The Great Cuisines

Starting with the earliest settled communities, cookery was merely a means of survival. Later, in the 19th Century cookery began to form into it's two distinct classes. The two classes, arguably best defined by the French, were cuisine bourgeois, meaning "home cooking", and haute cuisine, meaning, "cookery conceived as an aesthetic form of art". The main difference between the two classes is basically practical cooking and skilled cooking as a refined art. The distinction between the two forms of cooking has grown more vague over the years as the home kitchen has become more advanced and better equipped and cooks have become more informed and, therefore, able to emulate in their home kitchens the skilled cooking of chefs.

Cookery was basically a means of survival. The food was prepared by roasting beside and/or in open fires, or by wrapping food in leaves to be steamed. This was only made possible by the use of pottery some 7,000 to 12,000 years ago. Pottery also enabled certain cooking methods such as steaming, boiling, frying, and stewing. Eventually these basic techniques developed into what today is known as modern cookery.

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French politician and writer on gastronomy, (the art of good eating) became known for his masterpiece, The Psychology of Taste (1828), and developed cooking into an art.

"Chefs" were chosen to prepare the meals of the upper class or rich Romans for whom no food was too costly or exclusive. Such foods as flamingo tongues, peacock brains, oysters from Britain, and even ostriches from Africa were prepared and served. Along with the more complex orders and requests, the kitchen become more sophisticated as new equipment emerged. The modern kitchens boasted ovens, grills, vast preparation tables, complex masonry, etc.

Although the French master chef, Marie Antoine Carême of the 19th-century, criticized this Roman cookery as "essentially barbaric," Roman cookery might have evolved into Carême's cuisine if the Empire had not broken up. The future of cookery was now left to the Renaissance during which time the masters prepared the path towards haute cuisine.

The three major cooking styles are, Chinese, Italian, and French. The Chinese have the oldest, purest and perhaps the most sophisticated style. Chinese cookery is basically quick cooking and best known for the unique-shaped frying pan called the wok. The wok is designed in a way to circulate heat quickly and evenly while keeping its contents in constant motion. The Chinese cook uses small, chopped ingredients, so he can expose the maximum amount of food surface to heat in the quickest possible time to conserve a most valuable and diminishing component: fuel. A sauce can easily be made with the ingredients, again, to conserve fuel. Chinese food is light, fresh, has variety, and many flavors, colors, and aromas. Chinese cookery can be found in Japan, areas of Hawaii, and in the western Malay Archipelago.

Due to Italy's careless practice of deforestation, Italian cookery faced the same problem as the Chinese which was shortage of fuel. Italian cookery is also quick cookery; namely, pasta and thin cuts of meat, as well as rice and corn, exposed to heat for shorts periods of time. The path towards haute cuisine in Italian cooking was born during the Renaissance, producing the first truly modern European cuisine.

In the beginning French cooking was heavy, over spiced, and monotonous until the arrival of the Italian-born queen Catherine de Médici (1533). The Médicis, along with their crowd of Florentine cooks, bakers, and confectioners, and the advanced kitchen equipment altered the course of French cooking and set the standard for all Western cuisines. As time passed by, great chefs such as François Pierre de La Varenne, who developed the first true French sauces; Marie Antoine Carême, the founder of la cuisine classique; and August Escoffer, who modernized, codified, and publicized French cookery, all contributed to the new "taste" or what is known today as French cooking.

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