Lyonnaise cuisine

Lyonnaise cuisine refers to cooking traditions and practices centering on the area around the French city of LyonKindersley, Dorling (2011)
''Ultimate Food Journeys: The World's Best Dishes and Where to Eat Them''
Penguin. p. 49. and historical Lyonnais culinary traditions.

In the 16th century, Catherine de Medici brought cooks from Florence to her court and they prepared dishes from agricultural products from many regions of France. This was revolutionary, as it combined the fresh, diverse and indigenous nature of regional produce with the know-how of Florentine cooks.

The result was that regional specialities were elevated in status among royalty and nobility. Lyonnaise cuisine became a crossroads of many regional culinary traditions. A surprising variety of ingredients from many nearby places emerged: summer vegetables from farms in Bresse and Charolais, game from the Dombes, lake fish from Savoy, spring fruits and vegetables from Drôme and Ardèche and the Rhone Valley.

In the 19th century, middle-class women, nicknamed the "Lyonnaise mothers", left their homes to work as cooks and created brand new culinary traditions incorporating their regional roots.

In 1935, the famed food critic Curnonsky did not hesitate to describe the city of Lyon as the "world capital of gastronomy".

In the 21st century, Lyon's cuisine is defined by simplicity and quality, and is exported to other parts of France and abroad. With more than a thousand eateries, the city of Lyon has one of the highest concentrations of restaurants per capita in France.

History

Antiquity

The history of Lyon cuisine begins in antiquity at Lugdunum, the capital of the Three Gauls monopoly on the wine trade. Oil and brine were imported from Africa and the south of Spain. The wine trade was well-documented even before the arrival of Roman settlers in the region: trade in wine during the 2nd century AD is known to have occurred in the alluvial plain of the Vaise. Italian wines from the Tyrrhenian coast were also present.

A new population of Roman settlers brought Mediterranean flavors, new products and new food habits: the wines of Italy gave way to Greek wines, from Rhodes, from Cnidus, from Kos, and also wine from Chios, reputed to be the most expensive and luxurious wine. During the 1st century AD, wine from further places arrived, like wine from Crete and the Levant. At the end of the 2nd century AD, wines from other parts of Roman Gaul arrived.

It was not until the 3rd and 4th centuries that wine from more exotic locations like Tunisia arrived. Septimanus was a well-known cook from Lugdunum, who has been documented in historical texts. He had an inn on the site of the present Rue Saint Helena and was renowned for cooking pork and game birds properly.

Renaissance

During the Renaissance, there was a distinction between so-called "bourgeois" cuisine and the more common cuisine of the lower classes. This "lower class cuisine" made heavy use of offal, deemed "cheap cuts", as immortalized by writer François Rabelais at the beginning of his novel ''Gargantua''. In the story, Gargamelle gave birth to her son Gargantua after eating a great amount of "skewered tripe", or ''grand planté de tripe'' in French.

The first edition of ''Pantagruel'', another novel by Rabelais, published in Lyon in 1532 before Gargantua, is inspired by the adventures of a comedic doctor who is said to be inspired by the Lyonnaise comportment. The book evokes Lyonnaise cuisine, citing a list of dishes: "sausage, sausage, ham, sausages, huge wild boar roasts with garlic sauce, pluck, fricandeau, fat capons in white Mangier, hochepots, beef stew, cabirotades, hastereaux, game animals and birds, stuffed lamb, stuffed carp, whitefish, annealed (cheese flavored with peach leaves), crackers and macaroons (dry cakes), fruit jellies, fritters, and so on".

Erasmus, a Renaissance humanist, hired many chefs from the city of Lyon: "It is better at home than when we are at a hotel in Lyon… the Lyonnaise mother comes first to greet you, begging you to be happy and to accept food.” The city had specialized in the preparation of certain foods, as evidenced even in place names: ''rue de la Fromagerie'' (Cheese Shop Street), ''rue Poulaillerie'' (Poulterer Street), ''rue Mercière'' (Merchant's Street).

18th century to present

It was in the eighteenth century that ice cream was introduced to Lyon by an Italian, Spreafico. The modern culinary reputation of Lyon was truly born with the publication of a poem by Joseph de Berchoux, glorifying the local cuisine. He was born in Roanne in 1760, and moved to Lyon in 1770. His work, ''Gastronomie ou l'homme des champs à table'', which was translated into several languages, introduced the idea of "eating well" in French culture and dispersed the new word "gastronomy".

It precedes the works of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod, which would later perpetuate Berchoux's praise of the art of eating well. This "art" would become a specific middle-class characteristic of French society in the nineteenth century. The poem reads:

:"Want to succeed in the art I profess?
:Have a good castle in Auvergne or Bresse
:Or rather places near Lyon sees passing
:Two rivers lovers ready to embrace;
:Will you get this under favorable sky
:Everything that can serve the sweets table."

A book by Amable Leroy, ''La cuisinière bourgeoise'', published in 1783, invented and immortalized recipes that would make Lyonnaise cuisine famous.
In the last years of the eighteenth century the first modern-style restaurants would appear, some of which still exist today. There is Déduit, located at the top of ''rue Romarin'', known for its calf's head specialty. It was also during this period that the Lyonnaise mothers would appear. They were master ''charcutières'', or meat-cutters in English. The first to open a shop was Mother Brigousse, in 1759. She became famous for preparing and cutting Pike.

In 1816, the poet Joanny Carmouche, a member of the Epicurean Society of Lyon brought together gourmets with verse:

:"The desserts are eaten,
:Cutlery line up,
:Women arrange ...
:At the dock, it happens
:A marmot absconds

:(Without paying the bill!)
:Far from River
:The working class
:Roast chicken ...
:But each request:
:What is this band
:Bacchus order?
:- They are rascals
:Fleeing the river
:Who, then, in River
:Every month will be
:Epicureans."

Stendhal, passing through Lyon in 1837, evoked Lyonnaise cuisine:

The Lyonnaise mothers become so famous that the gourmet Maurice Edmond Sailland, usually known as Curnonsky, who had spent several weeks each winter in Lyon declared in 1934 from the ''Vettard'' restaurant that Lyon was the "capital of gastronomy". The statement came during the golden era of Lyonnaise cuisine, involving people with feathers and gastronomes and the idea spread and soon became one of the components of the image that Lyon will give their city. Curnonsky reasoned that Lyon's cuisine reflects the values of the local society, including its simplicity, as it appears in the speech of Paul Bocuse: "It is this honesty, this taste of the measure, I like to find in an honest and healthy Lyonnaise dish".

Bernard Poche, in his book ''Lyon tel qu'il s'écrit. Romanciers et essayistes lyonnais 1860-1940'', or ''Lyon, as written: Lyonnais novelists and essayists 1860–1940'', concluded that eating well affected all layers of the population of the city. In the nineteenth century, the puppet Guignol, the famous weaver, often finds its parts by the prospect of a "hoary stew", a good meal, while novels use, or scoff at the legendary delicacy of bourgeois Lyon.

''Terroirs'' and culinary influences

As a result of Lyon's geographical location, many different culinary influences have converged in the city's cuisine, particularly those of the South (Provence and the Mediterranean) and of the North (Alsace and Lorraine). Each cuisine imparts its own characteristics: the use of butter and cream from the North and of fresh vegetables and olive oil from the South. In addition, in the fifteenth century, Lyon served as one of the primary distribution centres for spices imported from the East by Italian merchants.

There are a number of ''terroirs'' around Lyon whose farmers supply their products to the city. To the north of Lyon lies Charolais, whose cattle breeders provide beef, while the fishermen of the Saône River deliver whitebait. The wine-producing region of Beaujolais is also located to the north of Lyon. According to French writer and journalist Léon Daudet,"hereare three reasons why Lyon is the capital of French gastronomy. . . . The third is that in addition to the Saône and the Rhône, she is served by a third river, the Beaujolais, which never dries up and is never muddy."Chelminski, Rudolph. "Chapter IV." ''I'll Drink to That: Beaujolais Wine and the French Peasant Who Made it the World's Most Popular Wine''. (New York: Penguin Books (USA) Inc., 2007).

Located north-east of Lyon, the region of Bresse supplies poultry, the appellation d’origine contrôlée (En: controlled designation of origin) of which dates to 1957. Bresse also supplies ''gaudes'', corn used to make ''soupe de farine jaune'' (En: corn flour soup). The neighbouring region of Bugey provides wine as well as crayfish, which are caught in the lac de Nantua (En: Nantua Lake) and are used as the base of the Nantua sauce that often accompanies ''quenelles''. Frogs, along with several types of fish including carp, tench, roach, pike and zander, are also supplied by the Dombes, a glacier-gouged plateau made up of more than 1,000 ponds (sometimes referred to as lakes), the majority of which are man-made and were created during the Middle Ages.

The regions to the south of Lyon produce fruits, vegetables and wines in the Vallée du Rhône (En: Rhône Valley). In the Ardèche