How did French cuisine achieve global dominance and prestige over advanced culinary traditions like Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, and African cuisines?
I've been thinking about the history of fine dining. Cuisines from India, China, the Middle East, and parts of Africa have spent thousands of years mastering complex spice blends, fermentation, and layering intricate flavors. By comparison, traditional French haute cuisine relies heavily on fats like butter, cream, and stock reductions, often using very little spice beyond salt, pepper, and herbs. To an outside palate, it can even come across as a bit bland.Historically speaking, how did France manage to position its relatively mild, dairy-heavy food profile as the absolute global standard for luxury and sophistication over these highly advanced, flavor-dense culinary traditions? Was it purely political and colonial power, or was there something specific about how they codified their cooking that won the world over?