What made France so much more influential back a few hundred years ago when it came to "high cuisine" as opposed to...

My point is that in the case of food, the french are both the codifiers and the premier examples. In music, it would be italians and germans respectively.

Although i think theres this bias towards italian and chinese because food has more tendency to leveling at the expense of quality, than compared to music. This is because you can serve a master musicians work to endless people, whereas only so many can taste a top chef's food.

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user makes a good point -though not on topic- guise: Chinese gave us noodles, Indians gave us pepper

I used to teach french for Chinese universities, in beijing.

One part of the job was to introduce french culture. Food is a topic that came back all the time.

To cut things short and entertaining, i always took a class or two to show Anthony bourdain show when he goes to Lyon (fine cuisine) and when he goes to burgundy (much more local stuff, everyday recipes).

I haven't found a good youtube link but there are torrents around. I highly encourage watching those 2.

Especially the one in Lyon, where you can see a lot about Escoffier heritage one of the best restaurant in the world and what MOF are.

He's right fuck off this is for chan, your good and bad has no merit

now call me autist

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try 900 years, not a few hundred. The earliest cookbook in European history is French. The French have always been autistic about food.

A few Hundred years ago French and English Cuisine, was almost identical.
Britain however, took a tumble at the beginning of the 20th Century though, what with the Boer Wars, the world wars and subsequent rationing,etc. Being on an island does have a downside sometimes.

Even though Garlic was available in Britain, the French always seemed to love it more.
A typical example is in the cooking of Snails, the English used to prefer them in a simple Butter/Parsley sauce but the French preferred Butter/Garlic and although snails have fallen out of fashion in both countries (still eaten at decent restaurants though) - the Brits now prefer the garlic version albeit still with Parsley!

With regard to 'High-End' Cuisine - again, there is nothing in it, they have always been similar but in the 70's and 80's the French pulled ahead with presentation and British Chefs were despatched to the continent to find out what was going on, as Britain at that time was excited with an upsurge of Chinese and Indian food and they began to lose interest with traditional fare, this I am glad to say, has now been addressed.

I don't know about the rest of Europe but it would be interesting to hear.

>The earliest cookbook in European history is French
No.
It's English, written in Latin in 1140 AD.

>Britain however, took a tumble at the beginning of the 20th Century though, what with the Boer Wars, the world wars and subsequent rationing,etc.

That's often repeated but in my opinion it's simply not true.

1) British cuisine had a poor reputation well before those wars. Mrs. Beeton's--a very well known English cookbook from the 1860s--discusses the poor reputation of English cooking, and that pre-dates even the Boer wars by several decades.

2) A great many countries suffered though wartime rationing and there was not anywhere near as much of an impact on their cuisine. Heck, France had worse rationing than the English had and yet they still managed to hang on to their reputation for excellent cooking.

That's the medical textbook from Durham Abbey, not a real cookbook. Le Viandier is the first after the fall of Rome

You are retarded. Greeks had cookbooks. Sumerian had those. They even had beer recipes manuals.

>British cuisine had a poor reputation well before those wars. Mrs. Beeton's--
I stopped reading there as you repeat this every single time. Mrs Beeton complied a book on Housekeeping, she was 18 years old and not an expert on anything.

Rationing was one thing but being on an island is even worse . . . .I know you try to debunk this everytime but it's only in order to perpetuate your memes.

> not a real cookbook
Technically you are correct but I have found something older from Rome 4th or 5th Century. called Apicius: De Re Coquinaria

Many texts contemporary to Beeton say just he opposite. Tom Brown's School Days has pages and pages of traditional British cuisine. Dickens. and on and on

E U R O P E A N
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>repeat this every single time

I wouldn't have to repeat it if you'd simply give up on the "waah, war rationing" meme. It's been disproven.

>> being on an island is even worse
Agreed. The shitty climate of England doesn't help things either.

The only point I'm trying to make here is that there's a lot more going on here than just "lol rationing".

england, germany and the united states were worried about winning a war.

france surrendering in 1940 left them a lot of time to worry about which grapes tasted the best and how to sauce plates to impress the nazis.

>It's been disproven
Only by you.

It's not just rationing of basics but luxuries too .. infact they weren't rationed, they were simply unavailable, bringing spices back from the corners of the globe took low priority during the Wars.

>It's not just rationing of basics but luxuries too .. infact they weren't rationed, they were simply unavailable

Same situation in France, Germany, etc. And their culinary traditions were still strong.

>>bringing spices back from the corners of the globe took low priority during the Wars.

It was never a priority for the British, even before the wars. Look at Victorian British recipes and you'll see that relatively few spices are called for, and they are also used in small amounts.

>disproven

you obviously aren't a very good historian as a single instance of someone saying english food has a poor reputation and some crude metrics about rationing aren't 'proof' of the broader point you are making or 'disproof' of the other guy's.

yes it is more complicated than just rationing. i'm the guy who was going back and forth with you in the thread where those numbers about french rationing were dug up. it is obviously great that you did that research but it doesn't really knock out the idea that rationing affected our cuisine as we had a different food culture and perhaps more significantly a different economy going into the war.

I don't think their wartime fare was any better than ours, let alone 'strong'.

Using spices in small amounts don't not mean things were'bland' (a favourite American word) . . .we were eating many exotic spices in the 1400 due to our roaming around and trading Empire. I don't know what you are trying to prove here?

>a single instance of someone saying english food has a poor reputation

I agree it would be nice to have more sources. But the fact is that I at least have *A* source. I have yet to see a single source supporting the idea that rationing is somehow to blame.

...and really, Beeton's is a great example because the recipes were compiled from the public as a whole. So here we have literally hundreds of recipes from hundreds of cooks and the recipes are, in general, very bland.

>> it doesn't really knock out the idea that rationing affected our cuisine....

I'm not denying that rationing affected British food culture. I'm arguing against the idea that rationing was the main cause. Had an effect? Sure. But it certainly isn't decisive. If rationing was a decisive cause then we'd have seen the same thing happen to France, Germany, etc.

When the French revolution hit and the nobility were forced from their positions their chefs had to go somewhere. They opened up restaurants and brought haute cuisine to the masses.

>I don't think their wartime fare was any better than ours, let alone 'strong'.

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to their wartime food as "strong". I was referring to the fact that France's reputation for good food remained strong despite rationing. They suffered through just as bad (if not worse) rationing than Britain did, and yet their culinary reputation was unaffected by this.

>>I don't know what you are trying to prove here?
That the poor reputation of British food pre-dates the wars, therefore it could not have been caused by "rationing" as is commonly parroted.

Not him, but I think you and I have discussed Beeton's cookbook and rationing's effect on British cuisine.
You seem to be forgetting a handful of points I made last time we spoke.

1) Britain is an island in the north. It's not warm year round in any part of the country. It wasn't conducive to a wide variety of crops in Beeton's time. As such, the cuisine of the British gentry in that era (inb4 you claim, as you did last time, that Beeton was part of the gentry because she simply wasn't) was the only one able to use all those fancy and newfangled ingredients from abroad. Beeton wrote a book on /housekeeping/. It wasn't written by someone in the gentry nor for anyone in the gentry as the gentry simply wouldn't have to keep house as they paid others to do it. Kathryn Hughes describes Mrs Beeton's lineage as 'not quite gentry, but established themselves in the business of the gentry.'

2) rationing in Britain extends far before the World Wars, the Boer wars and even the Crimean war due to the forementioned inability to grow/raise quality food. This is why classic British cuisine is based on game and fish rather than farmed animals (and this tradition persists in echoes into the modern era en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_limits#Countries_with_no_bag_limits) and wild, native plants, such as leeks/Welsh onions rather than foreign ones, such as garlic and continental onions as well as crops well-suited to growing in gigantic tupperware (because the Isles are cold and grey, like the long-forgotten pot of pudding left in the back of the fridge since Christmas) like potatoes, turnips, parsnips and cabbages.

What the aristocracy and gentry ate and had cooked for them was just about as rich and diverse as continental cuisine, despite the limitations detailed above and other details I've no room to discuss here.

>If rationing was a decisive cause then we'd have seen the same thing happen to France, Germany, etc.

who's to say it didn't? this is a relatively complex subject that is probably largely economic in its explanation so that kind of isolated factor analysis is quite crude.

really, i'm sure there are a metric fuckton of pre-war sources within britain saying bad stuff about british food. but that doesn't mean they're correct. heaven knows we've had a complex about the inferiority of our culture in general, especially in comparison to the french, for a very long time indeed.

>the recipes are, in general, very bland.

i don't agree with this at all. 'blandness' is one of those things that i feel is abused as a concept because it almost always favours the produce borne of warmer climates. there's nothing bland, however, about much of the rich, herbaceous food we make here.

>You seem to be forgetting a handful of points I made last time we spoke.

No, I agree with both of those points. They're simply not relevant here.

The only point I am making is this:
Wartime rationing was not the fundamental cause of the poor reputation of British food.

Who cares what the Aristocracy ate? We are discussing cuisines in general. What the elite ate isn't relevant. What matters in this context is what the average person ate.

What do you think the average person in France ate?

Ever been to France? Even cheap "peasant food" is made to a very high standard. And many of the well-known dishes you might order at a fancy restaurant had their origins in poverty food.
Coq Au Vin: when you had nothing left to eat but the stringy 'ol rooster
Cassoulet: dump whatever you have in a pot and stew it up
Tête de veau: when you're so poor you eat the facial skin of a calf.
...and so on...

France is famous for its charcuterie (pate, terrine, sausages, etc.), which is made using trimmings and scraps.

I find it interesting how the French and the Chinese are known for their food, and they are the only two cultures (that I know of) which enjoy frog legs. Maybe they're on to something.

I'm french, i second this. Look up the origins of pot-au-feu.

Frog is big in Southeast asia--Vietnam, Thailand, etc.

>Ever been to France? Even cheap "peasant food" is made to a very high standard.

not really. french peasant cooking is often just like a lump of boiled meat and some boiled vegetables. if you're visiting france you still probably are not getting the everyday french poor person experience, don't be naive.

also, making good use of trimmings and shit is exactly as true of brit food as french. in fact potentially moreso. we also have a strong tradition of preserved meat, sausages and the like.

the thing is that basically nowhere has an overwhelmingly bad or inferior national cuisine. it's all just stereotyping and the march of industrialisation/globalisation that obfuscates it.

No, I haven't been to France 200 years ago.

Italy is known for it's food and doesn't eat frog legs

India is known for it's food and doesn't eat frog legs

I have literally no fucking idea what point you're trying to make

His point is we take cheap cuts of meat, shit vegetables and make world famous food out of it.

Enfin merde, arrête de cracher sur les français quoi, on a quand même un peu de mérite.

>pot-au-feu.
Beef stews have been cooked in pots since Neolithic times.

All the items you mentioned are just French names for everyday things, even the French don't presume to have invented them.

>His point is we take cheap cuts of meat, shit vegetables and make world famous food out of it.

so do we.

so does everyone actually.

>also, making good use of trimmings and shit is exactly as true of brit food as french

Any culture will have foods based on that kind of thing. The difference is that the French version of those dishes are world-famous.

What other names can you think about ?

I don't think anybody is shitting on French food but some people, who have never been to any European country, claim to know better than those that live here.

And we famous...

You jelly ?

>Beef stews have been cooked in pots since Neolithic times.

Yep. That's kinda the point here. Nobody is claiming the French invented beef stew. Rather, the point is that theirs enjoys a better reputation than the others.

>All the items you mentioned are just French names for everyday things, even the French don't presume to have invented them.

Again, nobody is claiming the French invented those dishes. They just did it so well that they're world-famous despite their humble origins.

There are some interesting points here, particularly regarding 200 years ago.

You're wrong, except for immigrants, who eat their own grub, even the most basic and poverty-tier French cooking is superior. It's absolutely cultural and the most foul old drunken Gascon slobbing about the streets of his country town annoying everyone can get a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese that makes an objectively superior meal.

France produces an amzing amount of terrible wine, tho. And good wine, just a surprising amount of swill

ce

I wasn't going to mention wine.
As a Brit, I realise that our wines cannot compete with French wines . . .. .yes there maybe one or two exceptions but by and large France wins this.

Talk about beer and the situation is dramatically reversed but that's for another time.

> The difference is that the French version of those dishes are world-famous.

so for a start, i don't give a fuck that french food is more famous or well-regarded, the point is there isn't necessarily as much of a qualitative difference as you, and perhaps the rest of the world, think there is.

secondly, many of our famous dishes are in fact made from the cheap or forgotten stuff. pies, cawls, pasties, sausages and the like are stuffed with them.

i'm not gonna disagree that french food is great and deserves a good reputation. but so many of the attempts on here to describe why it is so many leagues above british food are just misinformed. like, when people talk about british food on here they go to chicken tikka masala and fish and chips first, maybe sunday roasts in there. that is a wetherspoons-tier cartoon of british food. the combinatoric complexity of our cawls, pies, pasties, hotpots, soups, myriad fish dishes, pickles and chutneys, puddings, jellies and so on don't get a mention.

oh and cheese. fucking cheese. we have so much fucking cheese it's crazy. more independent cheesemakers than the french.

>>a single instance of someone saying english food has a poor reputation
>I agree it would be nice to have more sources. But the fact is that I at least have *A* source.

pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/eating-and-drinking-with-charles-dickens/

historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Food-in-Britain-in-the-1950s-1960s/

there, can you STFU about this now and stop throwing Beeton in there like a pulp author is has any historicity other than as a novelty item? This is like pointing to Cosmo magazine as an authority on how women live

Seconded.
Bong cheese is very good.

Then why you guys boil lamb and mint together tho ?

because it tastes fucking good.

>boil
Lamb is very rarely boiled mate, it's roasted.
And YES . . .often served with a mint sauce.

>the point is there isn't necessarily as much of a qualitative difference as you, and perhaps the rest of the world, think there is.

Oh, I agree 100%. I didn't mean to assert that French food actually was superior, but rather that French food enjoys a better reputation. whether or not that reputation is deserved is a different discussion altogether.

>>secondly, many of our famous dishes are in fact made from the cheap or forgotten stuff.

Every cuisine is like that. The difference is that the French are famous for it, while the others are not.

>> cawls, pies, pasties, hotpots, soups, myriad fish dishes, pickles and chutneys, puddings, jellies and so on don't get a mention.

Have you bothered to think about why they don't get a mention?

>le surrender monkeh

you are so full of shit

>Have you bothered to think about why they don't get a mention?

i think about it all the time. i don't think it's because they're bad.

>Every cuisine is like that.

yes, and that's what i was saying. it seemed earlier like people were making it into a selling point for french food, which is silly.

You eat it then :/

nigga you take some lamb shanks, braise them down, shred the meat and remove the cartilage, reduce the cooking liquor down and cook barley in it and add fresh mint, rosemary and fried onions then combine into a salad with some fresh peas and shoots dressed with good vinegar and come back to me

The dickens article was great, thanks for sharing it. But it doesn't say anything about the relative reputation of British vs. foreign cuisines. It's not a source at all.

The 2nd article does a great job describing what food was like in the 1950s. But again, there's no comparison being done.

I'll ask again:
If rationing really was responsible for the poor reputation of British cooking, then why weren't the other countries culinary heritage similarly affected? There must be something more to it.

Fancy photos aside . . .and this isn't one of them.

Roast Lamb and Mint Sauce is pretty good, I am an oldfag and I remember the days when New Zealand Lamb was common here (pre-EEC) . . .it was a lot cheaper, I hope the kiwis forgive us and reopen trade after Brexit as Lamb today is quite expensive.

> There must be something more to it.
I have explained this to you so many times .. .we are an island nation, our luxury goods and spices have to be shipped in.

We have been enjoying exotic spices well before most of Europe but shipping routes were disrupted during the early 20th Century . . .I'm not going to explain this again.

*Forgot pic.

Rationing wrecked British cuisine as they could still substitute for the lack of local goods with imported preserved goods to a greater degree than the French who more likely had to cook what was local and not processed and preserved goods.

This is a good post. I learned something today.

It's easy to see why Italy is one of the most influential nations. I think they were the biggest driving force on experimenting with tomato cuisines, and we look to today where tomatoes are associated both in casual lunches all the way to fancy dinners.

They had artisans specialized in cuisine perfect techniques due to an outrageous amount of money. The french were very materialistic, and so it can be seen in their cuisine. Rich is as rich does, still in the 21st century.

Does it matter, historically, that both of the World Wars rampaged straight through France? Talking about "taking a tumble".

So you're not that other guy? He kept trying to argue that Mrs Beeton was part of the gentry and I was like "yeah... no."

Well, anyway, we agree, then. Remember, also, that with what limited resources they had, Brits made some fairly adequate dishes. Cockieleekie, for example, is pretty flavourful despite how bland it looks. Nations with similarly limited culinary resources pale in insignificance in comparison to what Britain did with what little they had.

It's funny that you say this because the average Frenchman at the time of Mrs Beeton and earlier ate a cuisine nearly identical to that of the average Brit IE what could be foraged/hunted/trapped and boiled to unrecognisable ends. France's haute cuisine is what set it apart from British haute cuisine due to the fact that it was, as described earlier, the first to be notated in a replicatable manner.

I've even heard arguments that the reason for France's dominance in the world of haute cuisine is due to their nation being the birthplace of metrication, which made it easier to note recipes in empirical fashion. Carême was born in the 1780s. Metrication was born the decade following as part of the Revolution. By the time he entered the culinary world in the early 1800s, metrication was already standard throughout France and Napoleon's patronage of Carême certainly pushed haute cuisine even further.

Without all this happening all at once, France would never have birthed haute cuisine to begin with. Had those factors not worked to Gaulish favour, we could have just as easily wound up calling it hochküche today; Austria was culinarily just a step behind France at the time.

And, of course, neither nation would have amounted to anything were it not for Italian culinary influence to begin with.

The traditional British export is soldiers and sailors, who carried army food with them. Indians thought the British lived on hard tack and salt beef, so naturally the cuisine never acquired a high reputation. There's probably an entire generation of Iraqis that think Americans live on MREs back home too.

Traditional British cuisine was very fine at its best, especially in baking and meats, but it was never experienced outside of Britain, unlike French cooking, which made its way out of France as premier aristocratic signature, thanks to the excesses of the pre-Revolution French monarchy.

the British were hiring French chefs at home; abroad they were eating 18th c MREs or the native food. They ran the world, and thus dictated trends.

Industrialization combined with rationing are what destroyed the uncelebrated British cuisine. You can find countless references to this. George Orwell writes at length about the changing diet of the British underclass thanks to the wars

I'm not sure that Italian cuisine had much influence outside of the Mediterranean, let alone influencing France and Britain, I think that Italian cuisine seemed to evolve on it's own within that region.

The other problem I have with Italian cuisine is that it has never moved on, Italian Chefs seem to stick with traditional, whilst French and British Chefs tend to experiment more.

>I'm not sure that Italian cuisine had much influence outside of the Mediterranean, let alone influencing France and Britain, I think that Italian cuisine seemed to evolve on it's own within that region.

LOL no

>he other problem I have with Italian cuisine is that it has never moved on, Italian Chefs seem to stick with traditional,

say that to carlo cracco's face not online and see what happens

Don't get me wrong mate, I love Italian food and as a Brit, I will eat pretty much anything, from simple Scandinavian, to simple East Euro stuff . ..from Indian curries to French haute cuisine but I honestly don't think that Italian food has any influence over what France or Britain does.

And again, you cite one chef who might get grumpy but I think that Italian chefs are more set in their ways and less flexible than others in Western Europe.

>but some people, who have never been to any European country, claim to know better than those that live here

Veeky Forums in a nutshell. That moment when you're French and have your roots in Provence, have your family in the cooking business and some fedora tipper tries to school you on what is the "proper" ratatouille.

>tfw you go to paris and order fried chicken
>its just fried chicken and looks like something you would get at dennys
>have to pay for water

> I honestly don't think that Italian food has any influence over what France or Britain does.

this is historically very inaccurate though.

yeah they are very protective of traditional italian food, but there is innovation there, and the french are also very protective of regional traditions.

>tfw you go to paris

Dug your own grave there mate. Hey let's go the meme city who's just a tourist trap and has more immigrants than actual French people.

It all started when the bourgeois found themselves some money and began dining like all the French nobility did.

I'm a Brit, my Father has retired to France and since the '90s, I spend a few weeks per year in the Hérault region , a small village near Lunel.

As a keen road cyclist, I take advantage of the roads too . . .they love cyclists down there.

But I love the food, Lunel Market has a larger selection of goods than my small Market town in England. The locals love it when we arrive every year . .. loads of Bants in the village 'pub' (which closes about 21:00hrs)

It's my choice of retirement destination.

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Ah, Lunel. I really enjoy their muscat on hot summer days, like tonight, fuck I could go for one now.

Well its goes a lot deeper than food you know how French fashion and interior design are also considered high class?

It has to do with the rise of absolutism under Louis XIV the Sun King. During his regency there was open conflict between the nobles and his regent. SO when he took over he began to cultivate a court that revolved entirely around himself. Kind of a cult.

He got anything he wanted and any style or fashion he liked immediately became the standard of the French court. If you where a noble and did not conform to the kings tastes you would loose any favor or influence that you had. (I'm getting a little off topic here) But anyways France was one of the wealthiest European countries and its nobility spent large sums of money on food and fashion which in France was considered extravagant and high class. Other nations that saw this wanted to emulate the wealth and prestige of France.

For example you know the stereotypical image of the 1700's nobility wearing those large wigs even if it meant they had to shave their real hair off to wear one? Thats because the sun king went bald in his old age and started wearing a wig

Dude what? French Fashion has stayed relevant for a lot more than Louis XIV

I never said he was the only reason

But the way the Sun King organized his court is why just about everything French is considered high class

I am from a sleepy town in the South West Of England and the Southern French Lifestyle suits me, it's so laid back.

A group of us bought some baguettes and pate once and sat in a park in Montpelier . .. .a group of French skinheads started walking towards us and asked us where we were from? . . . .I stood up expecting a rumble but the big guy infront just looked at us and said " bon appetite" . . .and walked off.

He did more for Anglo/French relations than any politician could.

Brilliant!

>I'm not sure that Italian cuisine had much influence outside of the Mediterranean
Italy ran all trade routes to and from Europe for several centuries. Through this fact alone, the peninsula had incredibly strong influence culinarily and geopolitically. That dominance is the very reason there are European-descended people in the Americas to begin with: fed up with paying Italians their highway-robbery prices for trade goods, the rest of Europe scrambled to find alternate routes to and through the orient. Remember that Italy has had diplomatic relations with China, Central Asia and the Muslim world since the 13th century.
In addition to Italian influence on France (and subsequently Britain), which I will cover below, Italy influenced the cuisines of Austria, Hungary, Poland and Germany directly through marriage of finicky Italian nobles into the nobility and royalty of those countries.

>let alone influencing France and Britain
France's cuisine today is directly descended of Italian cuisine of the 15th and 16th centuries, brought due to Caterina de' Medici's marriage to Louis III, d'Orléans. She was dismayed with the horrendous cuisine of the French of the time who boiled everything with little to no seasoning or aromatics and called for her personal cooks to be sent from Firenze.
The same happened with Bona Sforza who married into Poland, Isabella di Parma into Austria, Maria Louisa di Napoli into Germany and so on and so on and so on.
The Italians introduced bechamel sauce, brioche, mirepoix/soffritto/włoszczyzna, deglazing with wine, the use of spices and more to the various cuisines of Europe.
Also, British and French cuisines played off each other for centuries until the clear demarcation of French cuisine into its own in the early 1800s under Carême and Escoffier thereafter.

>italian cuisine has never moved on
How not?

Do you eat with a fork daily? Then guess what? You've been directly influenced by Italian culinary tradition. The French ate stews, soups and bread exclusively, all eaten with bare hands or with spoons, until Catherine de Medici got there with Italian cuisine, which tends to require forks.

>we also have a strong tradition of preserved meat,
Thats just pre industrial food in general.
Slaugher a lamb/sheep/cow? Fresh beef can only be a small part of it, the rest has to be cured or dried

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The English were pretty damn influential as well. You don't build an empire and not pass on your cuisine, particularly cakes, pies, bread and roasted meats.