An entrée ( AHN-tray; French: [??t?e]) in modern French table service and that of much of the English-speaking world (apart from the United States and parts of Canada) is a dish served before the main course of a meal; it may be the first dish served, or it may follow a soup or other small dish or dishes. In the United States and parts of Canada, an entrée is the main dish or the only dish of a meal.
Historically, the entrée was one of the stages of the "Classical Order" of formal French table service of the 18th and 19th centuries. It formed a part of the "first service" of the meal, which consisted of potage, hors d'oeuvre, and entrée (including the bouilli and relevé). The "second service" consisted of roast (rôti), salad, and entremets (the entremets sometimes being separated into a "third service" of their own). The final service consisted only of dessert.
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Origin of the term in the 16th century
The word "entrée" as a culinary term first appeared in print around 1536, in the Petit traicte auquel verrez la maniere de faire cuisine, in a short section titled "Here is what is needed to make a banquet or wedding after Easter" ("C'est que fault pour fair ung banquet ou nopces apres pasques"). Each of the menus that follow begins with "Bon pain, Bon vin" (Good bread, Good wine) followed by a list of dishes grouped under a series of four headings, which mark the four stages of the meal.
The headings "Entree de table" (Entrance to the table) and "Issue de table" (Departure from the table) describe the first and last stages of a meal; these are organizing words, "describing the structure of a meal rather than the food itself". Between these two stages are, first, a single group of Potaiges (any sort of food cooked in a pot) and then one or more Services de rost (separate presentations of roasted meat); the terms potaiges and rost describe cooking techniques without specific reference to the order of the dishes in the meal. These four stages of the meal--entree de table, potaiges, service(s) de rost, issue de table--appear consistently in this order in all the menus of this family of cookbooks.
While the Livre fort excellent does not discuss the ingredients or cooking techniques appropriate to the entree de table, certain dishes found only in this stage of the meal may be characteristic of the entree de table of the 16th century and perhaps the 15th as well: sausages, offal, and raw watery fruits (oranges, plums, peaches, apricots, and grapes, but not the raw "dry" fruits characteristic of the Issue de table: apples, pears, and medlars). Other dishes appear both in the entrée de table and in other stages of the meal, such as venison cooked in various ways (potaiges and rost services) and savory pies and sauced meat dishes (rost services). This distribution of dishes is very similar to that of the menus of the Ménagier de Paris of 150 years earlier.
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The 17th century and the emergence of the "Classical Order" of service
The stages of the meal underwent several significant changes between the mid-16th and mid-17th century. The entrée became the second stage of the meal, and potage became the first. The roast retained its position after these two stages, and salad was routinely mentioned as its accompaniment. Entremets came to be recognized as a distinct stage of the meal, served with or after the roast. And the final stage of the meal was increasingly called dessert, consisting of foods not from the kitchen, but from the storeroom, "de l'office" (fresh and preserved fruits, nuts, cheese, and other dairy dishes).
This new order of table service was presented in French cookbooks of the second half of the 17th century as if it were already well-established practice, but the reasons for and history of these changes are not explained in any contemporary source. François Pierre de La Varenne, writing in the 1650s, includes no information on table service in his books, though notably his chapter on potages precedes his chapter on entrées. La Varenne's contemporaries Nicolas de Bonnefons and Pierre de Lune, in their numerous menus, present the potages and entrées and every other stage of the meal in separate services; these menus definitively indicate the new order of service, but with no explanatory remarks.
At this point, the term "entrée" had lost its literal meaning. This was somewhat obscured in the late 17th century by a new style of table setting, in which some stages of the meal were presented together rather than in separate services. Antoine Furetière, in his dictionary, wrote that entrées were served with the potages. And in the menus of François Massialot, Nicolas Audiger, and "L.S.R." the potages and entrées were presented together in a single service. The roast and entremets were presented together in one service by Massialot and Audiger, but separately in two services by L.S.R. Dessert was a separate service in all of these menus.
By the end of the 17th century, the basic elements and structure of the Classical Order of service--potage, entrée, roast (with salad), entremets, and dessert--and the new style of serving some stages of the meal together were fully established. They remained the usual form of service among the nobility and bourgeoisie of France well into the 19th century.
The composition of the entrée in the Classical Order
As in the Livre fort excellent, the terms "potage" and "roast" have obvious culinary meanings, without any indication of appropriate ingredients; the terms "entrée" and "entremets" imply nothing of preparation or ingredients. The dictionaries and cookbooks of the 17th and 18th centuries rarely discuss directly the composition of the dishes for each stage of the meal, though they routinely include lists of dishes appropriate to each stage. Nevertheless, entrées and the dishes of the other stages of the meal can be distinguished from each other by certain characteristics: their ingredients, cooking methods, and serving temperature.
Appropriate ingredients for entrées on meat days included most butchers' meats (but not ham), fowl, furred and feathered game, offal, and suckling pig.
Of these, butchers' meats of all types were particularly characteristic of entrées. Large joints were also presented in the roast service in the 17th and early 18th centuries, but by the end of the 18th century, they were served almost exclusively as entrées. Butcher's meats were rarely served as entremets. Suckling pig, uniquely, could be served as entrée, roast, or entremets.
Fowl and feathered game were primarily (but not exclusively) served as roasts, less frequently as entrées; furred game was more frequently served as an entrée, less frequently as roast. Fowl and game were only rarely served as entremets.
Offal (of any sort) and sausages and forcemeats (of any meat, fowl, or game) were equally common as entrées (always served hot) and entremets (usually served cold); they were not served as roasts.
Eggs, on meat days, were never served as entrées; they were served only as entremets.
Vegetables often made up part of the sauce or garnish, but entrées were always meat dishes; vegetable dishes were served only as entremets.
On lean days, fish and eggs replaced meat and fowl in every stage of the meal; and on these days, eggs did appear as entrées. Fish for entrées was generally served sliced or in filets, since poached whole fish was the usual replacement for the meats of the roast service. There were no distinctions between types of fish or shellfish as there were among the ingredients on meat days. Even on lean days, few entrées were composed only of vegetables. During Lent, though, vegetable entrées ("entrées en racines", encompassing all vegetables, not just "roots"), were sometimes served.
In a notable change from the practice of earlier centuries, raw fruit was no longer served as an entrée, even on lean days.
Moist cooking methods were characteristic of this stage of the meal, typical preparations being sautés, ragoûts, fricassées, marinades, étouffades, daubes, civets, and terrines. Meat or fowl (but not fish) might be roasted, but it was first wrapped in paper, or stuffed with a forcemeat, or barded with herbs or anchovies, or finished in a sauce, or prepared in some other way to keep the dish from browning and crisping like a true roast. Savory pies and pastries were baked in dry heat, but the enclosed meat cooked in its own steam and juices.
All entrées were served hot, and this was a salient feature of entrées until the 19th century. In contrast, any entrée brought to room temperature or chilled was served as an entremets.
These distinctions were at first loosely observed, or perhaps more accurately, the "rules" were in a formative stage for several decades. La Varenne, for example, includes several sauced dishes, ragoûts, and other entrée-like dishes alongside the roasts in his chapter for the Second Service; La Varenne also includes small game in ragoût among his entremets. De Lune does not seem to divide hot and cold pastries strictly between entrées and entremets. And as late as 1708, in the revised 7th edition of L'École parfait des officiers de bouche, the unknown author writes that the roast service includes entrees. None of these practices persisted into the 18th century, as specific ingredients and cooking methods were increasingly confined to only one stage of the meal.
The entrée in the 18th and early 19th centuries
Changes in the Classical Order over the course of the 18th century primarily entailed more restrictive "rules" on what was served in each stage of the meal, including the introduction of new distinctions within each stage. As in the 17th century, direct discussion of the changes is lacking. But new definitions of the stages of the meal appear in the dictionaries, cookbooks, and menus of Louis Liger, Vincent La Chapelle, François Marin, "Menon", François-Alexandre Aubert de la Chesnaye-Desbois, and expanded later editions of Massialot.
In the early 19th century, the remarkable culinary author Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière discussed in detail the composition of all the various stages of the "Classic Order" in articles spread throughout the eight issues of his Almanach des Gourmands (1803 - 1812). Among his articles is a discussion of the many distinct types of entrées that had emerged over the course of the 18th century.
Grosses Entrées, Entrées à la broche
In the late 17th-century, writers first began to discuss the arrangement and management of the dishes on the table, producing the first printed diagrams for setting the table and managing elaborate menus. Writers distinguished between large, medium, and small (gros ou grand, moyen, et petit) potages, entrées, roasts, and entremets, and between various types of serving vessels: large basins (bassins), large and medium platters (grands et moyens plats), plates (assiettes), footed plates (assiettes volantes), and little bowls (petites creuses). These new distinctions in serving size, unknown before 1660, continued to govern table setting through the early 18th century, becoming largely obsolete in the late 18th century.
One of the categories, the large entrée (grosse entrée, or grande entrée), took on a more specific and longer-lasting meaning. In the early 18th century, the grosse entrée was the centerpiece of the table in the entrée service, presented either with or following the potages. In composition, the grosse entrée would have been (on meat days) a casserole, a large savory pie, a joint of meat, or even feathered fowl.
By the mid-18th century, the grosse entrée was more narrowly defined as a large joint of butcher's meat, usually beef or veal. In many menus, this was "the large joint of beef used as a centerpiece" ("la grande pièce de boeuf pour le milieu"). In other menus, large joints were presented in a separate second service, or partway through the first service as relevés for the potages. The joints were prepared in a number of ways, including boiling and braising. They were perhaps most commonly served as spit-roasted entrées (entrées à la broche), though always stuffed with a forcemeat or studded with herbs or wrapped in paper to keep the meat from browning and crisping like a true roast.
On fish days, in the early 18th century, a fish casserole or savory pie would have been customary. In the late 18th century, whole fish were the norm, "but always served with a sauce or garnish under them; this sauce establishes, in most cases, the distinction that must exist between a roast and spit-roasted entrée." ("mais toujours avec une sauce ou une garniture dessous ; cette sauce établissant, dans plusieurs cas, la différence qui doit se trouver entre un rôti et une Entrée de broche.")
(In a similar way, the "gros entremets" was the centerpiece of the subsequent services, either with or after the roast. For Grimod de La Reynière, these were "grosses pièces", although that overly broad term could also describe entrées, roasts, and entremets.)
Relevés
In the table service of the 18th century, similar to the practices of the 17th century, the stages of the meal could be grouped into three, four, or five services. Between each service, the waiters would remove (relever) the empty serving vessels from the table and replace them with new dishes. Marin, Menon, Aubert de la Chesnaye-Desbois, and the mid-century editors of Massialot include examples of various styles of table setting from this period.
For the first stages of the meal, all the potages, hors d'oeuvres, and entrées might be placed together in a single first service; or the potages and hors d'oeuvres might be placed in one service and all the entrées placed in a second service; or a grosse entrée might be the centerpiece of a first service of potages and hors d'oeuvre, remaining on the table for a second course of entrées.
Alternately, all the potages and hors d'oeuvres could be placed with some entrées in one service, and then the waiter could remove only the empty soup tureens and replace them with a "partial second service" of more entrées, specifically grosses entrées and entrées à la broche. After the mid-18th century, this practical description of the waiters' duties came to refer to the "replacement dishes" themselves, which were then called relevés. This arrangement is found in some of the menus in the new edition of Massialot; by the early 19th century, this was apparently the only table setting known to Grimod de La Reynière.
The relevés were not new types of dishes, but rather grosses entrées and entrées à la broche under a new designation. In practice, the relevés were consumed after all the other dishes of the first service, i.e., after the potages, hors d'oeuvres, and other entrées; but in setting the table, they were replacement dishes for the potages.
Le Bouilli
The term bouilli itself is old, meaning broadly any food cooked in a liquid; more narrowly, it refers to boiled meat or fowl. But in the late 18th century, the term came to mean a specific type of grosse entrée, i.e. "boiled beef", a joint of beef (rump or brisket), poached or braised, served with a simple garniture of braised vegetables. As with the relevé, this was not a new type of dish, but rather a new name for an existing type of entrée.
The bouilli was the first of the entrées eaten, immediately after the potages (and hors d'oeuvres, if those were served), and before the ordinary entrées and relevés. The bouilli is thus equivalent to the pièce de boeuf pour le milieu of the early to mid-18th century. Unlike those, however, the bouilli was always beef and always boiled, and the new designation bouilli may thus represent a more restrictive set of "rules" governing entrées in the late 18th century.
Unlike the creativity shown in preparing other entrées, there was a certain monotony in the boiled beef served at every meal; nevertheless, by the early 19th century, the bouilli was a "required" dish at all fine meals.
Among the many new categories of entrées that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, the bouilli receives the least discussion in the cookbooks and dictionaries of the time, despite its obvious significance. The bouilli was, however, commonly included in lists of the stages of the meal, without comment, as if it were a well-understood culinary term.
Usage
Marie-Antoine Carême explained for a French readership the order of courses in the state dinner à la russe served for Tsar Alexander I's review of his troops in 1815, at an isolated location far from Paris, under trying circumstances:
Russian service is carried out rapidly and warmly; first, oysters are served; after the soup, hors d'oeuvres; then the large joint of meat; then the entrées of fish, fowl, game, meat, and the entremets of vegetables; then the roast meat with salad. The service ends with the desserts: jellies, creams and soufflés.
In Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, bills of fare for a grand dinner for eighteen follow two kinds of fish and two kinds of soup with four entrées: ris de veau, poulet à la Marengo, côtelettes de porc, and ragoût of lobster. Guests were not expected to eat of each dish, for the entrées were followed by a second course and a third course, of game and fruit.
In 1961 Julia Child and her co-authors outlined the character of such entrées, which--when they did not precede a roast--might serve as the main course of a luncheon, in a chapter of "Entrées and Luncheon Dishes" that included quiches, tarts and gratins, soufflés and timbales, gnocchi, quenelles, and crêpes.
In 1970, Richard Olney, an American living in Paris, gave the place of the entrée in a French full menu: "A dinner that begins with a soup and runs through a fish course, an entrée, a sorbet, a roast, salad, cheese and dessert, and that may be accompanied by from three to six wines, presents a special problem of orchestration".
An entrée is more substantial than hors d'oeuvres and better thought of as a half-sized version of a main course. Restaurant menus will sometimes offer the same dish in different-sized servings as both entrée and main course.
The entrée in modern French cuisine
In traditional French haute cuisine, the entrée preceded a larger dish known as the relevé, which "replaces" or "relieves" it, an obsolete term in modern cooking, but still used as late as 1921 in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire.
In France, the modern restaurant menu meaning of "entrée" is the course that precedes the main course in a three-course meal, i.e. the course which in British usage is often called the "starter" and in American usage the "appetizer". Thus a typical modern French three-course meal in a restaurant consists of "entrée" (first course, starter (UK), appetizer (U.S.)) followed by the "plat" or "plat principal" (the main course) and then dessert or cheese. This procession is commonly found in prix fixe menus.
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