Today, as in the past, chefs are grouped into “ schools” with debates raging between the partisans of one supporter or another.
French cooking is a monument in a permanent state of renovation.
French cuisine remains dynamic, integrating new products, thriving on trends, and rejuvenating itself through periodic purges and, at least once in each century, a “ nouvelle cuisine” is born. If French cuisine “belongs” to the chefs and is a professional cuisine par excellence, it can also boast a score or more of distinctly regional cuisines whose names are generally derived from the old pre-Revolutionary division of the country into provinces.
Although these regional cuisines are now a source of pride, the distinctive cooking of the provinces did not attract the attention of the French gastronomes until a relativly late date.
Indeed, no regional cookbooks appear in France until the 1830s when Nimes gave us it’s Cuisinier Durand and Mulhouse its cuisinier du haut-Rhin. Grimod De La Reyniere did much to whet the appetite of his fellow gastronomes for regional produce and regional recipes.
In his Almannach des gourmonds ( 1803 to 1812) which was, among other things, a veritable catalogue of regional specialities. He never tired of praising artisans who shipped the finest duck liver pates to Paris or excelled in the preparation of regional mustard.
He was constantly calling attention to the gastronomic wealth of the provinces, which inspired the anonymous auther of the Cours gastronomique to go one step further and publish the first Gastronomic map of France in 1808.
As never before, one could now visualize the wealth and diversity of the regions  |