A country of regional kitchens — butter and cream in the north, olive oil in the south, goose and duck in the south-west — that Paris gathered into one grand cuisine without ever quite replacing them.
France's cooking starts with its terroirs: the particular soil, climate and habits of each place. Normandy's pastures give cream and apples, Alsace pork and white wine, Burgundy beef and red wine, Brittany buckwheat and salted butter, Provence olives and herbs, and Gascony ducks and geese. Each region cooked what grew around it, and many still guard their dishes and products under protected names.
From the seventeenth century on, cooks to the court and the aristocracy wrote down a more refined way of cooking, built on stocks and sauces. After the Revolution, the restaurant — which grew up in Paris in the late eighteenth century — carried it to a paying public, and later chefs organised it into a system of mother sauces, brigades and set garnishes. This Parisian, professional cooking is what much of the world came to mean by French cuisine.
The regions never stopped cooking their own food, though, and the two have always fed each other: grand kitchens borrowed Norman cream and Burgundian wine and gave them fancy names, while village dishes like cassoulet and bouillabaisse became national emblems. How much of the regional map is old and how much was drawn in the twentieth century, when guidebooks and motoring tourists went looking for it, is still argued over.