Cuisine

French

Cuisine française

You taste French cooking first in stock, butter and pastry, not in a single national plate. A croissant is laminated dough: butter folded into wheat until the layers shatter. Steak frites is a pan-cooked steak and twice-fried potatoes, judged on the crust and the chip. Crêpes are a thin batter cooked on a hot surface, sweet or savoury. Pot-au-feu is beef and bones simmered with vegetables until the broth is the point. Soupe à l'oignon is caramelised onion, stock and a gratinated cheese lid.

Rural pots and bakery craft ran beside court and restaurant professionalisation. The brigade, the sauce list and the pastry shop are nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions, not medieval law. Croissant dough as France now makes it is a bakery evolution of Viennese lamination. Ratatouille is a Provençal vegetable stew that restaurants sometimes over-reduce into a jam. Lentilles du Puy are a terroir pulse dish: green lentils that hold their shape in a mustardy dressing or a simple pot. A French omelette is a texture test — barely set, no browning — that cookbooks used to sort professionals from home cooks.

Sauces start from stock, fond or a cooked vegetable base. Braising is low heat and time. Lamination is temperature control: butter that stays in sheets. Regional pantries still disagree — butter and cream in the north and west, olive oil in the south, duck fat where the birds are. Steak frites should not arrive swimming. Pot-au-feu wants a clear broth and boiled meats that are not dry.