Florentine or à la Florentine is a term from classic French cuisine that refers to dishes that typically include a base of cooked spinach, a protein component and Mornay sauce. Chicken Florentine is the most popular version. Because Mornay sauce is a derivation of béchamel sauce which includes roux and requires time and skill to prepare correctly, many contemporary recipes use simpler cream-based sauces.[1][2][3]
Culinary lore attributes the term to 1533, when Catherine de Medici of Florence married Henry II of France. She supposedly brought a staff of chefs, lots of kitchen equipment and a love of spinach to Paris, and popularized Florentine-style dishes. Food historians have debunked this story, and Italian influence on French cuisine long predates this marriage.[4]Pierre Franey considered this theory apocryphal, but embraced the term Florentine in 1983.[5]
Auguste Escoffier included a recipe for sole Florentine in his 1903 classic Le guide culinaire, translated into English as A Guide to Modern Cookery. It is recipe 831 in that translation. Escoffier called for poaching the fish in butter and fumet, a stock made of fish bones, cooking the spinach in butter, covering the dish with Mornay sauce, garnishing it with grated cheese, and finishing it in an oven or salamander.[6] In his 1936 cookbook L'Art culinaire moderne which was first translated for American cooks in 1966 as Modern French Culinary Art, Henri-Paul Pellaprat included five recipes for spinach-based Florentine dishes with Mornay sauce. The protein components were chicken breasts, cod fillets, sweetbreads, stuffed lamb breast and oysters.[7]Craig Claiborne published a recipe for oysters Florentine with Mornay sauce in The New York Times in 1958.[8]
A quiche containing spinach is often called "quiche Florentine".[9] Poached or soft-cooked eggs served on spinach with a Mornay sauce or equivalent is often called "eggs Florentine".[10]
Chicken Florentine
Chicken Florentine gained popularity in the United States as early as 1931, although the quality of the dish was uneven, and canned mushroom soup was sometimes used as a quick sauce in the years that followed.[11] By the 1960s and 1970s, the general quality of the dish had deteriorated to "casserole" and "wedding banquet" food.[12]
Writing in The New York Times in 1971, Claiborne praised a restaurant version of chicken Florentine, describing the chicken as "batter‐cooked and served with mushrooms in a lemon sauce".[13] Contemporary cookbook authors are attempting to "restore" the dish to "its elegant roots",[14] with "clearer, brighter flavors".[15]
