I recently purchased a large French cookbook, which has turned in to one of my favourite food books in my kitchen library. Food making traditions have long and deep roots in France. The recipes, like coq au vin were born in times when people did not have such an excessive and consuming lifestyle - they had to eat everything they managed to grow and catch. Of course, the food had to be tasty too and the only way to make it tasty was to prepare it slowly and really thinking what you were cooking for your family. Because the amount of ingredients available was then more limited than in today's supermarket, the foods became more inventive and cheaper than now, too.
Tv-ads make us believe nowadays that we are always in terrible rush and that's why we should buy their semi-finished products and not to do it all from the scratch. I am quite sure that we have much more free time than our ancestors. The relationship to food, or to be precise, how we respect our food in western culture has changed. We do not have to hunt our meat, pick herbs from nature or rely on self-grown vegetables. Some of us have never chance to see even corn fields or cows.
But of course, traditions can and must change, too. Even French have modernised some classic receipts, however, they still keep the most necessary, traditional parts still boiling slowly in the pots.
