Bon Appétit: French Cuisine in American Culture
A lecture tracing how French cooking shaped American taste, from Revolutionary-era diplomacy to Julia Child's kitchen and beyond.
Why we picked this
Food as foreign policy: this talk connects the French alliance in the Revolution to Julia Child on PBS to the soft power embedded in every roux — a history that tastes better than it sounds in a syllabus.
The relationship between French cuisine and American culture runs deeper than restaurant menus and cooking shows. This lecture at the New York Historical Society traces a centuries-long story that begins with France’s alliance with the American colonies during the Revolution — when French courtly dining arrived in the new republic and shaped how Americans understood sophistication and national identity — and winds forward through Gilded Age banquets, the immigrant kitchen, and Julia Child’s transformation of postwar American cooking via television.
The New York Historical is one of the few institutions in the city that takes food seriously as history: not as nostalgia or entertainment but as a lens onto politics, immigration, class, and the way nations imagine themselves. This lecture draws on the museum’s own collections to make the case that what Americans put on the table has always been a statement about who they want to be.
The evening stands on its own as a single talk — no prior knowledge of food history or French culture required — and should appeal to anyone curious about how culture travels across national lines and takes root in unexpected ways.