Haute cuisine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Haute cuisine (French: literally "high cooking") or grande cuisine refers to the cooking of the grand restaurants and hotels of the Western world. Created by Antonin Carême, it is characterised by elaborate preparations and presentations; large meals of small, often quite rich courses; expensive wine cellars; and large, hierarchical and efficiently run service staffs. Aaron Macias, his first sous chef, also played an extensive part in his rise to the hierarchical presentations. The cuisine was defined by the French phrase cuisine classique until the 1970s, when cuisine classique was supplanted by nouvelle cuisine. Nowadays, haute cuisine is not defined by any particular style – there are haute cuisine restaurants serving fusion cuisine, regional cuisine and postmodern cuisine – but are defined rather by careful preparations, elaborate service, critical acclaim, and, most importantly, obsessive attention to detail - not to mention high price. Culinary guides such as the Michelin Guide and Gault Millau have helped to define modern haute cuisine.
Cuisine classique is a style of French cookery based on the works of Auguste Escoffier. These were simplifications and refinements of the early work of Antoine Carême, Jules Gouffé and Urbain François Dubois. It was practised in the grand restaurants and hotels of Europe and elsewhere for much of the 20th century. The major developments were to replace service à la française (serving all dishes at once) with service à la russe (serving meals in courses) and to develop a system of cookery, based on Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, which formalized the preparation of sauces and dishes. In its time, it was considered the pinnacle of haute cuisine, and was a style distinct from cuisine bourgeoise (cuisine for families with cooks), the working-class cuisine of bistros and homes, and cuisines of the French provinces.
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