Lyonnaise cuisine
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.
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.
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.
The modern culinary reputation of Lyon was truly born with the publication of a poem by Joseph de Berchoux, glorifying the local cuisine.
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.
The poem reads: A book by Amable Leroy, La cuisinière bourgeoise, published in 1783, invented and immortalized recipes that would make Lyonnaise cuisine famous.
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".
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.
As a result of Lyon's geographical location, many different culinary influences have converged in the city's cuisine,[2] particularly those of the South (Provence and the Mediterranean) and of the North (Alsace and Lorraine).
In addition, in the fifteenth century, Lyon served as one of the primary distribution centres for spices imported from the East by Italian merchants.
Frogs, along with several types of fish including carp, tench, roach, pike and zander, are also supplied by the Dombes,[7][8] a glacier-gouged plateau[9] made up of more than 1,000 ponds[10] (sometimes referred to as lakes), the majority of which are man-made and were created during the Middle Ages.
The Dauphiné region, which is known for its pork products and cheeses such as the Saint-Felicien[13] or the Saint-Marcellin,[14] is also located to the south of Lyon as are the 48 communes[15] that produce rigotte de Condrieu,[16] ".
[20] Their history was linked to the rise of automobile tourism, as promoted by the Michelin Guide,[21] and the development of the city of Lyon under mayor Edouard Herriot.
[22] In the mid-19th century, these women of modest means, initially the cooks in large middle-class households in Lyon, decided to start their own businesses, serving dishes that mixed homemade and traditional cuisine.
[24] While starting out serving a client base of working-class people, such as journeymen,[25] in this industrial city, the reputation of their meals soon spread to a much wealthier clientele.
[24] Located on the Rhône River in the Mulatière region, her self-named guinguette (En: open-air restaurant) specialized in matelote d'anguilles, a dish of stewed eels in white/red-wine sauce.
"[31][32] She established a restaurant on 73 rue Duquesne, known for a simple, unchanging menu featuring her own culinary creations, such as volaille demi-deuil (En: fowl in half-mourning).
Guests of Mère Brazier included the mayor, Edouard Herriot,[32] and celebrities such as poet/screenwriter Jacques Prévert and singer Édith Piaf.
[38] Paul Bocuse, a chef "more famous [in Lyon] than whoever happens to be mayor"[35] and the longest-standing recipient of 3 Michelin stars (over 40 years), apprenticed under Mère Brazier.
[35] Bocuse attributes much of his success to those formative years, a sentiment echoed "by many of Lyon's great chefs"[39][40] who received similar culinary training under les Mères.
[4] Some of her dishes included tablier de sapeur (literally meaning sapper's apron - a dish of pan-fried tripe), macaroni gratin, and choucroute au champagne (an adaptation of choucroute garnie, "sauerkraut cooked and served with meat,"[44] usually "pork, sausages and often potatoes"[45] made with Champagne instead of Riesling[46]), for which she was awarded a Michelin star.
[24] Known as a woman who was quick to share her opinions (often quite loudly), Mère Léa would go to the Saint Antoine market each morning pushing a large cart with a sign that read "Attention!
