SUNDAY CUISINE: French cuisine affair

On Thursday last week, Goût de or Good France celebrated French gastronomy with over 1,000 chefs on all five continents taking part. Diners were served simultaneously in participating restaurants and notably only the Sheraton Kampala Hotel qualified as a participant in Uganda.

This event honoured the merits of French cuisine taking into account its capacity for innovation, its values, while at the same time sharing, enjoying and respecting the principles of high quality and environmentally responsible food. Among foodies and since time immemorial, French cuisine has been accepted and acknowledged, the world over to be the best and most imaginative to be found. I hasten to add that taste will always remain subjective and individual both by nature and taste or as the French would say, chacun son gout.

Unique cuisine
What seems to distinguish the French from other cuisine is their almost fanatical zeal in their preparation and cooking as opposed to other conventional types of cuisine. For the French remain unsurpassed in seemingly having managed to make food to state of excellence rarely seen or savoured anywhere.

Notwithstanding, in an entirely different genre, the Chinese would certainly give them a run for their money!

It is not farfetched to say that the French were the original proponents of the famous computer technology age parlance, (GIGO) ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ For the French chef, it is quite common to spend time agonising and studying menus for hours on end, prodding vegetables to make certain that they are of the correct ripeness, making certain that they choose just the ‘right’ cut of meat.

That is not all; they then have to ensure that the items chosen are all cooked to perfection, with time not being a consideration, unlike in conventional Continental fare.

To the French, this is one of the most creative and useful ways of spending one’s time. And by the way, this addiction has become an art that is practiced all over France by the suburban housewife as well as the ranks of the great and not so great chefs of the eating establishments of France.

One can only marvel at how far ahead of the times they were in terms of their breathtaking and mouth-watering pastries and ice creams.That is how French cuisine became forever revolutionised and immortalised.

Schools of thought

Today, there exists two principle and distinct schools of French cooking. If you who have been to France then you must be familiar with the first, known as haute or Grande cuisine, traditionally practiced in the early days and we are speaking of 300 hundred years ago, by chefs who were very renowned and famous. Their patrons were usually people of great nobility and royalty, not to speak of the top hotels and eating joints of the day.

The second would of course be the widely known provincial or bourgeois cooking. One of the better-kept secrets the French tend to keep to themselves is the fact that they owe the existence of haute cuisine to the Italians where it first began! Prior to the 16th century, the French were a woefully uncultured and backward lot whose cooking was simple and rustic, with the emphasis on domestic and dairy produce.
Indeed the French should eternally be grateful to the young Catherine de Medici who ventured in France in order to wed the French king, Henry II. Catherine was not only a Bon Vivant, but also a cultured lady who travelled with a retinue comprising, among others cooks and chefs who were steeped in the traditions of Renaissance Florence.