Pretty impressed that this thread starts with “I’ve never been to France”. An informed perspective on French cooking right there!
Also
is a bizarre thing to say.
If you’re using Windows, hold down Alt while typing 0223 on the number pad. (If you have a laptop, my apologies – I wish they’d change this, too.)
If you’re using Mac OS, hold down option and press e, then press e again.
… which is not to say that typing a French surname in all caps isn’t perfectly acceptable, too.
Shitty French food is the rule, not the exception, in France or anywhere else. But there’s a reason the techniques deployed are the main course of the formation of a great many master cooks working in all manner and traditions of food – the French are great at codifying and streamlining method. Think about it this way – even at a pub serving burgers and fries/chips, most times the nomenclature for the kitchen staff is the same as in a French tradition, and most times these people don’t even speak French. It’s tradition.
And a versatile one – if you know how to make a nice brunoise, or one of the mother sauces, you can adapt that to just about any tradition of food.
ETA thanks above for the tip – it doesn’t seem right to see a name or name-like word without the right accent, but I do use a notebook computer without a numeric keypad. SOL, I guess. I guess I’ll annoy everyone by using the little “cheat” of using caps for words with accents, since it’s relatively standard for French typesetting. (I finally bought my own copy of Grevisse, and was surprised to learn his name doesn’t have the acute accent on the first ‘e’ – I’ve been pronouncing it wrong for years!)
I’m not the one who said it. I paraphrased it from the book Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow.
Quoting now: “Until the French Revolution, France was a divided patchwork of nationalities similar to the present-day Balkans…They all spoke different languages, lived in distinct geographic areas, and, of course, ate different food…France didn’t end up like the Balkans because Paris effectively bulldozed regional differences after the Revolution to create a common French identity. Still, many regional differences subsisted in a subdued way. Cuisine is one of them…Jean-Claude Jandin, a high ranking civil servant who ran a non-profit organization networking cities around Orleans…believes cuisine became important to the French precisely because it was one of the few modes of expression of local cultures that the French State didn’t eliminate in the centuries of centralization following the Revolution.”
There’s no need for snarkiness just because I dare ask some questions about French cuisine. I’m trying to get my ignorance fought. Nowhere have I said that French cooking isn’t all that. It’s just that the French cooking I’ve sampled didn’t live up to the hype, in my opinion. Now that may be simply that I’ve never experienced the real thing, or it may be that my expectations were misplaced. I’d like to know which it was.
I admit the Mike Royko quote was a bit of a low blow. But that’s Mike. He’s my hero.
I just want you to know that thanks to this thread I felt the need to make stuffed crepes for dinner and now I have a tummy ache from overeating. I hope you’re happy. 
The Mrs. and I went to a high-end french restaurant this January past. We’re no strangers to high end dining, and have had some decent french food in the past, but most recently we’d been to a string of restaurants over the previous week that had promised fantastic food but failed to deliver, and we were getting a bit jaded, and began to doubt that any place was going to impress us with anything other than extreme portion size.
But right from the start, our taste buds were blown out of the water. From appetizer to soup to entree to cheese course to dessert, each item was truly top-notch. We had to restrain ourselves from licking the plates.
I also had my first exposure to Epoisses de Bourgogne, one of the most amazing cheeses I’ve ever run across.
We both left contented, yet probably consumed 1/3 fewer calories than at a typical meal, just because there was so much to savor with each bite.
In the US? And it was good? Pray tell, where did you get it?
I fell in love with Epoisses while in Bourgogne, and every bit of it I’ve gotten in the US stinks of ammonia in a bad, bad way. Even the stuff I paid a ridiculous amount of money for from a very high-end cheese shop who swore to me it was good. Blech. None of the Epoisses I got in France stunk of ammonia.
Shit. Now my brain is telling me I need to go back to France.
Filling recipe, s’il vous plait?
Isn’t the tiny portions cliche just a certain type of French cooking? Nouvelle? I think thats the first thing many people think of when they picture going to a French restaurant. A bite sized piece of meat on top of a teaspoon of vegetables in some weird sculpture with some sauce drizzled around the plate that cost $70.00.
Yup, it’s just one style.
It’s funny how many people claim to hate French food, but who will gladly scarf up beef stew, steak & fries, scalloped potatoes, pan-fried fish, steamed mussels, and about a dozen other dishes I can think of that are classic French food. I guess that’s the true testament to how good French food really is; it’s the basis of so much of what we consider standard American food that we don’t even realize it.
It was Our Lady of Cambridge’s Fondue au Crustace, with the substitution of some leftover pork loin for the shellfish, some colby/jack mix for the swiss, and a substantial snork of leftover rose in place of the vermouth.
Merci!
Snork? Heh, snerk.
With apologies to everyone for continuing the hijack (but how can you properly discuss French food if you can’t type French characters?)…
If you frequently find yourself needing to type accented characters, but don’t want to call up Character Map every time, you can set up an additional keyboard mode. (This is what I do, when I’m working in Windows.) For a very long-winded explanation, have a look at this Microsoft article: How to use the United States-International keyboard layout in Windows 11 - Microsoft Support
Simply put, I type Alt+Shift to switch to the accented keyboard, type ’ then e to get an é (or ` then a to get an à, or , then c to get a ç – you get the idea), then continue typing normally since pretty much everything else is the same, or just Alt+Shift again to toggle back.
Exactly!
Talking food is one of my all-time favorite things in the world. It always amazed my wife, that when I’d have a house full of chefs, and cooks over for some chowing down, that we would sit and talk shop for hours. She likes to leave work at work.
For some reason I cant stand talking about it on message boards and fora. I guess its easier for me to get my points and ideas across if I can use facial expressions and voice inflection. I also find it difficult to tease or gently bust someones chops without sounding like a jerk.
Actively wanting to discuss cooking is what separates a chef from a run of the mill hash slinger. To some schmoe working at a Waffle House, cooking is work. He could just as easily be pumping gas or digging ditches for his wage. To a chef, cooking is a passion. That passion leads to a thirst for knowledge that spurs the chef to learn more than just the rote procedure of cooking, but the craft and art as well.
As was stated earlier in the thread, French cuisine is usually more about taste than anything else. More importantly, I think french cuisine is talked up because it establishes a framework for a large portion of the foods we take for granted as good, but don’t attribute directly to France or French methods. The mother sauces are an excellent example of this. You can’t make a good macaroni and cheese without starting with a béchamel sauce.
The French may not have invented these methods, but they certainly refined them into a coherent school of thought that encompasses a panoply of styles and ingredients.
One of the most important differences for me is that in France, cheap food can also be tasty food. In Paris, there’s a crepe stand or a panini stand every block or so. You can get a crepe or a sandwich for 2-4 euros that is absolutely delicious and satisfying for breakfast or lunch. Comparatively, our cheap cuisine is practically dog food.
Back in the dark days of the Nixon Administration we were given the opportunity to take an extended European vacation at the expense of the American taxpayer. We lived in Kaiserslautern, Germany, which is reasonably close to Metz and Strasbourg on the main road from Frankfort to Paris. Between my job and a colonel who was very liberal about formal and informal leave we had many opportunities to eat all over Western Europe. Let me say that there are all sorts of restaurants and cafes out side of Paris, in rural France, in the provincial cities and along the West Bank of the Rhine where a superb meal could be had at a reasonable price in a warm and friendly setting – food that was indescribably good. The same was true of southern Germany even though the pallet was much different as you worked your way out of areas with historical French influence.
We have been back a number of times and things haven’t changed. Same good food, same reasonable price (even though my pockets are a bit deeper than they were forty plus years ago as an impecunious junior officer) and the same friendly and warm welcome. Even warmer in Germany where Americans are no longer representatives of an occupying power but cash customers.
Quite frankly, my idea of Heaven is a little French country restaurant – local food, local wine and just enough of the language to read the menu and ask questions.
Well, 4 Euros is like, $8. Even in New York City, it’s easy to find a reasonable lunch for $8. $8 for breakfast is highway robbery.
I agree, cheap roadside food is awesome all over the globe. There are even some instances of that here in the states, but I do agree that most of it is crap.
Rather than hijack, I want to start a thread about that, but I have to go under the knife in about 21 hours, so I’ll wait until tomorrow. Unless someone else is interested.
Nitpick: palate