The Dominance of the French Grande Cuisine

Many in Western societies as well as upper-class members of non-Western societies consider French cookery to be the world’s most refined method of food preparation. This reputation has mainly to do with the grande cuisine, a style of cooking offered by high-class restaurants and generally regarded as the national cuisine of France. The grande cuisine attained its status because it emphasizes the pleasure of eating rather than its purely nutritional aspects. Whereas all cuisines embody notions of eating for pleasure, it was only in France, specifically in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that a cuisine that focused on the pleasure of eating became socially institutionalized. Moreover, it was the bourgeois class of the period that used this emphasis on eating for pleasure for their cultural development. Previously, the aristocracy had determined the styles and fashions of the times, including the haute cuisine, but this privilege was temporarily lost with the French Revolution.

The middle class also used the grande cuisine to demonstrate a cultural superiority over other social groups with growing economic power and, thus, the potential to rise on the social ladder. At the same time, restaurants – new and special places created for the grande cuisine – came into being. Spatially institutionalized, the grande cuisine was transformed into a matter of public concern and considerable debate (Aron 1973).

The institutionalization of a cuisine that emphasized the pleasure of eating had many effects, not the least of which was that in France, more than in other European societies, eating and drinking well came to symbolize the “good life” (Zeldin 1973–7). As such, the grande cuisine became culturally important for all French classes, not only for the middle class that had created it, with the result that cooking and discussions about food and the qualities of wines came to be of paramount moment. Indeed, this self-conscious stylization of eating and drinking by all classes of France led to the description of the French by other Europeans as pleasure-oriented, and the characterization of the French style of living as savoir vivre.