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Dining Guide
/ 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 well represented. 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 when, in 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 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.
In France,
cheese is generally served after the main dish and before the dessert.
Please note: in a British-style French dinner, cheese is served
after the dessert. Though the right sequence is the topic of fierce
arguments, the editors of this dining guide recommend that each
person follows his or her inclinations.
After allowing
some time for the main course (and cheese) 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.
After the dessert
still come coffee and Cognac (French brandy).
Other descriptions:
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