Cuisine / French Cuisine
French cuisine has internationally set the standards for fine dining. There is no regional Western cuisine that has not adopted a number of French ways of preparing food and the terminology to go with it, and the finer the dining the more.
In Bangkok, French cuisine is probably better represented than in any other capital in East Asia. Many five-star hotels especially in Bangkok have French gourmet restaurants, and in spite of the fact that more German, British and Scandinavian tourists come to Thailand than French tourists, and furthermore in spite of the fact that the French are also trailing other European nations in foreign investments, independent French restaurants are decisively more numerous in the Thai capital than restaurants with any other European cuisine.
And beyond that, many non-French first-class restaurants in the Thai capital, be they Spanish, Italian, German, seafood, or grill restaurants, also offer a number of French dishes. What in English English is referred to as continental food (as the United Kingdom for centuries didn’t consider itself part of the European continent but a separate group of islands), is dominated by French cooking.
In this context, it may be noted that while, since the 17th century, Bangkok has been the most important outpost for trade between Ayutthaya and the West, it was the French who for a few decades even had a garrison in Bangkok. Since that time, the Thai term for foreigners from the West, farang, is practically synonymous with the term for the French, farangse in full.
The French have a different approach to dining than do all other people. They dine out not just to enjoy good food but also as matters of adventure and education. Understanding how these two aspects are interwoven is instrumental to understanding the French.
If one sees dining out as an adventure, it’s clear that newness is a quality in itself. The French are always on a search for the last frontiers of contemporary cooking and dining. Accordingly nowhere in the world there are as many people going to first-class restaurants just for curiosity as in France.
And because newness is a quality in itself, it’s no surprise that the French create designations for cuisine in the style of nouvelle cuisine. We should not be surprised if we came across terms like "post modern cooking" or "21st century cuisine" or "new wave" or "new age" food preparation. French cuisine is like French bread; it’s stale tomorrow. And nouvelle cuisine which a few years ago was the latest in fine cooking, went out of fashion in France before it gained acceptance by the wider public abroad.
Besides the aspect of adventure, there is the aspect of dining out as a matter of education. In French public opinion the worst among the lowbrows are not those who have failed to read certain books or view certain pieces of art but those who don’t know enough about fine cuisine. Never mind if one cannot converse on the latest trends in literature, painting, or music, as long as one accepts every challenge for a small talk or a long discourse on the latest discoveries from the hearth.
French public opinion excuses rather the man who doesn’t care for his clothes than another who doesn’t care for what he eats. To be informed on eating is a matter of general education, and accordingly dining out is like going to (pleasant) classes. One takes the right textbooks in the disguise of dining volumes such as the Michelin Guide.
As French restaurants are so widespread in Bangkok, the city is, in spite of being more than 7,000 kilometers (4,375 miles) away from Paris, a fine campus for educating one’s self on French cuisine, with (to stay in the picture) tuition fees well below of what they are in more industrialized nations of the West. Though French cuisine in Bangkok may be more expensive than German or Scandinavian cuisine, it’s still good value if compared to most European countries.
Except for nouvelle cuisine, the sauces are considered the essence of French cuisine. They bring the characteristic taste to a specific dish. French sauces in general are more elegant in taste than sauces in the rest of the world. They essentially owe their elegance to two ingredients: cream and wine. Other common ingredients are a meat or fish stock, butter, flour, tomatoes, carrots, onions, bacon, thyme, and bay leaf.
The crudest classifications of French sauces are: fish sauces and meat sauces; butter sauces, white sauces, and brown sauces.
Butter sauces are for example Hollandaise and Bernaise. Hollandaise sauce is made mainly with eggs; Bernaise is based on Hollandaise but gets its particular taste from the addition of tarragon. Bechamel is the basic white sauce; it always includes milk and often also cheese.
The basic brown sauce is demi-glace. It comes in many variations depending on what meat it is to accompany.
In French cuisine a much wider range of meats is used than in all other European cuisines. This includes other poultry such as duck, goose, and turkey; lamb (but not as much as in Great Britain); and a lot of game like hare, wild boar, roe, but also domesticated rabbit. As all these less common meats are hard to get or at least very costly in Thailand they are underrepresented in the French cuisine as it is found here.
Fish and seafood are less important to French cuisine than to her Spanish and Italian counterparts. However, French cuisine has developed one of the most famous fish recipes in the world - bouillabaisse. Actually, the recipe for this French fish soup is amazingly simple. It just takes a strong fish stock (extracted from fish bones by boiling them), a variety of different fish cut into pieces, some tomatoes and onions, and a few herbs. It’s characteristic bright red-yellow color and its particularly flowery taste comes from saffron.
Saffron, by far the most expensive spice in the world, originated in Asia but is widely produced in Southern France. It is extracted from the blossoms of the crocus flower, and it takes hundreds of flowers to produce a single gram of saffron (price per gram 5 to 10 US dollars). To spice the bouillabaisse is the main use of saffron in French cuisine today.
A very original seafood recipe is the one for lobster a la Thermidor. If a lobster is prepared this way the meat is first removed, mixed with a cheese sauce, and then put back into the lobster.
French cuisine is famous for its dining order, dividing a meal into five to ten courses, with long breaks between the courses. Eating the French way takes time. A comparatively ordinary and cheap meal in a restaurant in France will easily take two hours, and a luxurious dinner occupies a whole evening.
A standard fine dinner starts with a cold hors d’oeuvre (an appetizer dish). Most commonly, this is charcuterie (sausage in plain but insufficient English). A French hors d’oeuvre that is surprisingly available in Bangkok is escargots de Bourguignonne (snails cooked in burgundy wine and herb butter).
The appetizer is followed by a soup, most probably a consomme, a broth of beef that is cooked with many ingredients which are removed before serving. If later some vegetables are added (not those who have sacrificed their taste in the preparation of the consomme), it’s called a soup julienne. A double consomme uses a double amount of beef; bone marrow is sometimes added.
The famous thick French onion soup is seldom served as part of a menu but rather for a small meal in between as it would be too filling as part of the dinner.
Instead of soup a fish dish or a souffle may be served. A souffle consists mainly of air. What is served in a very large bowl is a normal portion of spinach or cheese with beaten egg white leavened underneath.
What follows in the dining order appears rather strange to the non-French: it’s an entremet, a sweet dish before the main course of meat. However, there is a fairly strict limitation of what this sweet dish is allowed to be. Sorbetes, mild fruit ice creams and variations thereof only are permitted.
Instead of sorbetes a salad may be served. The most typical French dressing, of course, is French dressing, prepared with egg and various spices. Salade Nicoise (named after the city of Nice on the Mediterranean coast) actually is more Italian than French in style. It contains lettuce, tomatoes, olives, tuna, and anchovies, and it is dressed with vinegar and olive oil, the basis of Italian dressing.
At the same time as the main dish of meat, but not on the same plate, a side dish of vegetables is served. Vegetables usually have butter melted over them.
After allowing some time for the main course to settle, the dessert is served. The most typical French desserts are mousse and crepes. Like a souffle, a mousse has a flair with air, resulting from beaten egg white worked into a chocolate or fruit creme.
Crepes are very thin pan cakes that typically are rolled and filled with chocolate or fruits and have a cream sauce poured over.
A French dinner is not over with the dessert. After the dessert there is still the cheese, and after the cheese still come coffee and Cognac (French brandy).
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