Displaying items by tag: Kitchen & Art of cooking

Since the night of times, the Man improved his food. With Prehistory, it starts to clean its food in the river and the lakes. The control of fire allows the cooking of certain food.
With settlement, it cultivates cereals to make flours,… One found representations of ancient Egypt where the made bread are appearance like consumption of fish, the meat, the fruits and vegetables.
The Romans will create new food receipts to integrate the new ingredients come from the colonies and Roman empire. The spices are used in the new receipts to bring additional flavours to the palace.
In Middle Ages, the medieval kitchen consists of a dresser where the guest eats venison, roast poultries, with acidulous and sweet-and-sour accompaniments with spices. Following the crusades, the Eastern fruits and vegetables are integrated in the dressers.
At the 13th century, one starts to introduce the furnace into the kitchen and one draws up the dining table. To the level of the food hygiene, cooking limits the microbial proliferation on the meat and fish.
The food is different according to the established social order. The most expensive ingredients like certain spices (saffron,…), salt, the game are booked to the kings and to the lords.
With 14th and 15th centuries, the famine is spread in Occident. The lords and the prelates organize banquets where the profusion of the best mets is a social marker. The lord eats the best pieces of the dishes: shoulder of lamb, pheasant, swan, chicken,… the culinary techniques evolve to more complexity to improve the gustatory feelings.

The food surplus is distributed to the poor around the castle.

The various Dukes of Burgundy dramatized by the ritual ones and an order of the dishes the gastronomy of the time. In Europe, the Court of Burgundy became the model for all the European aristocracy. The banquet of Pheasant, held in Lille in 1454 is the top of the time. Hundreds of people could attend the wealth of the table of the Duke of Burgundy. Philippe Le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, invited approximately 200 Knights to his table for the ceremony of the wishes of pheasant. He wanted to obtain that each Knight makes the wishes leave to the crusades.

With the Middle Ages, the court of the lords is a place where one teaches the good manners according to the social status. The noble young people share the same container with drinking and the same bowl. One should not give in the dish a started piece,…. The chronology of the dishes is codified. Service of the simmered mets, then the service of the roasts, intervene them and the desserts.
With each service, the servants pose on the tables several mets. The ritual was to make pass the dishes according to the social status around the table of the lord. The most modest people were to help themselves in the dish placed in front of them.
With the Rebirth, the Italian influence introduces a new chronology of service. One serves the fruits as starter, then boiled, after the large roast sides of meat with the meats, in finally the desserts. The kitchen grows rich by the new products come from dessert and South America (bean, chocolate, tomatos, corn, potato) from Italy (frost, gingerbread and nougat).

The name of François Vatel is attached to the imposing festivals and with the dinners organized at the time of the arrival of Louis XIV with the castle of Be worth the Viscount of the Fouquet Superintendent and the castle of chantilly of the Prince Louis II of Bourbon Cop. On April 23rd, 1671, the royal court of the castle of Versailles made up of 3.000 people (noble and domestic) come to Chantilly for 3 days from festivity. The budget of this reception is evaluated with 50.000 ecus. The name of François Vatel will remain in the History of France like one of the organizers of dinners of exception.

The cooks of the time start to limit the use of spices in the composition of the dishes. One searches the flavour of the product with the use of more technical sauces melts of sauce.).
At the 18th century, the trades of mouth (to stop, tripe butcher, caterer.) appear to meet the needs for the townsmen.
The problem of the food preserving is a concern of Humanity. Artisanal solutions exist since the night of times but the 1st industrial process is invented by Nicolas Appert in 1795. It will be sophisticated by Pierre Durand in 1810 who opens up the way for the canning facilities. The sterilization of food is an important progress in the human consumption. The food industry develops. The easiest households will be able to be equipped with the first cookers. The development of the various cooking methods will result in working out cooking recipes for the households.

In 1858, the 1st newspaper of the gastronomy is launched: “The Gourmet” by Charles Monselet. In the 1st number, one clearly indicated the goal of this new weekly magazine: “One will enter from now on with certainty at Verdier or Véry by knowing in advance what one must request from it, and it will be enough for the hosts to send to the market their cooker with the last number of our newspaper to the hand”.
In the various numbers, it is published detailed receipts so that the cooker can reproduce each dish with the list of the ingredients and the proportions to be respected. There is also a preoccupation with a research on old dishes to give to the last style.
In 1865, Louis Pasteur deposits a patent of a novel method of food preserving starting from work of Nicolas Appert: pasteurization.
The food industry will use this thermal novel method (between 62 ° and 88°) to develop on the conservation of the fresh produce.

In 1846 is born Auguste Escoffier, the great name of the French cuisine. It will revolutionize the kitchen been useful in the de luxe hotels. Part of its family circle works in the restoration. Thus, it enters at 13 years in training as kitchen boy the restaurant of his uncle.
The development of the railroad in France and Europe leads the aristocrats and the European upper middle class to move towards the Riviera. Hotel César Ritz joins Auguste Escoffier to develop a new concept of the hotel trade of luxury with a restaurant where a Grand Chief of kitchen officiates. In 1898, it opens the Ritz Hotel of the Vendôme place in Paris. The women are accepted at the restaurant. This social innovation will contribute to the success of the hotel trade of luxury.

The chief Auguste Escoffier will create “the menu with the map” by revolutionizing the organization of the tasks carried out in kitchen. He creates the brigade where each person with a quite precise task to realize by respecting a certain timing. He creates mets while proposing to the celebrities to give their name to this new met like famous crepe Suzette, the Melba.Pour fishing season to facilitate work in brigade, he creates the menu with the map at fixed price with a minimum of 4 people by table with fresh produce.

In 1899, it leaves to direct the kitchen of Carlton to London. It applies its methods until 1920 when it directed a brigade de 60 people in kitchen. With each service, environ 500 had to be served covered.
This chief engaged in his writings, by his initiative to create the “Dinners of Épicure” by his “culinary Guide” to export the French cuisine in the whole world. In 1883, it founds the review 'the Art of cooking” which will become “the culinary review in 1920”. In 1912, its book “the book of the menus” explains to the cooks the rules to be applied to the professional kitchen of restoration.

The popularization in 1934 of its receipts in the book “My Kitchen” towards the public of the housewives is an act of democratisation of the French cuisine.

The development of the means of transport as the car, the railroad, the plane will contribute to diversify the varieties of food coming from the whole world. The kitchen grows rich by new receipts to adapt to the new dishes.

In 1920, the Red Guide of Michelin publishes a list of restaurants with the information collected by the customers of the Guide and the first inspectors anonymous. In 1926, a marking system is set up. In 1931, the stars are used to indicate the best restaurants of France. In 1997, the notation of the “Greedy Feeding-bottle” makes its appearance to indicate an establishment where kitchen of quality at a moderate price.

In the years 1970, Henri Gault and Christian Millau will launch a magazine of gastronomy and a guide “GaultMillau”. The guide establishes a notation of the restaurants according to new criteria which announce a revival of the French cuisine.

The movement of the new kitchen takes as a starting point these new criteria like a return to authentic flavours of the products, to control the cooking of the meats, fishes and vegetables, to control the sauce funds,…. the excellence of the kitchen and the culinary creativity must show the real know-how of a chief and a brigade of kitchen. The taste becomes again a basic element to make share with the customers of the restaurants. One also recommends to decrease the number of the mets been used compared to the services as Auguste Escoffier.

Here the list of the 10 recommendations for this new kitchen written by Henri Gault and Christian Millau in 1973:
1 “You will not cook too much.”
2 “You will use fresh produce and of quality.”
3 “You will reduce your map.”
4 “You will not be systematically modernistic.”
5 “You will however search what the novel methods bring to you.”
6 “You will avoid marinades, faisandages, fermentations, etc”
7 “You will eliminate rich sauces.”
8 “You will not be unaware of dietetics.”
9 “You will not fake your presentations.”
10 “You will be inventive.”
Since 1980, the editorial board of the Guide decrees the title of “Cook of the year”.

 The emblematic chiefs of this current are Michel Guérard, the Large Brothers Three, Alain Chapel, Paul Bocuse, Alain Sanderens.
The culinary movement of the defense of the taste is an answer sociétale to the development of an industrial kitchen developed by the great groups of the agro-alimentary one. Increasingly demanding standards on the level of the food hygiene, the development of large distribution, evolution of the rhythms of life,…. led the population towards the consumption of the products manufactured by the sector of the agro-alimentary one.
The mediatization of the kitchen appeared in 1954 with the screen with the emission “Art & Magic of the kitchen” animated by the chief Raymond Oliver. This chief of the Parisian restaurant “Grand Vefour” had 3 stars with the Red Guide from Michelin. The goal of the emissions and the magazines is to give again desire with the families of recuisiner with fresh produce and season.

The new equipment like the refrigerator, the food processor, the ovens with several cooking methods. will contribute to facilitate the realization of the dishes. One recommends cookings to the vapor, with the bain-marie, in curlpaper. Cooking at low temperature makes it possible to preserve the taste of the product.

In the years 1990, researchers wanted to check in a scientific way the bases of the receipts of the French cuisine. Nicholas Kurti and Hervé This created the molecular gastronomy. The experiments carried out with the chief Pierre Gagnaire will make it possible to establish the scientific mechanisms which lead to the principal culinary transformations. It often uses liquid nitrogen to make its experiments.
The emblematic chiefs of this current are Pierre Gagnaire, Thierry Marx, Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal.

ART OF COOKING
It is a transitory art, it especially developed starting from the movement of the new kitchen. The esthetics of a met must come to compensate for the impression of a modest amount been useful in the plate. The cook becomes artist. The presentation of a plate must make feel emotions with the guests.
Each plate must be thought like a masterpiece. The chief must work on esthetics as on the composition of the ingredients. The image of a dish became as important in felt as tasting itself.
The molecular kitchen makes it possible to support visual presentation of a met. Certain chiefs remove the structure from dishes and desserts while playing with the visual one to make discover with their customers a new approach of dishes and revisited desserts.
The spangled restaurants were directed towards this aesthetic research. Each chief must associate collaborators having a certain control of the culinary techniques and an artistic capacity to propose new innovating and aesthetic cards.
One can visually compare the difference of the presentation of a dish carried out by a chef and a dish carried out by a spangled chief applies the new precepts of the world kitchen.

For several years, the artification of culinary has been orchestrated by the exhibitions like the exposure “Arts & Food” which réunit 78 photographs of art of cooking. An extract of the presentation of this movement comments on the place of the photographic art to the service of the kitchen: “The photography, which replaces the written thing, invites to reflect, dream… and sometimes to salivate when it is about culinary photography. As well it is true as more than ever, one eats from now on initially with the eyes and than one would prefer to damn oneself rather than “to consume idiotic “. Culinary photography became that of a growing number of photographers of the whole world, professionals of the light whose glance, posed on our plates and our food, sublimates our tastes and our dietary habits, our choices as regards kitchen .....”

The Palace of Beautiful arts of Paris organized the exposure “Art and the culinary process” in 2013. The idea of this exposure was to develop a contemporary approach of the art of cooking.
Extract: “
Culinary creation is about to being recognized like an art except for whole, a mode of expression anchored in the contemporary. In 2007 already, Ferran Adrià saw himself invited as an artist in Dokumenta de Kassel. But its participation was limited to the invitation of some visitors of the exposure in his restaurant elBulli to Pinks… How can the kitchen ‐elle fully become an object of exposure?
The “new one cooks” in the years 1970, then twenty years later before ‐ Spanish or Italian gardism, registered the evolution under the sign of a permanent duty of creation. More recently, the return to the order and the centring on the product were during “natural” esthetics which, in phase with the blossoming of the Scandinavian kitchen, gave its noble letters to the locavorism, including in its most radical expressions. All these movements released the creativity of the chiefs, questioning in the same dash the statute of the cook. The such cinema in the years 1950, the kitchen profits from now on from a “policy of the authors “and from a critic able to decipher the reasons and the challenges of them.
Such is the principal stake of COOKBOOK: to locate culinary creation in the contemporary cultural field, and to initiate a deeper dialogue between artists and cooks of today, whereas multiply the exchanges and the mutual influences between the world of the art and that of the gastronomy. Which are the aesthetic trends and the dominant forms in the contemporary kitchen? Is the epic of the natural kitchen ‐il soluble in the theoretical work of the more conceptual cooks?

In the central exposure of program COOKBOOK, the contemporary art forms a “gangue” around the culinary creation, represented by preparatory works (drawings, sketch, joinings, videos…) carried out by the Masters of the world gastronomy.
In return, COOKBOOK isolates some components from the culinary practice (cooking, the table, the alchemical transformation of the matter, the contribution of the “molecular kitchen” and the reflection on the structures and the matters of the ingredients…) in order to locate of them the action or the correspondences in the artistic process.”

In the years 1960, the School of Beautiful arts of Frankfurt exempts courses of kitchen. Today, one teaches at the University of Art and Design (ESAD) the culinary design. The conducting line of this educational movement is to train the future chiefs with Art to make it possible to these chefs to try out and create transitory works of the contemporary gastronomy.

The spangled restaurant became a space of artistic representation transitory. The easy customer comes to discover new at the same time aesthetic and goûteuses creations.

In 1825, Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin, celebrates French gastronome published in the Physiology of Goû tles thought following:

“The animals feed; the man eats, the witty man alone can eat”

“Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are”,

“The discovery of mets new fact more, for the happiness of mankind, that the discovery of a star”.

Today these thought are to be meditated on the future orientations of the kitchen and the Art of cooking.

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