Learn French Cuisine Vocabulary: 200 Flashcards from Mother Sauces to Boeuf Bourguignon

Want to read a French menu without guessing, or follow a recipe from Lyon in the original? Deck ER4937 — French Cuisine & Gastronomy (200 cards, English to French) is less a phrasebook than a tour of French food history: medieval game and spices, Carême and Escoffier's kitchen, then a region-by-region pantry from Alsace to Burgundy.

A taste of the deck

What you will pick up: roux, velouté, béchamel, espagnole, consommé, ragoût, fond, brigade de cuisine, garde manger, rôtisseur, pâtissier, maître d'hôtel, cuisine bourgeoise, haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine, Guide Michelin, saumuré, fumé, brochet, anguille, lotte, coquille Saint-Jacques, homard, écrevisse, venaison, sanglier, lièvre, pigeonneau, macis, safran, clous de girofle, cassoulet, blanquette de veau, pot-au-feu, choucroute, andouillette, quiche Lorraine, mirabelle, eau de vie, calvados, cidre, galette, crème Chantilly, îles flottantes, mille-feuille, Comté, Morbier, moutarde de Dijon, crème de cassis, bœuf bourguignon.

Learn it in three courses

1. The kitchen (cards 1-33 and 76-118): sauces, stocks and the brigade. These are the words chefs still use worldwide, so learn them first.
2. The medieval pantry (cards 34-75): fish, game, spices. Useful for reading history and older recipes.
3. The regions (cards 119-200): Alsace-Lorraine, Normandy, Brittany, the Loire, Burgundy and Franche-Comté. Group cards by region and attach each word to one dish (Normandy: pomme, cidre, calvados, Camembert).

A dozen cards are not food at all (microwave oven, train line, department, Metropolitan France, German cuisine): suspend them or keep them as context for the regional section.

Two traps the deck sets for you

Prune is not a prune. Card 145 gives plum = prune and card 143 prune = pruneau. Make one card that holds both, because English speakers swap them every time. In the same spirit, card 104 is right that entrée is the first course: in France the main course is the plat principal (card 10), the reverse of American menus.

Add the article and fix the near-misses. No card shows gender, yet menus are full of it: write le fromage, la recette, le roux, la sauce, l'huître (f), le homard. Then tidy four cards: gibier à plumes (card 49) means feathered game, not fowl (fowl is volaille, card 44); écrevisse appears twice (cards 157 and 191); trois services (card 103) sounds formal, and people mostly say trois plats; and loup de mer (card 151) is the Mediterranean name for sea bass, which is called bar on the Atlantic coast. Finally, the deck lists only three mother sauces. Escoffier had five, so add sauce tomate and sauce hollandaise. Note too that poissonnier is both the fishmonger (card 65) and the brigade's fish cook.

Keep going

For the French you need between meals (ordering, directions, numbers), continue with our French Travel and Daily Life guide.

Search for deck code ER4937 in the Flip It library: open Flip It.