French Cuisine

cooking · history · France · culture

Taillevent's recipes. In the 1300s, a royal chef named Guillaume Tirel, called "Taillevent," wrote one of the first recipe books of medieval France called Le Viandier, which helped shape how people cooked.

Breaking from Italy. Back then, French cooking copied a lot from Italian cuisine, but in the 1600s and 1700s, chefs like François Pierre La Varenne decided to create their own unique French style instead.

Royal influence. French cooking grew fancier and more special partly because top chefs worked for kings and nobles, who loved trying new and creative dishes.

A lasting tradition. The changes those famous chefs made hundreds of years ago shaped French cooking into the respected and beloved style it still is today around the world.