Busting French Cuisine Myths:

Catherine de’Medici’s Italian Chefs Taught the French How to Cook

According to legend, the turning point in the development of French gastronomy was 1533, when Catherine de’ Medici, daughter of the famous Florentine family, married the future King Henry II of France. The suite of servants who accompanied her north from her native Tuscany included chefs, who brought the recipes and techniques of Italian cooking with them. These dishes were unlike anything served in France at the time and they touched off a culinary revolution.

Versions of this story have been reprinted countless time since first surfacing in the 18^th century and they have also entered into popular oral tradition. Whenever I mention to a group of acquaintances—in France or even here in America—that I write about the history of French cuisine, somebody inevitably brings up Catherine and her cooks. But the story is a fiction, as a little history will show.

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