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By general consent the three major styles of modern cookery are the Chinese, Italian, and French. Of these, the oldest, purest, and perhaps most sophisticated is the Chinese, which is built on concepts defined by Confucius. The character of Chinese cookery has been shaped by the character of China itself. In a land chronically overpopulated and fuel-poor, a people concerned with good eating had to use ingredients and develop techniques unknown or ignored elsewhere. In essence, Chinese cookery is quick cookery. To prepare meals using small quantities of flimsy, fast-burning fuel, the Chinese developed the wok, a round-bottomed utensil that circulates heat quickly and evenly while enabling its user to keep its contents in constant motion. With the wok, and using ingredients hacked into small, thin morsels, the Chinese cook exposes the maximum amount of food surface to heat in the shortest possible time, often simultaneously preparing a sauce in the same wok. Chinese cookery is typified by lightness, freshness, variety, and the calculated interplay of contrasting textures, flavors, colors, and aromas. Its influence is evident to varying degrees in the cookery of Japan and in areas from Hawaii to the western end of the Malay Archipelago.
Italian cookery, too, was shaped to a considerable degree by fuel shortages, in this case the result of early deforestation. In northern Europe in the Middle Ages, large roasts were cooked on spits, and stews, soups, and sauces were prepared in cauldrons. Although not unknown in Italy, these slower methods have not played conspicuous roles in a land where beef is relatively scarce but fish are plentiful and where pale meats, in any case, are preferred to red. Like the Chinese, Italian cookery is essentially quick cookery, with thin cuts of meat exposed to heat for periods of short duration, and with such relatively bland grains as pasta (wheat), polenta (corn), and risotto (rice) dependent on sauces and garnishes for interest. Based primarily on that of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Saracens, Italian cookery was refined to a high degree by the early Renaissance, when it produced the first truly modern European cuisine.
Although today it sets the standard for all other Western cuisines, French cookery was heavy, monotonous, and overspiced until the arrival in France (1533) of the Italian-born queen Catherine de Médicis; with her came a small army of Florentine cooks, bakers, and confectioners, an assortment of advanced kitchen gear, and a variety of delicacies then unknown to the French. In the following century François Pierre de La Varenne, a great chef trained in the French court, wrought a culinary revolution by developing the first true French sauces. La Varenne was followed by a long line of French master chefs, who in their times revolutionized cooking procedures: Careme, the founder of la cuisine classique; Auguste Escoffier, who modernized, codifed, and publicized French cookery; and, in the present era, a band of young innovators who have based their nouvelle cuisine in large part on Oriental traditions 2,000 or more years old, developing a new cooking style characterized by lightness, purity, and simple, undisguised flavors.
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