François Pierre La Varenne

François Pierre de la Varenne (1615–78 in Dijon), Burgundian by birth, was the author of Le Cuisinier françois (1651), one of the most influential cookbooks in early modern French cuisine. La Varenne broke with the Italian traditions that had revolutionized medieval and Renaissance French cookery in the 16th century and early 17th century.

La Varenne was the foremost member of a group of French chefs, writing for a professional audience, who codified French cuisine in the age of King Louis XIV. The others were Nicolas Bonnefon, Le Jardinier françois (1651) and Les Délices de la campagne (1654), and François Massialot, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1691), which was still being edited and modernized in the mid-18th century. The cookbook was still used in France until the French Revolution.

The seventeenth century saw a culinary revolution which transported French gastronomy into the modern era. The heavily spiced flavours inherited from the cuisine of the Middle Ages were abandoned in favour of the natural flavours of foods. Exotic and costy spices (saffron, cinnamon, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, nigella, seeds of paradise) were, with the exception of pepper, replaced by local herbs (parsley, thyme, bayleaf, chervil, sage, tarragon). New vegetables like cauliflower, asparagus, peas, cucumber and artichoke were introduced.

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