The Jazz Age of French Cuisine
French food of the 1920s paints a portrait of one of the country’s most exciting culinary periods, when old recipes were given new life and the food of the poor became fine dining for the rich.
Ironically, French food in the 1920s did not focus on the creation of new dishes (although this was the period during which the crepe suzzete made its debut), but instead grew out of new preparation techniques for haute cuisine or haute cuisine. Dinner.
More efficient preparation allowed chefs across the country to capitalize on the growing number of hotels featuring their restaurant as the highlight of their guest experience. For the first time, haute cuisine – meticulously prepared dishes with expensive ingredients – could be prepared much more quickly, and subsequently on a much larger scale.
Georges Auguste Escoffier laid the foundation for French food in the 1920s, who from the end of the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century revolutionized the way haute cuisine was prepared.
Escoffier is credited with dividing the modern kitchen into several stations where a chef was responsible for only a specific part of the preparation of a dish or meal. For example, a garde manager was responsible for preparing only cold dishes, while a rotisseur was solely responsible for ingredients that needed to be fried, grilled, or roasted.
This meant that dishes that could previously take up to 30 minutes to prepare could now be completed in half the time, as different chefs worked on different components simultaneously.
Escoffier is also credited with helping to shrink French menus and advocating for dishes to be served as separate entrees on individual plates.
With this foundation established, French cuisine, highly varied with recipes based on regions, began to develop a national character. Dishes and recipes that were previously cooked and eaten by the poor, or “peasant dishes”, began to make their way into haute cuisine. Chefs often simply replaced inexpensive ingredients with their more expensive counterparts, such as substituting cheap wine for much better quality.
It is therefore not surprising that French cuisine in the 1920s saw a growing popularity of the peasant dish coq au von, a soup consisting mainly of chicken stewed in wine, became popular. Although it’s an ancient dish (one legend says it was cooked for Caesar when he conquered the area that would become France), it wasn’t until the 1920s that it became a staple not just for peasants but for restaurants as well. haute cuisine.
Although originally published in 1903, Le Guide Culinaire, a cookbook that incorporates much of the foundation of French cooking, such as the use of fresh, local ingredients, was updated twice during the 1920s to reflect advanced preparation techniques. and the modification of old recipes into modern recipes. masterpieces
French food of the 1920s produced recipes in which regional diversity was fused into a cohesive culinary theme and is a testament to the success of modern efficiency combined with tradition.