It is widely believed, and with reason, that, in the art of cooking, the French are supreme. France gave birth both to the techniques of the haute cuisine—its many ways to slice, peel, combine, heat, and the like—and to its repertoire: its basic sauces and traditional dishes. France produced the seminal theorist of the culture of food and taste, Brillat-Savarin, and the authoritative reference work of the culinary arts: the Larousse Gastronomique. The things themselves come from France, but so do the names for them. A consequence is that, as an air controller must understand English, however narrowly specialized the vocabulary, and an opera star must be able to sing in Italian, so a chef, ambitious to excel, ought to become fluent, if not in French, than at least in “Kitchen French.”

France’s leading position where food is concerned may be explained, at least in part, by the range and excellence of its natural produce. But the French themselves have found a more satisfying explanation of why they are the best at it. As a spokeswoman for Centre Ferrandi, a Paris culinary institute, recently remarked: “Mais c’est simple. Ici nous avons le goût.”¹But France was not always at the top. The omniscient Fernand Braudel tells us that “sophisticated cuisine, typical of all advanced civilizations, and found in China in the fifth century and in the Muslim world from the eleventh or twelfth centuries, did not appear in the West until the fifteenth century, and