Added: 09/02/2005 |
French Recipes - Culinary ArtFrench cooking is not a monolith: it ranges from the olives and seafood of Provence to the butter and roasts of Tours, from the simple food of the bistro to the fanciful confections of the Tour d'Argent. However, it all shares a seriousness about food. The French have an ongoing love affair with food, and their reverence for time spent eating is evident in any culinary establishment nationwide.
Throughout the country, French cooking and French recipes involves a large number of techniques, some extremely complicated, that serve as basics. Any cook will tell you that French food will not tolerate shortcuts in regard to these fundamentals. Because mastery of French sauces, French desserts, French cookies or pastry dough is the center of the culinary arts, French recipes themselves remain classic and constant. In a way similar to Japanese cuisine, it is expected that even the simplest preparation be undertaken in the most careful manner, which means disregarding the amount of time involved. This is one reason why French cooking and French recipes have always seemed so daunting on the other side of the Atlantic.
Not only do basic cooking techniques require and French recipes great skill, but an they also demand a deep understanding of the ingredients themselves. Just as the vintner knows that the finest Bordeaux comes from the grapes grown on that side of the hill and not this, so too the chef knows not only from which region come the finest petits pois (small, young green peas), but from which town -- the same goes for asparagus, and even cauliflower. If there is something worth eating, and cooking, there is a best representative of such. Many foods are known by the town that made them famous, such as Pessac for strawberries, the peas of Saint-Germaine, Macau artichokes, the Charollais steer, butter of Isigny.
The French are predominantly Catholic and thus have no eating prohibitions, though many dishes have a Lenten variation. Moreover, the Gauls are not afraid to eat anything. Kidney, brain, sweetbreads, tripe, blood sauces and sausages, sheep's foot, tongue, and intestines are all common in French cooking and hold equal standing with the meat of lamb, beef, pork, poultry, and game. Quite the opposite of being exotic, these foods are at the heart of the bourgeois menu, with seafood inevitably being the soul, and vegetables, the flesh.
It is well-known that the stereotypical French meal is heavy in saturated fats; heavy creams and butter are a staple in many dishes. Despite this fact, the French populace suffers from lower incidences of cardiac disease than many other western nations, including the U.S. Much research and medical opinion seems to credit their consumption of red wines with an overall reduction in cholesterol levels. Whatever creedence one might place in this theory, it is a given that all French food is best accompanied by wine to be enjoyed to its fullest.
In France cooking is viewed as a major art form: innovations are celebrated and talked about as though they were phrases in the development of a style of painting or poetry... A meal at a truly great restaurant is a sort of theatre you can eat.
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