Nouvelle cuisine facts for kids
Nouvelle cuisine is a French term that means "new cooking." It's a special way of cooking and serving food that started in France. This style is different from older French cooking because it uses lighter, more delicate dishes. The way the food looks on the plate is also very important.
This new cooking style began in Paris in the 1970s. By the 1980s, you could find it in big cities like London and New York. Today, it's known almost everywhere. People started wanting lighter meals because modern business life meant shorter lunch breaks.
Food critics Henri Gault, André Gayot, and Christian Millau helped make nouvelle cuisine famous. They wrote about it in their restaurant guide, the Gault-Millau.
What Makes Nouvelle Cuisine Special?
Gault and Millau pointed out ten main things that made this new cooking style unique:
- Simpler Cooking: Dishes were made in a less complicated way.
- Shorter Cooking Times: Foods like fish, seafood, and vegetables were cooked for less time. This helped keep their natural taste and freshness.
- Fresh Ingredients: Chefs used the freshest ingredients they could find.
- Smaller Menus: Restaurants offered fewer dishes, but each one was carefully made.
- No Strong Marinades: Heavy marinades for meat were not used.
- Lighter Sauces: Old, heavy sauces were replaced. Instead, chefs used fresh herbs, good quality butter, lemon juice, and vinegar to add flavor.
- Local Dishes: Chefs started to include dishes from specific regions of France.
- New Techniques: Cooks used modern tools and new ways of preparing food. Sometimes, they even used microwave ovens.
- Healthy Choices: Chefs thought about what their guests needed for their diet.
- Creative Dishes: Cooks were very inventive. They created new and exciting food combinations.
A Brief History of the Term
The phrase "nouvelle cuisine" has actually been used a few times in French cooking history.
In the 1730s and 1740s, some French writers talked about their "modern" or "new" cooking. A chef named Menon even used "nouvelle cuisine" as the title for a cookbook in 1742.
Later, in the late 1800s, the cooking of a famous chef named Auguste Escoffier was also sometimes called nouvelle cuisine.
Images for kids
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The cover of Menon's 1742 book, La nouvelle cuisine.
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A modern nouvelle cuisine dish: Scallop tangerine gastrique.
See also
In Spanish: Nouvelle cuisine para niños
