Le Apéritif

To welcome a guest or guests to the French meal is a convivial ceremony ushered with le apéritif, an alcoholic drink served to stimulate the appetite, contrasting with digestifs, which are served after meals. Over the many decades, Europeans have adopted the term "aperitif" to also refer to a time of day, typically late afternoon or early evening, much like tea time in England, when an alcoholic beverage is first enjoyed.

Apéritifs are commonly served with something small to eat, such as crackers, cheese, pâté, olives, and various kinds of finger food. Historical records show that the apéritif first appeared in 1786 in Turin, Italy, when Antonio Benedetto Carpano invented vermouth in this city. In later years, vermouth was produced and sold by such well-known companies as Martini, Cinzano, and Gancia.

Apéritifs were already widespread in the 19th century in Italy, where they were being served in fashionable cafes in Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, Turin, and Naples. Apéritifs became very popular in Europe in the late 19th century. By 1900, they were also commonly served in the United States. In Spain and in some countries of Latin America, apéritifs have been a staple of tapas cuisine for centuries.

There's no single alcoholic drink that is always used for an apéritif; fortified wines, liqueurs, and dry champagne are possibly the most common choices. Sherry, a fortified wine, is a very popular apéritif. In Greece, ouzo is a popular choice; in France, pastis. In Italy, vermouth or bitters (amari) may be served; popular brands of bitters are Campari, Cinzano, Byrrh, and Suze.

The Zen of Stock

As water is to fish, stock is the inner life of French soups and sauces. Perhaps its preparation, which takes time, is a dividing line between those who pursue the French menu and those who'd rather not. Making stock harkens the origin of French cuisine -- a simmering cauldron over fire, a minimalist sensibility of earthen servitude. And there is no one right way to prepare stock, although the end product has to be right for it to be worthy of its noble purpose.

All Things Local and Fresh

Local farmers and artisans are important enablers to the French chef. Shopping at a trusted market is how most French chefs begin the day, then a drink at the cafe, and home around noon to start the meal. One must plan ahead, shop for local, fresh product and invest time in the kitchen. Assuming your heart is the hearth of your home, it sounds delightful if not bordering on kinky idealism.

La Varenne's Revolution

François Pierre de la Varenne (1618–1678) was the author of Le cuisinier françois (1651), the founding text of modern French cuisine. La Varenne broke with the Italian traditions that had revolutionized medieval French cookery in the 16th century. He was the foremost member of a group of French chefs, writing for a professional audience, who codified French cuisine for the age of Louis XIV.

The seventeenth century saw a culinary revolution that transported French gastromomy into the modern era. The heavily spiced flavors inherited from the cuisine of the Middle Ages were abandoned in favour of the natural flavors of foods. Exotic spices (saffron, cinnamon, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, nigella, seeds of paradise) were, with the exception of pepper, replaced by local herbs (parsley, thyme, bayleaf, chervil, sage, tarragon). New vegetables like cauliflower, asparagus, peas, cucumber and artichoke were introduced. Special care was given to the cooking of meat in order to conserve maximum flavor. Vegetables had to be fresh and tender. Fish, with the improvement of transportation, had to be impeccably fresh. Preparation had to respect the gustatory and visual integrity of the ingredients instead of masking them as had been the practice previously.

La Varenne's work was the first to set down in writing the considerable culinary innovations achieved in France in the seventeenth century, while codifying food preparation in a systematic manner, according to rules and principals. He introduced the first bisque and Béchamel sauce. He replaced crumbled bread with roux as the base for sauces, and lard with butter. Here one finds the first usage of the terms bouquet garni, fonds de cuisine (stocks) and reductions, and the use of egg-whites for clarification. It also contains the earliest recipe in print for mille-feuille. The cooking of vegetables is addressed, an unusual departure.

La Varenne preceded his book with a text on confitures—jams, jellies and preserves— that included recipes for syrups, compotes and a great variety of fruit drinks, as well as a section on salads (1650).

La Varenne followed his groundbreaking work with a third book, Le Pâtissier françois (Paris 1653), which is generally credited with being the first comprehensive French work on pastry-making. In 1662 appeared the first of the combined editions that presented all three works together. All the early editions of La Varenne's works—Le Cuisinier françois ran through some thirty editions in seventy-five years—are extremely rare; like children's books, they too were worn to pieces, in the kitchen, and simply used up.

The English translation, The French Cook (London 1653) was the first French cookbook translated into English. It introduced professional terms like à la mode, au bleu (very rare), and au naturel which are now standard culinary expressions. Its success can be gauged from the fact that over 250,000 copies were printed in about 250 editions and it remained in print until 1815.

It is said that La Varenne's first training was in the kitchens of Marie de Medici. At the time his books were published, La Varenne had ten years' experience as chef de cuisine to Nicolas Chalon du Blé, Marquis of Uxelles (marquis d'Uxelles in French), to whom he dedicated his publications and whom he immortalized in duxelles, finely-minced mushrooms seasoned with herbs and shallots, which is still a favourite flavouring for fish and vegetables. The Marquis of Uxelles was the royal governor of Chalon-sur-Saône, thought by some to be the birthplace of La Varenne.

Source: Wikipedia

The Holy Trinity

Mirepoix (pronounced meer-pwa) is the French name for a combination of onions, carrots, and celery. It's the flavor base for a wide number of dishes, such as stocks, soups, stews and sauces. If one is making stock, prepare mirepoix and saute in butter until soft and aromatic. Then add other ingredients. If one is making a sauce, use mirepoix accompanied with wine (cognac is also good) to deglaze, or loosen, carmelized bits from the pan.

Mirepoix derives its name, as do many other elements of French cuisine, from the patron of the chef who established it - in this case one of the house of Lévis, seigneurs of Mirepoix since the eleventh century.

Source: Wikipedia

Humane Eating a la Francais

Never has the debate over eating meat been so fierce as it is in the United States. There's a reason for such clamour: our production is industrialized unlike most European countries, thus the purpose is pure economics and nothing else. Throughout centuries, the French were as thrifty as the next yet produced animal products for culinary consumption that always had a farmer's humane sensibility, which yielded flavorful, quality food for the rest of us. Seek out humane farmers of the products with which you cook. The search is as much about ethics as it will be about flavor.

Julia's Trailblazing Predecessor

Elizabeth David is well known among the British culinary public. Perhaps not as much as Julia Child, worldwide, but if their lives converged there would be vigorous debate about their respective contribution to nurturing French cooking over the continents. But Julia Child wasn't a classical writer as David was, who essentially coined the genre of food writing. One discriminating, if pointed, another whimsical, yet integrous.

Elizabeth was a pre-eminent British food writer of the mid 20th century. She is considered responsible for bringing French cooking into the British home. In a Britain worn down by post-war rationing and dull food, she celebrated the regional and rural dishes of the Mediterranean rather than the fussier food of the gourmands and aristocrats. David's style is characterized by terse descriptions of the recipes themselves, accompanied by detailed descriptions of their context and historical background, and often laced with anecdotal asides. She was often scathing of bad food, including much of the food of England that she and her readers had grown up with.

More on Elizabeth David to come. Stay tuned.

Source: Wikipedia

Before the Fork

One must begin somewhere. Why not the middle ages? Medieval French cooking centered around the fireplace. The cook boiled everything in a big iron caldron, the chaudière (hence "chowder"), that hung from a crémaillère (pothook). Other foods were cooked in the ashes-oeufs perdus, for example, involved cracking eggs and dropping them into embers, then brushing them off to be eaten.

French cooks of yore placed meats and dabs of sauce on whole wheat bread trenchers baked several days beforehand, then sliced these into rectangles; depending on rank, diners got three or four slices. Liquid foods went into the ècuelle, a shallow bowl shared by two people. One common main dish consisted of various meats tumbled together on a platter; this form of presentation was later called service en confusion. Another presentation: carving the lids off venison (and other meat) pies so that diners could reach in and rummage with knives, spoons, or hands. Forks, alas, were rare.

In medieval times, gluttony was taken very seriously. It was a sin to eat before the proper hour, or to enjoy food too much. When you consider the unreliability of supplies, and what eating more than your share might mean.

Difficulties of supply and storage influenced medieval meals, as did seasonal fluctuations in the availability of ingredients. Livestock couldn't be fed through the winter, so cooks salted their beef, rendered fat in glazed earthenware crocks, and hung hams and tongues to smoke in kitchen chimneys after dousing them in baths of spices and brine. Sugar was expensive, but boiled honey could preserve fruits, nuts, and root vegetables.

The Christian calendar also imposed limits. Abstinence meant no terrestrial animal products-fish were an exception. Imitations were a feature of medieval cooking, and it pleased both cook and diner to pretend to break the fast-with 'eggs' fabricated from fish roe or curdled almond milk, or with the grandest hoax: 'bacon' slices or a 'ham' made with salmon for the pink meat, and pike for the fat." Diners esteemed the salted flesh of whale, dolphin, and porpoise (considered to be fish) as a Lenten delicacy. With peculiarly medieval logic, the beaver's tail and the barnacle goose were also exempt from the Lenten meat taboo. It was believed that the beaver's tail never left the water and that the barnacle goose lived its entire life at sea, so both qualified as fish.

Some early ingredients are now unavailable, or undesirable: quail tongues, peafowl, swan, lamprey, blackbirds. Herbs valued in the Middle Ages but now little used: tansy, rue, pennyroyal, hyssop. In the use of spices-and of sharp-flavored fruits mixed with hashed-up meats-medieval dishes might be compared to some aspects of Indian and near Eastern cookery.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the character or quality of dishes mattered less than abundance and expense. After entering to a trumpet fanfare, guests took part in a ceremony in which pages poured herb-scented water over their proffered hands. No one of rank ate anything before it was tested for poison. Aristocrats tested foods with substances allegedly possessing magical sensitivities-like unicorn horn (actually from narwhals), which was thought to bleed in the presence of impurity.

Source: Katrina Roberts, Harvard Magazine