So, lately I've been thinking about the history of food, particularly haute cuisine, after I confused Brillat-Savarin for Escoffier (I'd never heard of the latter, but I know the former from watching waaaaaaaay too much Iron Chef) in Quiz Bowl (don't ask). I have a few questions:

What was the status of cooking--particularly what we might call cuisine--in ancient civilizations, particularly the ones outside of Eurasia? (I'm going to some kind of African restaurant--Ethiopian, I think--on Tuesday with my cousin--she says it's awesome. Thus the question.)

How did modern Western cuisine develop? How did the French manage to declare themselves the Kings of Food?

How has cuisine historically been seen in relation to the arts? Have artists embraced it as a fellow art? Or is it seen as a backwater?

Well, the Roman cuisine was very "interesting". Garum for example, the "kethchup" from the Romans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum. BTW it is said that Asian fish sauces of today are very similar to garum. If one wants to cook like the old Romans you can use that as replacement.

Adler

About French cuisine:

It seems Chatherine di Medici, upon marrying the king of France, worried whether she'd be able to eat the food at this court of northern barbarians or not, so she brought along a couple of chefs from her native Florence. This was in the 16th c.

These Florentine chefs and their cooking was a big hit with the French court and great noble families. So originally the French cuisine grew out of Florentine renaissance cooking. French chefs started improving and elaborating on what the Italians did. (Some still find the French cuisine too elaborate and prefer the Florentine, which is said to be similar but with a more basic approach).

16th century France, in particular under Louis XIV, went on to make itself the undisputed provider of luxury goods and arbiter of taste for European monarchs and nobles, the only people able to afford it and whose opinion counted at the time.
This included the cuisine. Any selfrespecting king or nobleman would want to eat in style, and that meant doing it like they did it in France. It was a serious matter of ostentatious consumption. You didn't want to be caught lagging in the cuisine race. The stakes were so high the star chef beyond comparison during the reign of louis XIV, Vattel, eventually killed himself over a sauce the didn't come out right.

This went on until the French revolution. Suddenly, with no king and court, and the great nobles headless, on the run abroad, or at least with their estates confiscated, the luminous stars of European cuisine, i.e. French, found themselves out of work.

But since they had to make a living, they quickly assesed the situation and sized up the new rulers, the bourgeois middle class. While hardly paupers, they wouldn't run huge and expensive households like the nobles. This was where the French chefs hit upon the idea of the modern prestige restaurant. And since the French bourgeoisie was already copying things from the good life of the nobles, including their high-cuisine, they were extatic to suddenly be able to enjoy the real deal, and these modern high-cuisine restaurants turned out to be a riot succes.

As the courts and nobles had been looking to the French court and its cuisine, the European middle class on the rise in the 19th c. looked to the restaurants catering to their French equals and adopted them.

How did the French manage to declare themselves the Kings of Food?


That is something of a false title. Italian kitchens rule.

The basics of Western cuisine come from Italian kitchens, reflecting a true Mediterranean lifestyle. The French put all sorts of elaboration on it and make it their own, but the basics are Italian/Mediterranean.