This reification of French food by US media merely highlights how, in a country that recently crowned the burrito bowl the most popular dish (followed by the trusty burger), French cuisine is still the epitome of high culture. As Nikita Richardson, senior staff editor for The New York Times food section, put it: ‘We just can’t quit the French.’
It turns out that there are reasons for this that even Jefferson cannot claim. They have to do with how ‘French cuisine’ came into being and, most importantly, became canonised. Of course, French people ate ‘French food’ before the French Revolution, but there was no such thing as a ‘French chef’ for anyone but the noble courts before 1789. Prior to that, Paris was home to fewer than 50 taverns meant for common travellers. The aristocracy entertained on their own estates, courtesy of their cook-servants. Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006), set in the final years of the Ancien Régime, imagines the high-end fare that the queen consumed in a montage scene showing Marie and her court snacking on dozens of platters of cakes and confections – pink macarons, bite-sized redcurrant tarts and strawberry ladyfingers decorated with edible pink flowers. This was a time when peasants (imagine Marie’s chambermaid) ate mostly bread – not brioche made with eggs and milk, as Marie got, but dense loaves made with the far cheaper barley, oats and buckwheat. It’s no wonder that the ensuing grain shortage was a major cause for the revolution.
One toppled monarchy, a new constitution and 30 years later, there were approximately 3,000 restaurants serving as many as 100,000 Parisians per day. These establishments entertained a new class of Parisian, who had a little money and a lot of ambition. Around this time, the world’s first celebrity chef was enjoying success in his career. Marie-Antoine Carême came from a very large, very poor Parisian family; by age 10, he was on his own, illiterate and broke. To sustain himself, he signed a six-year contract to wash dishes at a tavern called Fricassée de Lapin, on the edge of Paris. By 16, he’d landed a job at a pastry shop near the Palais-Royal.