Lyonnaise cuisine

Lyonnaise cuisine refers to cooking traditions and practices centering on the area around the French city of Lyon and the historical culinary traditions Lyonnais. In the sixteenth century Catherine de Medici brought cooks from Florence to her court and they prepared dishes from the agricultural products from the 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 became 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 wines from Beaujolais and the Rhone Valley.

In the nineteenth 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 twenty-first 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.

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.

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