Question

Why was/is french cuisine so important to culinary?

Answer 1

Firstly, around the time of the French revolution brought about the very first Restaurants. Initially from memory a restaurant was a dish, like a soup or consomme which was used as a restorative for patrons who were feeling 'weak'. What differentiated these places from other Inn's and places where one could buy food was that it was they were the first places to offer choices of what one could eat. They were also places where one could essentially be 'seen' in public but still dine in a 'private' space (ie you didn't have to share tables with strangers as was the case in Inn's and the like. In fact some of these restaurants had private rooms as they still do). Many of the chefs in these early restaurants were previous employed by the French aristocracy. As the royals were now spending much of their time either running away from France or getting their heads chopped off, these chefs were now unemployed. Many of them opened restaurants as a means of keeping employed, the difference being that now in a France where there was indeed 'power to the people', many of these people were now enjoying haute cuisine that was previously only ever enjoyed by those of noble origin. As part of this we also got the first celebrity chefs and food writers who celebrated food in ways not often done before. One could argue that Archestratus was the first food and travel writer and that there were other chefs too before this time who were held in high esteem but during this time we got Careme (chef), Grimod de la Reyniere and Brillat Savarin (writers) who were all in their own right much like the celebrity chefs and food writers that we have today (Does anyone reading this think Steingarten is a bit like a modern day Brillat-Savarin?). Another one to look at is Escoffier who perhaps was the ultimate celebrity chef and cooked the greatest food for the rich and wealthy all over Europe. What he also developed though was a highly codified and rigid standard for cooking that was exceptionally well documented. All this information here is very much in short hand and written from memory. It probably excludes a lot of very important people and dates and times and so forth. I think though that the reason why it was so important is partly one of timing. So the French revolution happened and we got restaurants and celeb chefs and food writers. During and after this time, we also got the British colonizing half of the world, the development of the USA and the Industrial revolution. So when big hotels opened up in big cities the world over, the French way of cooling in restaurants was a great model to use and a relatively recently developed and highly popular phenomenon. The French restaurant brigade was a good way to run a high class food outlet that needed to cater to the different needs of well-heeled clientele. The French it seems were the ones who it seems venerated their chefs the most at this time. I once heard Giorgio Locatelli say that the difference between French and Italian food was that French food was all about the chef whereas Italian food was all about the ingredients. If this is true then if you wanted to open the best restaurant for your hotel, you needed both the best chefs and best ingredients. I suspect the French chefs were the ones of yelled the loudest!!

I got this from the interweb, I hope this helps!