French cuisine first originated during the Middle Ages, when wealthy aristocrats needed several classes to be served at the same time to huge amounts of people during flamboyant banquets. Though French food has developed since the beginning of the culinary style, master chefs paid the exact same attention to detail as well as the appearance of the dishes today as chefs do. For example, fowl were stuffed inside a more delicious bird like pigeon or chicken, such as dove or peacock were cooked and, because of the lack of a pleasant taste. The cooked meat was then put back in the skin of the fowl that was bland tasting, and sewn up with the feathers still complete to create an amazing display. Ordinary seasoning spices and herbs such as black pepper, used in every meal today, were very scarce in medieval France; instead, now used spices like long pepper and grains of paradise were incorporated into their intricate courses. The notion of utilizing pastry dough to encase a pie became highly popular during this age, and pies became an integral section of banquets spreads in medieval France. Fish made for nearly all the meat source during Lent for the average home, so many of these pies comprised some sort of marine meat; eel was a highly popular selection for pies.
Guilds were the equivalent of contemporary grocery stores. These guilds each had firmly one food category for which they provided master chefs and products, and also the royal government forbid providers and these chefs from selling any food products not in their category. Each form of cook was considered an equivalent essential section of the equation that was culinary. The convention of sticking having a culinary grouping has continued through the centuries, and current master chefs work with either the main courses or pastries.
