Everyone seems to be ga-ga over French cooking. French cuisine is good but it is not the world's best as most seem to think that it is. Personally I have eaten it, many times, and as yet, have never been that impressed by it! I prefer the much more subtle & much wider variety of tastes in the cooking of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The French & their sycophants claim superiority in cuisine but I can assure you that it is not true! Pastries & ornate desserts are supposedly a French monopoly. Not so! Austrian & Hungarian pastries are far superior to French pastries.
French sauces/gravies tend to be too heavy. Austro-Hungarian sauces & gravies make use of more natural ingredients such as fruit juices, vegetable & fruit purees, etc. and are thus tastier & lighter.
Perhaps some will say that I am just not widely traveled in my cuisines & thus have not experienced "true" French cuisine. To those folks I say, an adult lifetime spent working abroad, traveling around the world and as part of my work studying the cuisines of the cultures in which I was working, including France, has left me a well-rounded cuisinal education.
Sometime back I offended someone on a now defunct group by saying that I did not like Mayan food. After spending considerable time in the Yucatan, Belize & other Mayan enclaves I did indeed know Mayan cuisine and I did not care for it on the whole. The same is true of French cuisine. Different strokes for different folks and all that!
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 13
BTW, I really enjoy your posts!!
I think much of the dearth of understanding of Eastern European cuisine in this country and the West in general derives from the fact that for fifty years of the twentieth century, everything east of Germany and Austria (loosely speaking) was locked down and cultural interchange with the West was discouraged.