page_title: Lyonnaise cuisine
section_title: 18th century to present
hierarchical_section_title: Lyonnaise cuisine / History / 18th century to present
caption_attribution_description: better known as Stendhal, was a 19th century French writer
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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:
  "I know one thing that is done very well in Lyon. One eats admirably well there, and in my opinion, better than in Paris. Vegetables especially are divinely prepared. In London, I learned that there are twenty-two species of potatoes, in Lyon, I saw twenty-two different ways to prepare them, and at least twelve of these are unknown in Paris".
  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.
caption: The author Stendhal.
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