A brief history and evolution of French Chef's and Food writers celebrating French Cuisine in date order:
1310 Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent (French: "wind-cutter" i.e. an idle swaggerer) (born ca. 1310 in Pont-Audemer – 1395), was an important figure in the early history of French cuisine. He was cook to the Court of France at the time of the first Valois kings and the Hundred Years' War. His first position was enfant de cuisine (kitchen boy) to Queen Jeanne d'Évreux. From 1326 he was queux, head chef, to Philip VI. In 1347, he became squire to the Dauphin de Viennois and his queux in 1349. In 1355 he became squire to the Duke of Normandy, in 1359 his queux and in 1361 his serjeant-at-arms. The Duke of Normandy became Charles V in 1368 and Tirel continued in his service. From 1381 he was in service to Charles VI. He is generally considered one of the first truly "professional" master chefs. He died in 1395 at around 80 years of age. He expanded a collection of recipes as "Le Viandier", a famous book on cookery and cookery technique, thought to be one of the first professional treatises written in France and upon which the French gastronomic tradition was founded. It had an inestimable influence on subsequent books on French cuisine and is important to food historians as a detailed source on the medieval cuisine of northern France. During the reign of Philip VI Taillevent was a major influence in the rise of courtly favor for the strong red wines being produced in the south of France as well as those coming out of Burgundy. Many restaurants are named after him but the most famous is just off the Champs Elysees at 15 rue Lamennais. Taillevent is a restaurant in Paris, founded in 1946 by André Vrinat, and now owned by the Gardinier family and holds 2 Michelin stars. It used to be one of the hardest places to get into years ago but I was able to easily obtain a reservations last year and it is one of the best Michelin star restaurants in Paris I have eaten at and cannot wait to return.
1615 Francois Pierre de La Varenne(1615-1678) was the foremost member of a group of French chefs, writing for a professional audience, who codified French cuisine in the age of King Louis XIV. Bugundian by birth he was the author of "Le Cuisinier Francois(1651), one of the most influential cookbooks in early modern French cuisine. La Varenne broke with the Italian traditions that had revolutionised medieval and Renaissance French cookery in the 16th and early 17th century. Other authors of the time were Nicolas Bonnefon, Le Jardinier françois (1651) and Les Délices de la campane (1654), and François Massialot, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1691), which was still being edited and modernised in the mid-18th century. The cookbook was still used in France until the French Revolution. The seventeenth century saw a culinary revolution which transported French gastronomy into the modern era. The heavily spiced flavours inherited from the cuisine of the Middle Ages were abandoned in favour of the natural flavours of foods. Exotic and costly spices (saffron, cinnamon, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, nigella, seeds of paradise) were, with the exception of pepper, replaced by local herbs (parsley, thyme, bayleaf, chervil, sage, tarragon). New vegetables like cauliflower, asparagus, peas, cucumber and artichoke were introduced Special care was given to the cooking of meat in order to conserve maximum flavour. Vegetables had to be fresh and tender. Fish, with the improvement of transportation, had to be impeccably fresh. Preparation had to respect the gustatory and visual integrity of the ingredients instead of masking them as had been the practice previously. Finally, a rigorous separation between salted and sweet dishes was introduced, the former served before the latter, banishing the Italian Renaissance taste for mixing sweet and salted ingredients in the same dish or in the same part of the meal.
Chef Francois Pierre de La Varenne
1739 Chef Menon is the pseudonym of an 18th-century French cookbook author; his true identity is unknown. His numerous works were originally printed, and often reprinted, anonymously and were written from 1739 to 1768 The best-known of his books is probably La Cuisinière bourgeoise, otherwise known as "The Household Cook" which was widely imitated and translated.
1755 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin(1755-1826) author of "The Physiology of Taste" with the famous quote "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are" was a French lawyer and politician, and gained fame as an epicure and gastronome:[1] "Grimod and Brillat-Savarin. Between them, two writers effectively founded the whole genre of the gastronomic essay. He was born in the town of Belley, Ain, where the Rhône River then separated France from Savoy, He lived during the French Revolution and at one point lived in the USA where he stayed for three years in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Hartford, living on the proceeds of giving French and violin lessons. For a time, he was first violin in the Park Theater in New York City. His famous work, Physiologie du goût[1] (Physiology of Taste), was published in December 1825, two months before his death. The full title is Physiologie du Goût, ou Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante; ouvrage théorique, historique et à l'ordre du jour, dédié aux Gastronomes parisiens, par un Professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savantes.[5] The book has not been out of print since it first appeared, shortly before Brillat-Savarin's death.[6] Its most notable English translation was done by food writer and critic M. F. K. Fisher, who remarked, "I hold myself blessed among translators." Her translation was first published in 1949. The body of his work, though often wordy or excessively – and sometimes dubiously – aphoristic and axiomatic, has remained extremely important and has repeatedly been reanalyzed through the years since his death. In a series of meditations that owe something to Montaigne's Essays, and have the discursive rhythm of an age of leisured reading and a confident pursuit of educated pleasures, Brillat-Savarin discourses on the pleasures of the table, which he considers a science. Aside from Latin, he knew five modern languages well, and when the occasion suited, was not shy of parading them; he never hesitated to borrow a word, like the English "sip" when French seemed to him to fail, until he rediscovered the then-obsolete verb siroter. The philosophy of Epicurus lies at the back of every page; the simplest meal satisfied Brillat-Savarin, as long as it was executed with artistry: Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
1784 Marie Antoine (Antonin) Carême (1784 –1833) was a French chef and an early practitioner and exponent of the elaborate style of cooking known as grande cuisine, the "high art" of French cooking: a grandiose style of cookery favoured by both international royalty and by the newly rich of Paris. Carême is often considered one of the first internationally renowned celebrity chefs. Carême opened his own shop, the Pâtisserie de la rue de la Paix, which he maintained until 1813. Carême gained fame in Paris for his pièces montées, elaborate constructions used as centerpieces. He made these confections, which were sometimes several feet high, entirely out of foodstuffs such as sugar, marzipan, and pastry. He modeled them on temples, pyramids, and ancient ruins. Napoleon was famously indifferent to food, but he understood the importance of social relations in the world of diplomacy. In 1804, he gave money to Talleyrand to purchase Château de Valençay, a large estate outside Paris. The château was intended to act as a kind of diplomatic gathering place. When Talleyrand moved there, he took Carême with him. Carême's impact on culinary matters ranged from trivial to theoretical. He is credited with creating the standard chef's hat, the toque, he devised new sauces and dishes, and he published a classification of all sauces into groups based on four mother sauces. He is also frequently credited with replacing the practice of service à la française (serving all dishes at once) with service à la russe (serving each dish in the order printed on the menu) after he returned from service in the Russian court, but others say he was a diehard supporter of service à la française. Carême wrote several books on cookery, above all the encyclopedic L'Art de la Cuisine Française (5 vols, 1833–34, of which he had completed three before his death), which included, aside from hundreds of recipes, plans for menus and opulent table settings, a history of French cookery, and instructions for organizing kitchens.
Chef Marie Antoine (Antonin) Carême
1865 Françoise Fayolle , nicknamed mother Fillioux(1865-1925) Françoise was born in a small village in Auvergne. She is the oldest of ten daughters. She went to work, in Grenoble then in Lyon, in bourgeois houses, including that of Gaston Eymard, director of an insurance company and gastronome. This is where it is formed. She married Louis Fillioux. They create a bistro at 73, rue Duquesne 5 , in Lyon , in a room belonging to his father-in-law, called "Fillioux, wine merchant". Françoise is cooking. Regulars at the Grand Camp, the Villeurbanne racecourse, became their first regular customers. At that time, the snack cost 1.25 francs and the full pork menu cost 3.50 francs. Little by little, his restaurant is also welcoming visiting cabaret and music hall stars. At the same time, the development of the railway allows a boom in tourism which benefits Mères Lyonnaises , in particular Mother Fillioux. Like 90% of the French population at the time, Françoise Fayolle spoke a regional language, but flourishing tourism pushed her to address her customers in the national language. This shop is later (late xix th century), a bistro t renowned Le Bistrot Fillioux . They served the same menu for thirty years: velouté soup with truffles, half-mourning poultry, gratin quenelle, artichoke base with foie gras, praline ice cream, accompanied by Beaujolais and châteauneuf-du-Pape. Many postcards circulate on this celebrity of the Lyon gastronomy. "La Reine des Poulards" would have prepared more than 500,000 using the same pair of knives. Legend also has it that "The Empress of Mères Lyonnaises" cooked her hens fortnightly, all in the same cooking broth. Its gourmet restaurant was, during the Belle Époque, one of the most famous in Lyon. "The Empress of Lyonnaise Mothers" was the patroness and formator of Eugénie Brazier (mother Brazier). Mother Filioux restored the coat of arms of restoration mothers in the capital of Gaul. The last Lyon mothers of the Trente Glorieuses owe him a lot. She is also considered to be the creator of the half-mourning chicken recipe. On December 2, 1965, a commemorative plaque paying tribute to Mother Fillioux was inaugurated on the site of her restaurant.
Chef Françoise Fayolle
1885 Mathieu Varille(1885-1963) was born in Lyon, at the same time he was a businessman, pioneer, aviation technician, collector, food writer, and historian. We own him many works on Lyon but in particular his book "La Cusine Lyonnaise published in 1928 and still available today.
1895 Eugénie Brazier, known as "la mère Brazier" (1895-1977) was a French chef who, in 1933, became the first person to attain a total of six Michelin stars, three each at two restaurants: La Mère Brazier on Rue Royale, one of the main streets of Lyon, and a second, also called La Mère Brazier, in the Alpine foothills at Col de la Luère. This was unmatched until Alain Ducasse was awarded six stars with the publication of the 1998 Michelin Guide. She was also the first woman to earn three Michelin stars. Born in La Tranclière in the département of Ain near Lyon, she opened her first restaurant,La Mère Brazier, in 1921, obtaining help from the food critic Curnonsky. Brazier developed Lyonnaise cuisine, a tradition with which Paul Bocuse later found a worldwide success. In 1914 she started working for Mère Filloux, another of the Mères Lyonnaises, one whose kitchen employed only women. During her time at La Mère Fillioux she learned to make volaille demi-deuil, also called poularde de Bresse demi-deuil (chicken in half-mourning), her version of which would make her famous. The dish consisted of a Bresse chicken(blue foot) with slices of black truffle inserted under its skin that was then poached in bouillon. When it was cooked, the truffle showed through the white skin of the chicken so that the overall appearance was black-and white; hence the name half-mourning. She also learned how to cook various types of game such as larks, ortolans, and partridges. She was famously picky about ingredients; her chicken vendor once joked that soon he would be expected to give the birds manicures before she would accept them. She was equally demanding about cleanliness, emptying storage areas daily for cleaning. She avoided waste, creating staff dinners from trimmings and saving anything left on diners' plates to feed the pigs. Her menu changed as required by seasonal availability. When there were few vegetables, she served a macaroni gratin The menus at the La Mère Brazier restaurants were identical and changed little throughout her career. The menu that Bocuse called her "classic standby" and "the one on which her reputation rested" was quenelles de brochet (pike dumplings), poularde demi-deuil, and fonds d’artichauts au foie gras (artichoke hearts with foie gras), typically accompanied by a young Beaujolais. The chicken in half-mourning was the dish for which she was famous. The British food writer Elizabeth David called out the artichoke dish as "one of the most delicious salads I have ever eaten". Brazier's cookbook, Les secrets de la mère Brazier, was published posthumously in 1977. In 2014 it was translated into English under the title La Mere Brazier: The Mother of Modern French Cooking. Bocuse and Pacaud each wrote forewords.
Chef Eugenie Brazier
1897 Fernand Point (1897–1955) was a French chef and restaurateur and is considered by many to be the father of modern French cuisine. He founded the restaurant La Pyramide in Vienne near Lyon. He was born in Louhans, Saône-et-Loire, France. His family kept an inn where he started cooking when he was ten. He moved to Paris and worked at some of the capital's best restaurants before working with Paul Bocuse's father at the Hôtel Royal in Évian-les-Bains Point. He opened Restaurant de la Pyramide when he was 24. The restaurant was awarded three Michelin stars. His book Ma Gastronomie was first published in French in 1969. The book includes 200 recipes based on Point's notes. The chef Charlie Trotter described Point's Ma Gastronomie as the most important cookbook. His most famous comment was "Butter! Give me Butter! Always Butter". The current chef at La Pyramide is Patrick Henriroux
Chef Fernand Point
1920 Gaston Lenôtre (b. May 28, 1920 in Normandy, France – d. January 8, 2009) was a French pastry chef known as a possible creator of the opera cake (gâteau opéra), the founder of "Lenôtre" a culinary empire; whose brand includes restaurants, catering services, retail concerns and cooking schools, and one of the three founders with Paul Bocuse and Roger Verge of Les Chefs de France at EPCOT in Orlando, Florida. Lenôtre was born on a small farm in Normandy. Both of his parents eventually moved the family to Paris and became restaurant workers. Eventually his father's ill health forced them to move back to the province from which they came. Lenôtre then had to struggle to find a position in a kitchen in Normandy. Prior to the outbreak of World War II he sold his homemade chocolate creations in Paris from a bicycle. Following the war, Lenôtre opened a small bakery in Normandy. The venture was a success and in 1957 he came upon the opportunity to purchase a tiny bakery in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris. His new establishment did extremely well from the outset and is said to have presaged nouvelle cuisine. Lenôtre was renowned for concentrating on simple preparations and fresh ingredients, and for insisting on using the best butter in his pastries. The year 1964 saw Lenôtre enter the catering field. Due in large part to improvements in freezing food perishables, he was able to quickly expand the numbers of diners he was able to serve. The year 1971 saw Lenôtre open his first cooking school in Plaisir, Yvelines France. Among the chefs who studied under Lenôtre there was David Bouley and Jean-Paul Jeunet. The chef Pierre Hermé was an apprentice of his, as was the pastry chef Sébastien Canonne.[3] The chef Alain Ducasse also worked under him. In 1974 Lenôtre dispatched another then apprentice of his Michel Richard to open Chateau France a restaurant and patisserie on the East Side of Manhattan in New York City to spotlight the Lenôtre culinary style. It only stayed in business for a single year. Quickly bouncing back from this failed venture, in 1982 he opened les Chefs de France in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World's Epcot Center together with Paul Bocuse and Roger Vergé. In 1985 the businesses under the banner head Lenôtre were taken over by the French Hotel firm Accor.
Chef Gaston Lenôtre
1926 Paul Bocuse (1926 - 2018) was a French chef based in Lyon who was known for the high quality of his restaurants and his innovative approaches to cuisine. A student of Eugénie Brazier, she was one of the most prominent chefs associated with the nouvelle cuisine, which is less opulent and calorific than the traditional cuisine classique, and stresses the importance of fresh ingredients of the highest quality. Paul Bocuse claimed that Henri Gault first used the term, nouvelle cuisine, to describe food prepared by Bocuse and other top chefs for the maiden flight of the Concorde airliner in 1969. Bocuse made many contributions to French gastronomy both directly and indirectly, because he had numerous students, many of whom have become notable chefs themselves. One of his students was Austrian Eckart Witzigmann, one of four Chefs of the Century and chef at the first German restaurant to receive three Michelin stars. Since 1987, the Bocuse d'Or has been regarded as the most prestigious award for chefs in the world (at least when French food is considered), and is sometimes seen as the unofficial world championship for chefs. Bocuse received numerous awards throughout his career, including the medal of Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur. The Culinary Institute of America honoured Bocuse in their Leadership Awards Gala on 30 March 2011. He received the "Chef of the Century" award. In July 2012 the Culinary Institute of America announced in The New York Times that they would change the name of their Escoffier Restaurant to the Bocuse Restaurant, after a year-long renovation. In 1975, he created soupe aux truffes (truffle soup) for a presidential dinner at the Élysée Palace. Since then, the soup has been served in Bocuse's restaurant near Lyon as Soupe V.G.E., VGE being the initials of former president of France Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
Chef Paul Bocuse
1937 Alain Chapel (30 December 1937 – 10 July 1990) was a French Michelin 3 starred chef, credited with being one of the originators of Nouvelle Cuisine. Chapel was born in Lyon, the son of Maître d' Charles and his wife Eva. At the outbreak of World War II, the family moved to the village of Mionnay 12 miles outside the city, where his father opened a bistro called La Mere Charles in an old coaching inn surrounded by lush gardens. There Alain Chapel received his first training. Alain Chapel eventually returned to the family bistro which was then upgraded to a restaurant. In 1967 it was awarded its first Michelin star. After taking over the restaurant in 1970 on the death of his father, he converted the inn to a hotel and renamed it in his own name. In 1973, Chapel gained his third Michelin star, then one of only 19 restaurants all in France which had ever then gained the honour. Chapel's signature dishes included stuffed calves' ears with fried parsley, truffle-stuffed chicken tightly enveloped in a pork bladder and cooked in a rich chicken broth. Food critic Craig Claiborne writing for The New York Times in 1977 described Chapel's gateau de foies blonds as "his ultimate triumph" and "one of the absolute cooking glories of this generation". According to the Gault Millau Guide to France: "A meal at Chapel's restaurant was like a symphony." Throughout the rest of his life, the establishment retained all three of its Michelin stars. The speed of transformation and the elaborate cuisine turned the village of Mionnay into a culinary landmark on any serious gastronomic tour of France. The attraction was also as great for young chefs, who sought the opportunity to work with Chapel – these included Michel Roux Jr.
Chef Alain Chapel
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