An entrée ( AHN-tray; French: [??t?e]) in modern French table service and that of much of the English-speaking world (apart from the United States and parts of Canada) is a dish served before the main course of a meal; it may be the first dish served, or it may follow a soup or other small dish or dishes. In the United States and parts of Canada, an entrée is the main dish or the only dish of a meal.
Historically, the entrée was one of the eight stages of the "Classical Order" of formal French table service of the 18th and 19th centuries. It formed a part of the "first service" of the meal, consisting of potage, hors d'oeuvre, entrée, and relevé. The "second service" consisted of roast, salad, and entremets (the entremets sometimes being separated into a "third service" of their own); and the final service consisted of dessert.
Video Entrée
Origin of the term in the 16th century
The word "entrée" as a culinary term first appeared in print around 1536, in the Petit traicte auquel verrez la maniere de faire cuisine, in a short section titled "Here is what is needed to make a banquet or wedding after Easter" ("C'est que fault pour fair ung banquet ou nopces apres pasques"). Each of the menus that follow begins with "Bon pain, Bon vin" (Good bread, Good wine) followed by a list of dishes grouped under a series of four headings, which mark the four stages of the meal.
The headings "Entree de table" (Entrance to the table) and "Issue de table" (Departure from the table) describe the first and last stages of a meal; these are organizing words, "describing the structure of a meal rather than the food itself". Between these two stages are, first, a single group of Potaiges (any sort of food cooked in a pot) and then one or more Services de rost (separate presentations of roasted meat); the terms potaiges and rost describe cooking techniques without specific reference to the order of the dishes in the meal. These four stages of the meal--entree de table, potaiges, service(s) de rost, issue de table--appear consistently in this order in all the menus of this family of cookbooks.
While the Livre fort does not discuss the ingredients or cooking techniques appropriate to the entree de table, several dishes in the menus are found only in this stage of the meal: sausages, offal, and raw watery fruits (oranges, plums, peaches, apricots, and grapes, but not the raw "dry" fruits characteristic of the Issue de table: apples, pears, and medlars). These are apparently characteristic of the entree de table of the 16th century and perhaps the 15th as well. Other dishes appear both in the entrée de table and in other stages of the meal, such as venison cooked in various ways (potaiges and rost services) and savory pies and sauced meat dishes (rost services). This distribution of dishes is very similar to that of the menus of the Ménagier de Paris of 150 years earlier.
Maps Entrée
The entrée in the 17th century
The stages of the meal underwent several significant changes between the mid-16th and mid-17th century. The entrée became the second stage of the meal, and potage became the first. The roast retained its position after these two stages, and salad was routinely mentioned as its accompaniment. Entremets came to be recognized as a distinct stage of the meal, served with or after the roast. And the final stage of the meal was increasingly called dessert, consisting of foods not from the kitchen, but from the storeroom, "de l'office" (fresh and preserved fruits, nuts, cheese, and other dairy dishes). This new order of table service was presented in French cookbooks of the second half of the 17th century as if it were already well-established practice; the reasons for and history of these changes are not explained in any contemporary source.
At this point, the term "entrée" had lost its literal meaning, though by the end of the 17th century, this may have been somewhat obscured by the way in which the stages of the meal were presented. François Pierre de La Varenne, writing in the 1650s, includes no information on table service in his books. Other writers from the 1650s and 1660s (Nicolas de Bonnefons and Pierre de Lune,) present the potages and entrées and every other stage of the meal in separate services. But by the 1690s, culinary writers (François Massialot, Nicolas Audiger, and "L.S.R.") were combining the potages and entrées together in a single service; followed by the roast and entremets, either together in one service (as is Massialot and Audiger) or separately in two (as in L.S.R.); ending with dessert, always served separately.
The cookbooks of the period do not discuss directly the composition of the dishes for each stage of the meal. As in the Livre fort, the terms "potage" and "roast" have obvious culinary meanings, but without any indication of appropriate ingredients. The terms "entrée" and "entremets" imply nothing of preparation or ingredients. Yet entrées and the dishes of the other stages of the meal can be distinguished from each other by certain characteristics, such as their ingredients, cooking methods, and serving temperature.
Appropriate ingredients for entrées on meat days included most butchers' meats (but not ham or joints of pork, which are reserved for entremets), fowl, furred and feathered game, and offal.
Of these, butchers' meats were particularly characteristic of entrées. While in the 17th and early-18th century, butchers' meats were also common as roasts, by the mid-18th century, they were served almost exclusively as entrées; they were rarely served as entremets. Suckling pig, uniquely, may be served as entrée, roast, or entremets.
Fowl and feathered game were primarily (but not exclusively) served as roasts, less frequently as entrées; furred game was more frequently served as an entrée, less frequently as roast. Fowl and game were only rarely served as entremets.
Offal (of any sort) and sausages and forcemeats (of any meat, fowl, or game, including pork) were equally common as entrées (always served hot) and entremets (usually served cold); they were not served as roasts.
Vegetables often made up part of the sauce or garnish, but entrées were always meat dishes; vegetable dishes were served only as entremets.
Eggs, on meat days, were never served as entrées; they were served only as entremets.
On lean days, fish and eggs replaced meat and fowl in every stage of the meal; and on these days, eggs did appear as entrées. Fish for entrées was generally served sliced or in filets, since poached whole fish was the usual replacement for the meats of the roast course. There were no distinctions between types of fish or shellfish as there were among the ingredients on meat days. Even on lean days, few entrées were composed only of vegetables.
In a notable change from the practice of earlier centuries, raw fruit was no longer served as an entrée, even on lean days.
Moist cooking methods were characteristic of this stage of the meal, typical preparations being sautés, ragoûts, fricassées, marinades, étouffades, daubes, civets, and terrines. Meat or fowl (but not fish) might be roasted, but it was first wrapped in paper, or stuffed with a forcemeat, or barded with herbs or anchovies, or finished in a sauce, or prepared in some other way to keep the dish from browning and crisping like a true roast. Savory tourtes and pastries were baked in dry heat, but the enclosed meat cooked in its own steam and juices.
All entrées were served hot, and this was a salient feature of entrées until the 19th century. In contrast, any entrée brought to room temperature or chilled was served as an entremets.
Usage
Marie-Antoine Carême explained for a French readership the order of courses in the state dinner à la russe served for Tsar Alexander I's review of his troops in 1815, at an isolated location far from Paris, under trying circumstances:
Russian service is carried out rapidly and warmly; first, oysters are served; after the soup, hors d'oeuvres; then the large joint of meat; then the entrées of fish, fowl, game, meat, and the entremets of vegetables; then the roast meat with salad. The service ends with the desserts: jellies, creams and soufflés.
In Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, bills of fare for a grand dinner for eighteen follow two kinds of fish and two kinds of soup with four entrées: ris de veau, poulet à la Marengo, côtelettes de porc, and ragoût of lobster. Guests were not expected to eat of each dish, for the entrées were followed by a second course and a third course, of game and fruit.
In 1961 Julia Child and her co-authors outlined the character of such entrées, which--when they did not precede a roast--might serve as the main course of a luncheon, in a chapter of "Entrées and Luncheon Dishes" that included quiches, tarts and gratins, soufflés and timbales, gnocchi, quenelles, and crêpes.
In 1970, Richard Olney, an American living in Paris, gave the place of the entrée in a French full menu: "A dinner that begins with a soup and runs through a fish course, an entrée, a sorbet, a roast, salad, cheese and dessert, and that may be accompanied by from three to six wines, presents a special problem of orchestration".
An entrée is more substantial than hors d'oeuvres and better thought of as a half-sized version of a main course. Restaurant menus will sometimes offer the same dish in different-sized servings as both entrée and main course.
The entrée in modern French cuisine
In traditional French haute cuisine, the entrée preceded a larger dish known as the relevé, which "replaces" or "relieves" it, an obsolete term in modern cooking, but still used as late as 1921 in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire.
In France, the modern restaurant menu meaning of "entrée" is the course that precedes the main course in a three-course meal, i.e. the course which in British usage is often called the "starter" and in American usage the "appetizer". Thus a typical modern French three-course meal in a restaurant consists of "entrée" (first course, starter (UK), appetizer (U.S.)) followed by the "plat" or "plat principal" (the main course) and then dessert or cheese. This procession is commonly found in prix fixe menus.
See also
- Full course dinner
- Food presentation
References
External links
- Recipes at Wikibook Cookbooks
- Why Americans say Entrée when everyone else says Main
- The Straight Dope on the meaning of entrée
Source of article : Wikipedia
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