising variety of ingredients from many nearby places emerged: summer vegetables from farms in
Rhone Valley
.
In the 19th century, middle-class women, nicknamed the "Lyonnaise mothers", left their homes to work as cooks and created brand new culinary traditions incorporating their regional roots.
In 1935, the food critic Curnonsky described the city of Lyon as the "world capital of gastronomy".
In the 21st century, Lyon's cuisine is defined by simplicity and quality, and is exported to other parts of France and abroad. With more than a thousand eateries, the city of Lyon has one of the highest concentrations of restaurants per capita in France.
History
Antiquity
The history of Lyon cuisine begins in antiquity at Lugdunum, the capital of the Three Gauls monopoly on the wine trade. Oil and brine were imported from Africa and the south of Spain. The wine trade was well-documented even before the arrival of Roman settlers in the region: trade in wine during the 2nd century AD is known to have occurred in the alluvial plain of the Vaise. Italian wines from the Tyrrhenian coast were also present.
A new population of Roman settlers brought Mediterranean flavors, new products and new food habits: the wines of Italy gave way to Greek wines, from
Cnidus, from Kos, and also wine from Chios, reputed to be the most expensive and luxurious wine. During the 1st century AD, wine from further places arrived, like wine from Crete and the Levant. At the end of the 2nd century AD, wines from other parts of Roman Gaul
arrived.
It was not until the 3rd and 4th centuries that wine from more exotic locations like Tunisia arrived. Septimanus was a well-known cook from Lugdunum, who has been documented in historical texts. He had an inn on the site of the present Rue Saint Helena and was renowned for cooking pork and game birds properly.
Renaissance
During the
Gargantua. In the story, Gargamelle gave birth to her son Gargantua after eating a great amount of "skewered tripe", or grand planté de tripe in French
.
The first edition of Pantagruel, another novel by Rabelais, published in Lyon in 1532 before Gargantua, is inspired by the adventures of a comedic doctor who is said to be inspired by the Lyonnaise comportment. The book evokes Lyonnaise cuisine, citing a list of dishes: "sausage, sausage, ham, sausages, huge wild boar roasts with garlic sauce, pluck, fricandeau, fat capons in white Mangier, hochepots, beef stew, cabirotades, hastereaux, game animals and birds, stuffed lamb, stuffed carp, whitefish, annealed (cheese flavored with peach leaves), crackers and macaroons (dry cakes), fruit jellies, fritters, and so on".
Erasmus, a Renaissance humanist, hired many chefs from the city of Lyon: "It is better at home than when we are at a hotel in Lyon… the Lyonnaise mother comes first to greet you, begging you to be happy and to accept food.” The city had specialized in the preparation of certain foods, as evidenced even in place names: rue de la Fromagerie (Cheese Shop Street), rue Poulaillerie (Poulterer Street), rue Mercière (Merchant's Street).
18th century to present
It was in the eighteenth century that
ice cream was introduced to Lyon by an Italian, Spreafico. The modern culinary reputation of Lyon was truly born with the publication of a poem by Joseph de Berchoux, glorifying the local cuisine. He was born in Roanne in 1760, and moved to Lyon in 1770. His work, Gastronomie ou l'homme des champs à table, which was translated into several languages, introduced the idea of "eating well" in French culture and dispersed the new word "gastronomy
".
It precedes the works of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod, which would later perpetuate Berchoux's praise of the art of eating well. This "art" would become a specific middle-class characteristic of French society in the nineteenth century. The poem reads:
"Want to succeed in the art I profess?
Have a good castle in Auvergne or Bresse
Or rather places near Lyon sees passing
Two rivers lovers ready to embrace;
Will you get this under favorable sky
Everything that can serve the sweets table."
A book by Amable Leroy, La cuisinière bourgeoise, published in 1783, invented and immortalized recipes that would make Lyonnaise cuisine famous.
In the last years of the eighteenth century the first modern-style restaurants would appear, some of which still exist today. There is Déduit, located at the top of rue Romarin, known for its calf's head specialty. It was also during this period that the Lyonnaise mothers would appear. They were master
Pike
.
In 1816, the poet Joanny Carmouche, a member of the Epicurean Society of Lyon brought together gourmets with verse:
"The desserts are eaten,
Cutlery line up,
Women arrange ...
At the dock, it happens
A marmot absconds
(Without paying the bill!)
Far from River
The working class
Roast chicken ...
But each request:
What is this band
Bacchus order?
- They are rascals
Fleeing the river
Who, then, in River
Every month will be
Epicureans."
Stendhal, passing through Lyon in 1837, evoked Lyonnaise cuisine:
"I know one thing that is done very well in Lyon. One eats admirably well there, and in my opinion, better than in Paris. Vegetables especially are divinely prepared. In London, I learned that there are twenty-two species of potatoes, in Lyon, I saw twenty-two different ways to prepare them, and at least twelve of these are unknown in Paris".
The Lyonnaise mothers become so famous that the gourmet Maurice Edmond Sailland, usually known as Curnonsky, who had spent several weeks each winter in Lyon declared in 1934 from the Vettard restaurant that Lyon was the "capital of gastronomy". The statement came during the golden era of Lyonnaise cuisine, involving people with feathers and gastronomes and the idea spread and soon became one of the components of the image that Lyon will give their city. Curnonsky reasoned that Lyon's cuisine reflects the values of the local society, including its simplicity, as it appears in the speech of Paul Bocuse: "It is this honesty, this taste of the measure, I like to find in an honest and healthy Lyonnaise dish".
Bernard Poche, in his book Lyon tel qu'il s'écrit. Romanciers et essayistes lyonnais 1860-1940, or Lyon, as written: Lyonnais novelists and essayists 1860–1940, concluded that eating well affected all layers of the population of the city. In the nineteenth century, the puppet Guignol, the famous weaver, often finds its parts by the prospect of a "hoary stew", a good meal, while novels use, or scoff at the legendary delicacy of bourgeois Lyon.
Terroirs and culinary influences
As a result of Lyon's geographical location, many different culinary influences have converged in the city's cuisine,
Lorraine). Each cuisine imparts its own characteristics: the use of butter and cream from the North and of fresh vegetables and olive oil from the South. In addition, in the fifteenth century, Lyon served as one of the primary distribution centres for spices imported from the East by Italian merchants.[3]
There are a number of terroirs around Lyon whose farmers supply their products to the city. To the north of Lyon lies Charolais, whose cattle breeders provide beef, while the fishermen of the Saône River deliver whitebait. The wine-producing region of Beaujolais is also located to the north of Lyon. According to French writer and journalist Léon Daudet,"[there] are three reasons why Lyon is the capital of French gastronomy. . . . The third is that in addition to the Saône and the Rhône, she is served by a third river, the Beaujolais, which never dries up and is never muddy."[4]