French cuisine photoI with great trepidation, andI am even taking on this topic with some reluctance, because how can one talk about the Great and Immeasurable? French Cuisine is truly Great and it deserves to be written about only with a capital letter! And only by geniuses of the pen. And Immeasurable... Dozens of volumes have been written about it. A human life would probably not be enough to try all the French dishes. I will try, just try, to give you just a few short strokes to the portrait of this Cuisine. Two important features are inherent in French cuisine, which cannot go unmentioned. Firstly, cooking and eating are as important to the French as love and the art of maintaining a conversation. Secondly, cooking for the French is a spiritual art. They name salads after operas: "Aida", "Carmen", "Tosca". And among the cooks there was one who wrote recipes in verse and then set them to the music of old melodies. French is the language of cooking. Rolls, cutlets, entrecote, sauce, mayonnaise, pom-fries, omelette, consommé, pot-au-feu, volette - all these names, and many others, came to us from French cuisine.
For French cuisine, like no otheranother, the sauce is important. "You can learn to boil and fry, but you can't learn to make sauce, you need talent for it, and you have to be born with this talent," wrote the famous 19th century chef and writer Brillat-Savarin. And he knew a thing or two about it! You can probably give up meat, but never the sauce! After all, sauce is the main thing in any dish. Imagine a real Bordelaise, Béchamel or Béarnaise sauce with white wine and cognac. And no one will be surprised if you eat the sauce with a crust of bread. You don't want to leave a single drop of this Miracle on your plate. There has never been a gourmet who would refuse a decent wine or a decent sauce. And salad! To make a real salad, it's not enough to wash and sort it. Russo " and he knew about cooking - he claimed that to prepare a salad you need the tender hands of a young girl. Or cheese! No meal is complete without cheese. Camembert is no less famous in the world than cognac. And Roquefort was prepared back in the days of the Romans. If a Frenchman eats a new type of cheese every day, it will never be repeated for a year. They say that there are from 400 to 600 varieties. However, depending on how you look at it: it is known that one collector keeps about 10,000 labels of varieties of Camembert cheese, collected over the past 20 years. I can’t resist giving a very simple recipe for a Parisian cheese dessert: cut 150 g of cheese and 2 peeled sweet apples into thin slices, add a handful of almonds, 2 tbsp. mayonnaise, lemon juice to taste and mix. Salt. Serve with toasted slices of bread.
If you are in Paris, be sure to try the onion one.soup. True, real onion soup, as it was early in the morning in the market districts (remember "The Belly of Paris", by E. Zola?) in the 19th century, may no longer exist, but still, any onion soup is magnificent. And if you find yourself in Marseille, how can you not try bouillabaisse. Only here, on the coast, it is prepared according to all the rules, experts say. But, to tell the truth, in Normandy it is not bad either. Here they add nuts to it and wash it down with Calvados - strong apple vodka. Drop in to Le Havre, even if it is not on your way - because there you will be served excellent roast duck - Canard a la Rouenise. Or small delicious andouille sausages. Yes, in any town they will always find something to treat you with. For example, snails in wine - what a delicate taste! And the famous oysters! And frog legs, which many of our fellow tribesmen have already tried in Moscow and other cities. Note that they were usually not prepared by the French. And this, as they say in Odessa, is two very different things. They say that once some gentleman was asked: "What would you like to eat asparagus with, gentleman?" The gentleman turned out to be a gourmet and answered briefly: "With reverence!" Yes, this queen of vegetables, with béchamel sauce and grated cheese, lightly baked, cannot be eaten otherwise than with reverence (it's a pity that this vegetable does not take root here). But with the same feeling, true gourmets eat almost any dish of the great French Masters.
I will just mention the famous French wines,magnificent champagne, divine drink cognac - these are the most beautiful additions to French cuisine, because this is already a completely different Song. And I wish you many, many wonderful meetings with this truly wonderful and inexhaustible, always new and always tasty, truly brilliant creation of the French people - the Great French Cuisine! Get to know and love French cuisine! Based on the book "Bon Appetit" by Gunther Linde and Heinz Knoblach.
