Video and recipe for preparing a French breakfast!

Authentic French food recipes and simple gourmet recipe collections for French cuisine may be found in the categories at right.

More on the recipes, ingredients and cuisine of French food!

The French culinary arts have evolved extensively over the centuries as a result of many social and political changes. Interestingly, its history can be traced to the Italians, primarily, Catherine de’ Medici who arrived in France in the 1930’s as the bride of King Henry II, making French Cuisine a royalty.

Starting from the middle ages to the French Revolution and heading towards the 20th Century, there were three most important chefs in the history of French cuisine. These chefs cultured the Classical cuisine style. They were:
• Francois Pierre de la Varenne, wrote the first French cuisine cookbook “Le Cuisine François”.
• Marie-Antoine Carême, an early practitioner of haute cuisine and one of the first internationally renowned celebrity chefs.
• Georges Auguste Escoffier, simplified and modernized Carême work and whose books are still used as a major reference all over the world.

We can also see the prevalence of regional wise distinctive traditions in French cooking which resulted in different kinds of cooking styles. These are:
• Classical French Cuisine: Consist of classical French dishes where food is filling and many dishes use cream based sauces.
• Haute Cuisine: Meals are heavy, emphasis is on presentation, ingredients are fine and meal tends to be bit expensive.
• Cuisine Nouvelle: Relatively new style of cooking. Food is lighter, cooking is less elaborative and use of seasonal ingredients.
• Cuisine du terroir: pastoral, regional specialties (more popular these days)

Some basic ingredients used in French food are shallots, onions, nutmeg (for fragrance), cinnamon, olive oil, vinegar (particularly red vinegar), and hot mustard. Also one of the specialities of French recipes is the use of fresh herbs for seasoning namely bouquet garni (garnished bouquet i.e. bundle of herbs tied together and is used in savory dishes), Fleur de sel (flower of salt), Parsley, rosemary, basil, sorrel (for sourness), sage (for meat and pasta).Now we would be examining some of most famous food items and recipes of the French cuisine.

A very remarkable feature of the French cuisine is that each region of France has a distinctive cuisine of its own. Also there are many dishes which are part of the France National cuisine like Breads (e.g. Baguette is bread having a crispy crust), Savory dishes (e.g. Coq au vin i.e chicken in red wine), Desserts and pastries (e.g. Mousse au chocolat, Mille-feuille).

Another famous dish which originated in the southwest area of France is Cassoulet and is prepared by combining meat with pork skin and white beans. Then there is one traditional vegetable dish called Ratatouille consisting of stewed vegetables and is primarily prepared in summers.

Tarte flambée, made of thin bread dough with a topping of bacons, onions and fresh cream, is the specialty of Alsatian region of France. Another famous French dish being Blanquette de veau (a veal dish) contains meat with aromatic vegetables.

One of the most impressive features of French cuisine is that each and every ingredient is added intricately to the main dish, so as to have that perfect blend of taste. Thus we can see that French cuisines are as diverse as the regions of France themselves, something for everyone to relish.

Bon Appétit!