97 Fun Facts About French Food

Which French custom did UNESCO add to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010?

The gastronomic meal of the French was listed as a ritual, not a recipe: an apéritif, at least four courses from starter to dessert, then liqueurs, with wines chosen to match the dishes.

What military-style name is given to the system of kitchen stations that Auguste Escoffier devised?

The brigade de cuisine drew on Escoffier's years as an army cook: he replaced the loud, riotous kitchens of his day with a chain of command and a specialist station for every task.

Escoffier created the dessert Peach Melba in honour of an Australian who was what?

An opera singer: soprano Nellie Melba had been singing in Wagner's Lohengrin in London, so Escoffier first served her the peaches and ice cream on a swan carved from ice, after the opera's swan.

The croissant descends from the kipferl, a crescent-shaped pastry from which country?

Austria's kipferl reached Paris when August Zang, a former artillery officer from Vienna, opened his Boulangerie Viennoise in the late 1830s; the French only later remade it in flaky laminated dough.

Which four ingredients may a French 'baguette de tradition' contain?

Flour, water, yeast or sourdough, and salt make the dough, with no additives, under the 1993 bread decree; it answered the arrival of frozen, pre-made doughs, and it bars pre-made dough from any loaf sold as traditional.

What does the French word baguette literally mean?

Wand or stick: the French also say baguette for a magic wand, a conductor's baton and chopsticks, and the loaf only took the name in the twentieth century.

Bouillabaisse, the famous fish stew, originated in which French port city?

Bouillabaisse comes from Marseille, where fishermen stewed the bony rockfish, such as rascasse, that they could not sell; local restaurateurs codified the recipe in a 1980 charter.

What is rouille, the sauce served with bouillabaisse?

Rouille is a garlic and saffron mayonnaise, thickened with olive oil and often bread or egg yolk and sharpened with cayenne; its name means 'rust', for its orange colour.

Cassoulet takes its name from the cassole, which is what?

An earthenware cooking pot: the deep, slope-sided cassole was traditionally made by the potters of Issel, and the beans and meats bake slowly in it until a crust forms on top.

Which town in southern France styles itself the world capital of cassoulet and claims to be its birthplace?

Castelnaudary's legend says cassoulet was born in a Hundred Years' War siege, when the townsfolk pooled their beans and meats in one pot to feed the defenders; its cassoulet brotherhood dates from 1970.

Coq au vin is traditionally made with red wine from which region?

The classic coq au vin is braised in red Burgundy with lardons, mushrooms and pearl onions; Alsace makes a white version with Riesling and the Jura uses its vin jaune.

Ratatouille is a traditional dish of which French region?

Provence claims the dish, though the word once meant any rough, thrown-together stew; only later did it settle on summer vegetables softened in olive oil.

Helix pomatia, the large snail served as escargots in France, is named in English after which ancient people?

Romans did eat snails, fattening them in pens, and English calls this one the Roman snail; the species is hard to farm, so most are gathered from the wild.

A macaron shell is made from egg whites, sugar and which ground ingredient?

Almonds ground with sugar and bound with egg whites made macarons long before Paris sandwiched them: in Nancy two nuns who took refuge there in the Revolution sold them to live and became the 'Macaron Sisters'.

Which Paris pâtisserie is often credited with inventing the double-decker macaron?

Pierre Desfontaines of Ladurée usually gets the credit, though a baker named Claude Gerbet also claimed the invention.

Add a fried or poached egg on top of a croque monsieur and it becomes a croque what?

Madame is the name once a fried or poached egg sits on top; in some parts of France the same sandwich is a croque-à-cheval, the French way of saying the egg rides 'on horseback'.

Which ingredient do purists leave out of a traditional quiche Lorraine?

Grated Gruyère has no place in the Lorraine original, which is only eggs, cream and smoked bacon in a crust; grated cheese is the habit of the neighbouring Vosges, and fried onions are Alsace's twist.

Tarte Tatin, the upside-down caramelised apple tart, is named after two sisters who ran what?

A hotel: the Hôtel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron. In the best-known tale an overworked Stéphanie Tatin left her apples caramelising too long and rescued them by baking the pastry on top.

What does the 'brûlée' in crème brûlée mean?

Burnt: the earliest known recipe, printed by François Massialot in 1691, has the cook scorch the sugared top with a red-hot fire shovel, and the 1702 English edition simply called it burnt cream.

The blue cheese aged in the Combalou caves of southern France is made from the milk of which animal?

Sheep's milk, from the Lacaune breed alone, goes into the cheese; legend says a shepherd left his bread and curds in a cave to chase a girl and came back to find them veined with blue mould.

Which cheese received France's very first Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, in 1925?

Roquefort won France's first cheese appellation in 1925, but its protection is centuries older: a royal charter of 1411 gave the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon the sole right to ripen the cheese in its caves.

Camembert comes from which French region?

Camembert is from the village of Camembert in Normandy's Orne department, where legend says farmer Marie Harel first made it in 1791; the round poplar box that let it travel was introduced in 1890.

Which French PDO cheese has the largest annual production, about 65,000 tonnes?

Comté, from the Jura massif, is France's biggest-volume PDO cheese, with output passing 60,000 tonnes a year; it is made in village cooperative dairies called fruitières from the Montbéliarde breed of cow and aged in large wheels.

Which three grapes make up nearly all Champagne?

Pinot noir, Pinot meunier and Chardonnay make nearly all Champagne, and two of the three are black grapes: they are pressed so gently that the juice runs clear before the skins can colour it.

What is the muselet on a bottle of Champagne?

The wire cage over the cork replaced knotted hemp string: Champagne merchant Adolphe Jacquesson patented a metal fastening in 1844 because tied corks kept leaking or blowing out under the pressure.

The Michelin Guide was first published in 1900 by a company that made what?

André and Édouard Michelin, whose Clermont-Ferrand company made tyres, gave away nearly 35,000 copies of the 1900 guide to encourage motoring; restaurant stars only arrived in 1926.

In the Michelin Guide, three stars officially mean a restaurant is what?

Worth a special journey is travel advice because the guide was written to get motorists on the road: two stars mean 'worth a detour', and the three-step scale arrived in 1931, five years after the first star.

Which American wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the Frenchwomen Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle?

Julia Child joined the two Frenchwomen's project in Paris; their first publisher dropped the manuscript as 'too formidable' for American housewives before Knopf brought it out in 1961.

Which of these is one of the five French mother sauces?

Velouté, stock thickened with a blond roux, was already one of Carême's four 'great sauces' in 1833; the five taught today keep it and swap his allemande for tomato and hollandaise.

Which French city names the mustard first sharpened with verjuice, the juice of unripe grapes?

Dijon mustard used verjuice where others used vinegar, an edge now imitated with white wine; a 1937 decree made the name generic, so a jar of 'Dijon' can be made anywhere, mostly from Canadian seed.

French law defines foie gras as the fattened liver of which two birds?

Duck or goose liver fattened by gavage is the legal definition, and the same law calls foie gras protected French heritage, though force-feeding birds goes back to the ancient Egyptians.

Which tea-dipped French cake triggers the narrator's memories in Proust's In Search of Lost Time?

The madeleine, the shell-shaped sponge that unlocks the narrator's childhood, comes from Commercy in Lorraine, where women with baskets sold them to passengers on the Paris to Strasbourg trains.

The gratinéed onion soup known around the world made its name in the restaurants around which Paris market?

Les Halles, the capital's central food market, fed its traders and shoppers on onion soup; restaurants around it such as Au Pied de Cochon served it under a thick crust of grilled cheese, the 'gratinée des Halles'.

A galette des rois is eaten around Epiphany and hides a small charm called what?

The fève, originally a real fava bean and now a porcelain charm, is baked into the frangipane-filled puff pastry; whoever finds it in their slice is crowned king or queen for the day.

The word soufflé comes from a French verb meaning what?

To puff or blow is the sense of souffler, and soufflé is its past participle, 'puffed up': the air beaten into the egg whites swells in the oven's heat and lifts the whole dish.

The famous 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines was ordered by which ruler for the Paris Exposition?

Napoleon III wanted France's best Bordeaux shown at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris; the brokers who drew up the list ranked the châteaux not by tasting them but by the prices their wines had fetched.

Which Bordeaux estate was promoted from second growth to first growth in 1973 after decades of lobbying?

Château Mouton Rothschild won its promotion after decades of lobbying by its owner, and changed its motto to match: 'First I cannot be, second I do not deign to be' became 'First I am, second I was'.

The bûche de Noël is a Christmas dessert designed to look like what?

The bûche de Noël is shaped and decorated to look like a log, recalling the Yule log burned on the fire at Christmas; a rolled sponge with buttercream, it appeared in the 19th century.

On a bottle of Cognac, the letters VSOP stand for 'Very Superior Old' what?

Pale: a VSOP, 'Very Superior Old Pale', holds no brandy younger than four years, and the grades are in English because so much of the early cognac trade was with Britain.

Cognac must be distilled twice in stills made of which metal?

Copper pot stills, the alambics charentais, distil the wine twice; as the brandy ages, so much spirit evaporates as the 'angels' share' that a sooty black fungus feeding on the vapour coats the warehouse walls.

Savoury Breton galettes are traditionally made with flour from which crop?

Buckwheat, called blé noir or sarrasin, was a crop that suited the peninsula's poor soils, so its dark flour became the everyday galette; sweet crêpes are made with white wheat flour.

Crêpe Suzette is flambéed with orange peel and which liqueur, usually?

Grand Marnier, or another orange liqueur, is set alight over crêpes in a sauce of butter, sugar, orange juice and zest; Henri Charpentier claimed he invented the dish by accident as a boy waiter in Monte Carlo.

Which raw beef dish was listed on early 1900s menus as 'steak à l'Américaine'?

Steak tartare was at first only the version served with tartar sauce, and the sauce's name stuck to the meat; the tale of Tatar horsemen tenderising beef under their saddles is a legend.

When pot-au-feu is served as two courses, which part of the dish comes first?

The broth comes first, as a soup, often with toast, rice or pasta in it; the beef and vegetables that flavoured it follow as the main course, so one pot simmered for hours yields the whole meal.

Jacques Médecin, long-time mayor of which city, begged cooks never to put boiled potato in the salad named after it?

Nice's mayor from 1966 to 1990 wrote in his 1972 cookbook that a true salade niçoise holds no boiled vegetables at all; purists blame Escoffier for slipping in the potatoes and green beans.

Kouign-amann, the caramelised laminated pastry, is a speciality of Douarnenez in which region?

Brittany's richest pastry, the kouign-amann, Breton for 'butter cake', is said to have been created around 1860 by Yves-René Scordia of Douarnenez: bread dough folded with butter and sugar until it caramelises.

Bordeaux's canelés are baked in fluted metal moulds traditionally brushed with what?

Canelé moulds are coated with beeswax, often mixed with butter, which sets the dark caramelised crust; the cakes are said to have originated with the nuns of the Couvent des Annonciades in Bordeaux.

Poulet de Bresse shows the French tricolour with white feathers, a red comb and which blue feature?

Its feet: blue legs complete the tricolour. The birds range free on grass for months, are then finished in cages on a rich diet of maize and dairy, and have carried an appellation d'origine since 1957.

Le Cordon Bleu takes its name from the blue ribbon of which order, founded by Henri III in 1578?

The Holy Spirit's knights wore their cross on a sky-blue ribbon, the cordon bleu, which became a byword for fine cooking; Henri III chose the name because each of his two thrones had come to him at Pentecost.

A classic Kir is white wine mixed with a liqueur made from which fruit?

Blackcurrant liqueur, crème de cassis, with white wine was once just a 'blanc-cassis'; it took the name of Canon Félix Kir, a priest and Resistance fighter who poured it for visiting delegations as a post-war mayor.

The name éclair, for the choux pastry, is French for what?

Éclair means 'flash of lightning' in French, possibly because the glossy pastry is eaten in a flash; the name replaced the older pain à la duchesse around the 1850s.

Which gastronome wrote 'Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are' in 1825?

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer and judge, published the aphorism in his Physiologie du goût in 1825, two months before his death; cheesemonger Henri Androuët named a triple-cream cheese after him in the 1930s.

Which chef's restaurant near Lyon held three Michelin stars from 1965 until 2020?

Paul Bocuse kept the three stars at L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges for 55 years; Michelin took one away two years after he died there, in the house where he had been born.

What does 'la fée verte', the old nickname of absinthe, mean in English?

The green fairy was blamed for madness and banned in France in 1915; absinthe crept back from the 1990s, but the Senate only voted to lift the ban on the name itself in 2011.

Despite its French name, the chilled soup vichyssoise is usually credited to Louis Diat, a chef working in which city?

New York's Ritz-Carlton is where the French-born Louis Diat chilled the everyday leek and potato soup of French homes; he named it after Vichy, the spa town near his birthplace of Montmarault.

The Périgord black truffle grows underground chiefly in partnership with the roots of which trees?

Oaks and hazels are its chief hosts; the truffle lives on their roots, and in winter trained dogs, or more rarely pigs, find the ripe ones by the sulphurous scent that rises through the soil.

Which country disputes with France the claim to have invented french fries?

Belgium claims fried potatoes were eaten along the Meuse near Namur by the 1680s, while France points to Paris street vendors of the 1780s; Thomas Jefferson served 'potatoes in the French manner' in 1802.

The word ratatouille is built on the French verb touiller, which means what?

To stir or toss is what touiller means, and the stew really is stirred together; the neat layered slices in the Pixar film Ratatouille are a chef's variation called confit byaldi.

The ring-shaped Paris-Brest pastry was created to commemorate what?

A bicycle race, Paris–Brest–Paris, gave the choux ring its name and its wheel shape; it is usually credited to Louis Durand, a pâtissier in Maisons-Laffitte on the route, perhaps at the race founder's request.

A traditional Limousin clafoutis is baked with which fruit?

Cherries go in whole, stones and all, under a thick batter; make the same dessert with apples, pears or plums and it is properly called a flaugnarde.

In south-western France a pain au chocolat is known by what name?

Chocolatine is the south-west's word, shared with Quebec, and feelings run high enough that in 2018 a group of MPs tabled an amendment to give the name official standing; the Assemblée nationale rejected it.

A croquembouche, the choux tower bound with caramel, is traditionally served at what?

Weddings, baptisms and first communions are its usual stage; often credited to the great chef Carême, the tower was already in print in André Viard's cookbook of 1806, years before Carême's own.

The small rectangular financier cake is said to be shaped to resemble what?

A gold bar is the shape the pâtissier Lasne is said to have chosen around 1890: his shop stood by the Paris Bourse, and he reworked the Visitandine nuns' little cakes for brokers who ate on the run and wanted clean fingers.

The gâteau Saint-Honoré is named for the patron saint of which trade?

Bakers claim Saint Honoré, a bishop of Amiens, as their patron: a Paris baker gave the land for his chapel in 1202, and the cake came from the Chiboust pastry shop on rue Saint-Honoré in the 1840s.

Which French leader asked how anyone could govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?

Charles de Gaulle's quip was aimed at France's endlessly divided politics, and it undercounts: estimates of the country's distinct cheeses now run from 1,000 to 1,600.

French law releases Beaujolais nouveau at one minute past midnight on which day?

Third Thursday in November has been the rule since 1985; the old fixed date of 15 November kept landing on weekends, and the Gamay wine reaches the shelves only weeks after the harvest.

In an île flottante as it is served today, what floats on the crème anglaise?

Meringue, baked or poached, is the island today, but the name once covered other desserts: early French versions floated liqueur-soaked sponge in the cream, and Escoffier's 1903 recipe was quite different too.

Confit de canard, a Gascon speciality, preserves duck legs by cooking and storing them in what?

Their own fat is both cooking pot and seal: the salt-cured legs poach slowly in it and are then stored beneath it, where no air can reach the meat, which is how farms kept duck long before refrigeration.

The trou normand is a small glass of Calvados drunk when?

The trou normand is a small glass of Calvados apple brandy drunk between courses of a long meal to 'make a hole' (trou) for the next dish; restaurants often pour it over apple sorbet.

The Mère Poulard omelette was devised to feed hungry travellers arriving where?

Mont-Saint-Michel's visitors turned up at any hour, whenever the tide let them cross, so innkeeper Annette Poulard took to cooking them giant omelettes over an open wood fire, a dish that could be made at a moment's notice.

Tartiflette, the Savoyard potato and bacon bake, is made with which cheese?

Reblochon's own trade body pushed the dish onto ski-resort menus in the 1980s to sell more of the cheese; the 'tradition' is a reworking of an older farmhouse potato gratin called the péla.

Aligot, the stretchy Aubrac purée of potato and melted tomme, is said to have been first served by monks to whom?

Pilgrims crossing the Aubrac on the road to Santiago de Compostela were fed by its monks, the story goes; that first aligot was made with bread, and potatoes only took the bread's place much later.

A classic mille-feuille stacks three layers of puff pastry with two layers of what?

Custard, the thick kind called crème pâtissière, fills the two gaps; the puff pastry itself, folded in three six times, runs to 729 leaves of dough, near enough to the 'thousand leaves' of the name.

The Mont Blanc dessert is a nest of sweetened vermicelli made from which nut?

Chestnut purée, sweetened and pressed through a sieve, falls in vermicelli strands around a peak of whipped cream; the dessert is named for its likeness to the snow-capped Mont Blanc.

Neufchâtel, one of France's oldest cheeses, is traditionally sold in which shape?

A heart is its best-known shape, though bricks, squares and cylinders are made too; legend says the girls of the Pays de Bray gave heart-shaped cheeses to English soldiers during the Hundred Years' War.

Which liqueur do Carthusian monks make from 130 plants to a secret recipe?

Chartreuse is said to follow a manuscript for an 'elixir of long life' given to the order in 1605; two monks prepare the plant mix, and the colour chartreuse is named after the drink, not the other way round.

Sweet Sauternes owes its flavour to grapes shrivelled by what?

Noble rot, the fungus Botrytis cinerea, thrives in the misty autumn mornings of Sauternes; it shrivels the grapes on the vine, concentrating their sugar and giving the wine its taste of candied fruit.

Lyon's quenelles de brochet are dumplings made from which fish?

Pike (brochet) flesh, full of fine forked bones, is pounded smooth with panade and butter and poached into light dumplings; crayfish-based sauce Nantua, named for the Ain town, is the classic partner.

Diners ordering pressed duck at Paris's La Tour d'Argent receive what?

A numbered certificate comes with every pressed duck: owner Frédéric Delair began counting the birds in 1890, and the restaurant served its millionth in 2003.

Which actress suggested the name tarte tropézienne for Alexandre Micka's cream brioche?

Brigitte Bardot fell for the cream-filled brioche when its creator, Alexandre Micka, catered the Saint-Tropez shoot of And God Created Woman; she suggested 'tarte de Saint-Tropez', and he trimmed it to tropézienne.

In legend, why did Parmentier have his potato field guarded by day but left unwatched at night?

To invite theft: a guarded crop looked fit for a king's table, so Parisians crept in after dark and carried the tubers off. Parmentier had learned to eat potatoes as a prisoner of the Prussians.

The rum baba reached France through Lorraine thanks to an exiled king of which country?

Poland's deposed king Stanisław Leszczyński, by then Duke of Lorraine, is said to have found his kugelhopf too dry and had it soaked in sweet wine; his pâtissier Nicolas Stohrer is credited with taking the baba to Paris.

Calissons d'Aix are a paste of ground nuts and which candied fruit, under royal icing?

Calissons are a paste of ground nuts and candied melon, with a little candied orange peel, on a wafer base under royal icing; they are blessed each September at Saint-Jean-de-Malte, a custom from a 1630 plague vow.

The bright orange Mimolette was created under Louis XIV to replace which foreign cheese?

Edam was shut out when Colbert banned Dutch imports during Louis XIV's war with Holland, so farmers near Lille were set to copy it; Mimolette's pitted grey rind is the work of cheese mites put there on purpose.

Legend says an angry emperor lopped the top off Valençay cheese, leaving what shape?

A flattened pyramid: in one telling Bonaparte, home from his failed campaign in Egypt, sliced the point off with his sword; in another his host had the tips removed beforehand to spare him the reminder.

French gourmets traditionally eat the tiny ortolan bunting with what over their heads?

A napkin over the head is said to hide the act from God, or simply to trap the aroma, as the bird is eaten whole; the species has been protected in France since 1999, and President Mitterrand is said to have chosen it for a last feast.

Bêtises de Cambrai, boiled sweets said to have been made by mistake, are what flavour?

Mint is the flavour, with a stripe of caramel to sweeten it; bêtise means a silly mistake, and two rival makers, Afchain and Despinoy, each still claim the botched batch that created the sweets was theirs.

Which French diplomat is said to have declared Brie the best of all cheeses at the Congress of Vienna in 1815?

Talleyrand, France's envoy, is said to have boasted that no cheese could match Brie, and legend has Brie de Meaux hailed as the 'king of cheeses' at the Congress's closing banquet.

Crottin de Chavignol, the Loire goat cheese, is made in the home commune of which wine?

Sancerre is the commune that absorbed the village of Chavignol, so the goat's cheese and the wine come off the same slopes; 'crottin' is also French for horse droppings, one of the rival explanations of the name.

Unlike Cognac, Armagnac is traditionally distilled how?

Once, in a column still, has been the Gascon way since a continuous still was patented in 1818; the spirit itself is far older, a churchman having praised its forty virtues as early as 1310.

Which food critic set out the ten commandments of nouvelle cuisine in a 1973 article?

Henri Gault published the ten commandments with Christian Millau, his partner in the Gault et Millau guide, as a call for lighter cooking; the phrase itself was old, a French cookbook having used it as a title back in 1742.

Jura vin jaune matures for years under a film of yeast, a method it shares with which Spanish wine?

Sherry's protective film of yeast, the flor, has a Jura cousin called the voile; vin jaune spends over six years beneath it, never topped up, then goes into its own squat bottle, the clavelin.

Béarnaise sauce reportedly began at a restaurant named after which king, a native of Béarn?

Henri IV, born in Béarn, gave his name to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, where chef Collinet is said to have made the sauce by accident while rescuing a spoiled shallot reduction.

Livarot cheese is nicknamed 'the colonel' because of what?

Reed rings like rank stripes: three to five bands of dried reedmace circle each cheese like the braid on a colonel's sleeve, though many are now wrapped in strips of green paper instead.

Which Lyon restaurateur became the first chef to hold six Michelin stars, three for each of two restaurants, in 1933?

Eugénie Brazier, 'la Mère Brazier', won three stars for her Lyon restaurant and three for her second in the hills outside it; raised on a small farm, she set a mark no chef equalled for over sixty years.

Which cooking method did Georges Pralus develop at the Troisgros restaurant in 1974 to stop foie gras shrinking?

Sous vide, 'under vacuum', seals food in a pouch and cooks it gently in a water bath; Pralus found that foie gras done this way kept its shape and lost far less of its fat.

Andouillette, the sausage graded by the AAAAA club, is made chiefly from what?

Pork intestines give andouillette a pungent smell that puts off newcomers and delights devotees; the AAAAA, founded by food writers, is the Association Amicale des Amateurs d'Andouillette Authentique.