History of Quantity Cooking, Part 3:

The sixteenth century brought turkey, potatoes, corn, red and green peppers, tomatoes, coffee and chocolate from overseas. It also brought Italian cuisine to France when Catherine de’ Medici of Florence married King Henry II. Catherine brought a staff of Italian cooks to Paris. In Italy the old Roman ways with food had persevered, and a cuisine of notable taste had grown, improved with foods and cooking methods from other parts of the Mediterranean world.

Now the French court learned to eat veal, artichokes, truffles, melons, macaroons, quenelles, ice cream and frangipane tarts. They also took in the elegant Italian etiquette. Catherine even introduced the table fork, in spite of the fact that she herself ate with her fingers. It took another century for the fork to catch on in France and England.

French cooks were apt to learn the new cuisine, and over the next several generations they built upon this groundwork to improve the flawless French cuisine we still enjoy today. The ponderous, greatly spiced medieval fare gave way to lighter foods more tender in taste and texture. Vegetables, fruits, and even flowers were added to the diet.

Fine food and fine cooking became favorite pastimes of the French ruling class. Not only did they dine well; they learned to cook. Louis XV, who ruled France for much of the eighteenth century, was both an avid eater and a novice cook, and he ordered the same of those around him. It became consequential to be a good cook, and specifically to invent a new dish, if you wanted to succeed at the French court. So arose the accumulation of sauces and garnitures – the basic dish served with a certain sauce, a certain garnish, or a certain set of vegetables. Many a garniture or sauce, however, was invented not by the person it was named for but by the chef.

It was the heyday of French chefs. They were highly regarded and well paid. Their fame spread all over Europe. Nobles from other countries sent their chefs to France for teaching or imported French chefs to head their kitchens.

But the chef’s work wasn’t easy. A dinner might need the preparing of a hundred different dishes. It is true that the kitchen had gotten better. Pots and pans were better. There were charcoal braziers – small burners holding live coals – and by the eighteenth century there were stoves with 12 or 20 grates. This equipment made it feasible to sauté and to season and to manage the food in the pan, which couldn’t be done near the roaring fires of the Middle Ages. But the cook still needed clean and steady heat sources and power-driven equipment. Conveniently for the chef and for French cuisine, there still were plenty of helpers for the common tasks.

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