I heard on some food show on TV that the French did not have a cuisine until they stole it from the Italians they tweaked it and oo-lala you have French cuisine..... I usually go with the original, Italian.
That makes no sense, at least to me. The French are known for their sauces, and Italian cuisine is, well, Mediterranean.
I heard on some food show on TV that the French did not have a cuisine until they stole it from the Italians they tweaked it and oo-lala you have French cuisine..... I usually go with the original, Italian.
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LOL. That was one pretty uninformed food tv commentator. Perhaps you'll notice almost no similarity between the 2 cuisines.
More or less true. During the Renaissance, Italian cuisine became very elevated. When an Italian princess was married off to some French royal or another, she brought the notion of haute cuisine with her and the French developed it further. Meanwhile, Italy fell on hard times and the craft of truly elevated cooking faded away. In the mid-19th Century, French food had reached its peak and it spread to Italy, who were perturbed that their invention had been taken by the French. The Italians tried to reinvent their own cuisine. One sign of this is that basically every Italian dish that had the name of a city in it--Bolognese, Milanese, Fiorentino--is the Italians trying to make their dishes sound like French dishes.
As you might imagine, this is all a very sore subject in Italy. It's important to remember as well that we're talking about very high cuisine here, not the pizza, pasta-with-red-sauce, sausage and peppers Italian, which is basically peasant food. Delicious peasant food to be sure, but different from truly high end stuff.
The French do good sauces. They have so much wine, you know. I try to stay away from it and I don't eat escargot anymore or crepes so I really eat only omelettes and roasted rosemary chicken.
What am I saying? I'm French!