Gourmet

A gourmet is a person with a sensitive and discriminating palate, and who is knowledgeable in appreciation of the culinary arts of fine food and drink, or haute cuisine. Gourmand can also mean one who simply enjoys food in great quantities. An epicure is similar to a gourmet, but the word may sometimes carry overtones of excessive refinement. Gourmet is often used as an adjective for meals of especially high quality, whose makers or preparers have used special effort or art in presentation or cooking the meal, or for facilities equipped for preparing such meals, such as a restaurant. The term and the practice may have negative connotations of elitism or snobbery, but is often used positively to describe people of refined taste and passion.

Gourmet is often used to modify another noun: gourmet cooking, gourmet restaurants. (French, from Old French, alteration – influenced by gourmand, glutton; see Gourmand – of groumet, servant, valet in charge of wines, from Middle English grom, boy, valet.)

The word gourmet is from the French term for a wine broker or taste-vin employed by a wine dealer.Cotgrave\'s French-English dictionary of 1611, quoted by Jean-Louis Flandrin, whose chapter "Distinction Through Taste", in A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance ((Belknap Press, Harvard University) 1989:289-92, "Gluttons and Epicures", traces the significance of these French terms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Friand was the reputable name for a connoisseur of delicious things that were not eaten primarily for nourishment: "A good gourmet", wrote the conservative Dictionnaire de Trévoux, employing this original sense, "must have le goût friand", or a refined palate. In the eighteenth century, gourmet and gourmand carried disreputable connotations of gluttony, which only gourmand has retained. Gourmet was rendered respectable by Grimod de la Reynière, whose Almanach des Gourmands, essentially the first restaurant guide, appeared in Paris from 1803 to 1812. Previously, even the liberal Encyclopédie offered a moralising tone in its entry Gourmandise, defined as "refined and uncontrolled love of good food", employing reproving illustrations that contrasted the frugal ancient Spartans and Romans of the Republic with the decadent luxury of Sybaris. The Jesuits\' Dictionnaire de Trévoux took the Encyclopédistes to task, reminding its readers that gourmandise was one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Foodie is often used by the media as a conversational synonym for gourmet. The word was coined synchronously by Gael Greene and by Paul Levy and Ann Barr, co-authors of The Official Foodie Handbook (1984).

Certain events such as wine tastings cater to people who consider themselves gourmets and foodies, while publications such as Gourmet magazine often serve gourmets with food columns and features.

See also

• Aristology
• The Frugal Gourmet
• Good Eats
• Gourmet Museum and Library
• The Surreal Gourmet

References

External links

• William Safire\'s distinction between gourmets and gourmands
• Free Gourmet Recipes
• the Reluctant Gourmet

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