People often think that gourmet cooking consists of a series of elaborate dishes of the kind that can only be found in top restaurants. It is thought of as a kind of cooking that is difficult to do and just as difficult to eat.
Gourmet cooking is felt to be something best avoided by the majority of people because it is too expensive and surrounded by social snobbery. Gourmet cooking is for the rich and those who have more money than sense.
That image of gourmet cooking dates back to the nineteenth century when French chefs dominated the industry. The best restaurants and the richest households employed French chefs.
Those chefs were trained in a rigorous system that aimed to keep professional secrets within a tightly knit group. The chef’s livelihood depended on maintaining his craft exclusivity. Equally his employer’s status depended on the exclusivity of the chef.
Today cooking is much more democratic. Few young chefs today would tolerate the kind of ritual humiliation that apprentice chefs suffered in old fashioned kitchens. Television chefs have demonstrated their skills before a wide public and college courses offer intensive training in arts once the preserve of elite kitchens.
As more people dine out on a regular basis the snobbery once associated with restaurants has become a thing of the past. The restaurant that allows its waiters to be rude to the customers will soon go out of business.
The food that is considered to be gourmet food has also changed. In the past the idea of gourmet food was to get as far as way as possible from peasant food. Today the same peasant dishes are likely to be on the menu of top restaurants. Simplicity and natural taste is everything. The rich sauces and elaborate dishes of old style gourmet food have been swept away.
A simple bruschetta made of a slice of bread covered in tomato sauce and toasted could be considered gourmet food. Yet a few centuries ago the same food would have been eaten by poor people.
The key thing in gourmet food today is the quality of the ingredients and the integrity of the final dish. If the bread is made with unbleached flour without any of the additives ususally found in commercially made bread, allowed to rise slowly and baked in a wood fired oven then you are off to a good start. The sauce should, of course, be freshly made not out of a far. It should be made from tomatoes with the best flavour not the tasteless varieties that are usually found on the supermarket shelves. It should be well seasoned with garlic and fresh herbs.
A dish prepared in that way will be something out of ordinary. It will justifiably rate as gourmet food although it is, in itself, very simple and demands no special skills to make it.
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