Is French Cooking All That?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve never been to France. So I really wouldn’t know. But I’ve been to a couple of restaurants here that claim to be authentic, both by their owners and the critics.

And at these, I’m always rather underwhelmed.

It’s nothing that I can put my finger on. The food is good. Maybe I’m just expecting more from these meals because, OMG! It’s French cooking!

What’s so great about French cooking? I read that cooking techniques is one of the few things the French government doesn’t regulate from Paris, so regional cuisines are really played up big. I forget what regions these restaurants claimed to be from. (if indeed, they claimed any.) But I find that when things are played up, they rarely live up to their reputations or their expectations.

So, is French cooking really all that? Do I have to go to France to find out? 'Cause that ain’t gonna happen for a long while, if ever.

2

if i can think of one unique french dish that i’ve tried, that would be unmistakably french, it would be the ortolan. look for it on youtube, especially the jeremy clarkson account.

3

Rustic French cooking is the best in the world. What people typically think of as French cooking is garbage. Calvin Trillin called it “Stuff-Stuff with Heavy.” Although…there are some stupendous places in Northern California that give France a run for its money. Google “Thomas Keller” or “Alice Waters.”

4

Beef bourguignon and cassoulet can change even the most doubting of minds.

5

French-style food can be very, very good, but there’s two “cheats” at play here that bolster its reputation:

  1. A lot of good restaurants in the US served French-style food. This isn’t necessarily because French food is “better,” but because a lot of Western traditions of “fancy” food come from the French style and because a lot of four-star hotel and restaurant chefs in the US were French-trained. This is decreasingly true, but cliches die slow.

  2. Food IN France (especially Paris) is supposedly incredibly good because the restaurant is so competitive anything subpar gets driven out.

That said, I love French cooking, and rarely leave half-decent French restaurants anything but happy.

6

I found the food in France to be as good as advertised. The French take food seriously and appreciate the effort in making a good meal. In much of the US, people are looking for cheap food with big portions, but the French want great flavor even if the portions aren’t huge.

You can also get great food in any restaurant in Montreal. But it’s not just French: San Francisco is also chock full of quality restaurants.

7

I think a lot depends on your palate. I occasionally wind up at Mexican restaurants where everyone is wolfing and stuffing and raving about how insanely awesome it is, and to me, the whole thing is pretty meh. And in some cases, actively feh. The whole experience just doesn’t do it for me.

I’ve never had any real French cooking made by real French people (or even real French-trained people), but French food tends to use a lot of things I really love–sauteed garlic and onions, butter, reduced wine, “baking” spices like nutmeg in savory applications. Heavily French-influence cuisines like the ones from Louisiana and the Caribbean are among my favorite in the world, and I’ve loved every bite of every French dish I’ve ever tried making myself. So I’m guessing I would find the same restaurants you don’t care for to be all that.

8

Speaking as somebody who spent nearly four months last autumn in the Perigord-Noir region of southern France (famous for, among other things, truffles, game, walnuts and Bordeaux), I can attest that hell yes, French cooking is indeed all that, for all the reasons mentioned above.

The level of popular knowledge about cooking techniques, the standards for quality of ingredients, the blend of traditional craft, inventiveness and seriousness with which the average person approaches the mundane task of getting food into hungry people, all combine to make the quality of the typical French meal just objectively better than the typical American one.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of French people who eat and enjoy mass-produced junk food (McDonalds and other fast food chains have been steadily increasing market share in France for a while now, as have prepared frozen entrees and the like), nor that there aren’t a lot of French people who don’t happen to be very good cooks. Nor does it deny the incontestable fact that there are a hell of a lot of good cooks and appreciators of fine food in every region of the US. It’s just that on average, food quality consciousness is significantly higher in France.

This doesn’t happen by accident, either: the French are very conscious of the importance of good food in their cultural heritage and work hard to keep standards of taste high. I happen to have in my hand the “restaurant scolaire” or public school cafeteria menu for November 2010 in the community where I lived, and here are a couple days’ lunch offerings. (Bear in mind that these meals are served, with no substitutions or snacks allowed, to students from kindergarten through high school, and everybody is routinely expected to eat what’s provided.)

Saucisson a l’ail/sec (garlic sausage)
Medaillon de merlu (medallions of hake (fish))
Puree de celeris (celery puree)
Abricot au sirop (apricots in syrup)

Betterave/pomme (beetroot with apple)
Filet de lieu armoricaine (filey of coley (fish) Armorican style, i.e., cooked with butter, cognac, white wine, tomatoes and cider)
Ble au beurre (cracked wheat with butter)
Yaourt aux fruits (yogurt with fruit)

And that’s omitting the monthly “regional cuisine theme” day, which in November happened to be focused on the Savoy region and included a white cabbage vinaigrette dish. (For kindergarteners, remember.) The menus are designed and the food prepared by professional cooks, and parents are allowed to pick a day each month to eat lunch in the cafeteria with the kids. And they do. And if they don’t think the food is up to scratch, they are not shy about saying so.

No, it’s not restaurant-quality food, but it ain’t no mystery meat or beany-weenies either. Generations of French children grow up automatically expecting food to be more complicated and better cooked than a microwaved frozen chicken patty, and it shows in adult perceptions and standards of food.

That said, it’s true that so-called “French” restaurants in the US (or what used to be generically called “Continental cuisine”, to join silenus in citing Calvin Trillin) are often a lot more American than French in their approach to French cooking. Just because something is called “a l’orange” or “sauce Bearnaise” doesn’t automatically mean it can’t be mass-produced, over-processed, badly prepared crap.

9

The French basically taught the world to cook, and I was trained to use their methods. I have worked and dined in great French restaurants.

Where do you live? I live in the Twin Cities and the restaurant industry sucks hard here.

10

Yes, yes you do.

And when you do you’ll rave about the food.

11

To counteract any tendency to overstate the uniqueness of French cooking as an ethnic/regional art form, I’m going to bring up the classic question of identifying the so-called “three great cuisines of the world.”

Pretty much every such list seems to include French cooking and Chinese cooking, and there’s continual disagreement about which other cuisine should share the title.

Note that both French cuisine and Chinese cuisine are characterized by a great variety of agricultural environments and a correspondingly huge list of potential ingredients, mostly unfettered by dietary restrictions or culinary squeamishness. Frogs, snails, organ meats, chicken feet, swift saliva, fish heads, whee!

I can’t really think of a third culinary tradition that belongs on the same list with French and Chinese cooking when it comes to sheer versatility, quality and scope, though I’ve seen various contenders suggested, from Mexican to Turkish to Italian.

12

That’s just wonderful. My eight year old is a vegetarian but she’d probably go for most of the stuff on that menu including the sausage. Our local school menu is of the fish sticks variety. The only really good food they do for the kids is order in fabulous local pizza on many Fridays.

I spent three weeks in France a few years ago. The produce was noticeably superior to just about anything I’ve eaten here. We spent hours talking about the markets over there. A single one of the melons we bought filled the hotel room with this deliciously droolworthy scent for two days until we finally hastily cracked that sucker open and pounced on it, polishing the entire thing off in about thirty seconds. The cherries were like softly sweet pillows and the fraises like little jewels. The closest I’ve come here in America to similar quality produce was either stuff picked directly off the tree or some of the produce at Trader Joe’s.

The bread and cheeses we ate were also quite superb.

My only quarrel with French food was that it was sometimes hard to find places to eat at a reasonable price in Paris. We wound up at the Rue Mouffetard multiple times.

But yeah much of it can be quite amazing. We found French quality ingredients just that much higher than the typical food back home. You can get good items here but you have to look harder.

13

In France as anywhere else, you can get a good or a bad meal. Why not try yourself? Get one of Paul Bocuse’s books. Stick exactly to his receipes and you won’t be disappointed. One thing he does say is that the end product depends upon the quality of the food. In Paris I’ve had better food from a hole in the wall than in a restuarant. The best was in a transport stop on the road that leads from Cherbourg down toward Brittany, it was like entering someone’s parlour. There was only a plat de jour on offer - which you good see an elderly lady cooking in the back room and it was absolutely brilliant. Funnily enough, the best dauphinoise I ever tasted was in a cafe in Birmingham, England called Chez Jules.

14

Wouldn’t those be options, that is: “garlic sausage or plain sausage”, “beetroot or apple”?

Part of the difference in the food eaten in France and in the US is that in the US it can be difficult to find ingredients which have been selected for flavor, not prettiness (this problem is spreading through Southern Europe due to overstock of “pretty stuff for export” being sold in-country), it’s a lot easier if you can find a farmer’s market or similar, but those don’t exist all over; also, meats are cut differently and many fishes which are popular in Southern Europe seem to be unknown in the US (then again, don’t try to find mahi-mahi in Spain).

15

A note on the bred in the bone nature of French culinary standards:

Back in my footloose youth, some friends and I were backpacking and had got as far a Moorea (part of French Polynesia, close to Tahiti). We were on a budget, and it was a damned expensive place to live. Also, not a lot of nightlife. Not knowing this, we left it far too late to go find food and had a dispiriting tour of the island finding places that were either prohibitively expensive or shut for the night. So we pushed on, getting hungrier and hungrier until we stumbled across what would surely be our salvation - a guy selling chicken from a rotisserie cart. Drooling, we ran up and offered him good spending money for his chicken. Bear in mind that it was now properly late, and he was clearly about to shut up shop and go home. Here we were, about to take his last stock off his hands in return for cash.

He refused. He said, “I don’t think I can help you. These chickens, are getting cold. And I don’t sell cold chicken - it’s just not something I do. Chicken should be eaten hot.”

At the time, I admit, this attitude was frankly irritating. We were starving. He had chickens. We didn’t care what temperature they were. And if we were prepared to eat them, who the hell was he to say otherwise? Looking back, while I doubt the business sense behind his decision, I have to respect his commitment to the culinary ideals. And this was no high-end chef. This was a drifter who was financing an extended holiday in a tropical paradise by selling chickens at the side of the road. But still, there were certain standards involved in the purveying of food, and he was damned if he was going to let them slip.

(The good news was that, on inspection, the chickens retained just enough warmth to qualify as acceptably edible. And they were damn good chickens.)

16

I live in Chicago, which has excellent restaurants, but not so much fancy French cuisine.

17

See, this is why people hate the French. If this had happened to me, I would find his attitude irritating, not just “at the time” but for all time. And I would tell everyone when relating this story just how much of a jagoff this guy was, until I die, or until people beg me not to tell the Asshole Rotisserie Chicken Guy Story again.

There’s having standards, and there’s being a jagoff just for the sake of being a jagoff. In the American Midwest, we don’t let people go hungry for stupid reasons.

18

I’m glad I’m not the only one who was under-whelmed by French food. When I was in college. I went to one of the best French restaurants in town. While the food was ok, I found the portions small, the sauces not at all impressive and the meal definitely not worth the inflated price. Sure, I’d give French food another try, but for years I thought maybe there was something off about my own tastes given how others rave about it.

Bri2k

19

Are you kidding? The core Escoffier-type techniques are the foundation of all high-end cuisine. I recommend Jacques PEPIN (had to capitalize cause don’t want to mouse to the character map for the accent) and his Technique and Method books (two books). Anything in a high-end restaurant comes from France, IMHO.

20

I understand Indian cooking is considered the third great culinary tradition. Although I’ve heard some recomending that Mexican be considered the fourth.

I’ve always loved Mike Royko’s quote on French cooking: “The French cook and eat what the rest of us call the Orkin Man for.”