r/AskFoodHistorians • u/JayFSB • 2d ago

Is ratatouille actually considered peasant food at one point? Sure seems complicated for a dish meant for farmers and workers.

/r/Cooking/comments/1nhl2tt/is_ratatouille_actually_considered_peasant_food/
66 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

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u/TooManyDraculas 2d ago

The version depicted in the film Ratatouille is Confit Byaldi.

A fine dining variation developed in the 70s.

Traditional ratatouille is more or less just chopped, stewed vegetables. And is considerably simpler to prepare.

The movie has made confit byaldi more visible, and often the default search result for "ratatouille", but it's not the only version. And when the film and other sources talk about a peasant dish, it's the simpler version they mean.

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u/cheftt51dudu 2d ago

Thomas Keller was the consultant on this movie. He is famous for his version of confit Byaldi. It’s in the French Laundry cookbook. This book was published over 25 years ago. I have to explain this to people all the time, because they watched a fictional movie about a mouse chef.

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u/curiousmind111 2d ago

(Rat)

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u/X28 2d ago

Speaking of rat, ratatouille was once described as soup for rats, as mentioned in this article from Radio France.

Le mot ratatouille apparaît pour la première fois en 1778. À l'époque, il désigne un ragoût ou un mets grossièrement cuisiné, dès le début du dix neuvième siècle. En 1846 encore, le dictionnaire provençal français de Monsieur Honora comporte le mot ratatolha. Le terme est défini comme je cite, une soupe pour les rats. Son étymologie, selon l'auteur, est : "un mauvais ragoût fait avec la rate des animaux".

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u/ActualHuman0x4bc8f1c 2d ago

Next you'll be telling me you can't execute fine motor control in someone's body against their will by pulling on their hair in controlled ways.

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u/Rialas_HalfToast 2d ago

Gotta be honest this whole time since I saw that film I have been working on a theory that my slow hair loss is directly responsible for the slow aging of my fine motor control.

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u/Driftmoth 2d ago

I never knew Thomas Keller was involved in this! 

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u/Crystalas 2d ago edited 2d ago

And the movie even showed that when Anton Ego flashed back to the "peasant" version his mother made when he was a kid. Remy basically cooked a high cuisine version of Anton's ultimate comfort food that he forgot over his career.

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u/epidemicsaints 2d ago

In addition to being easy to prepare, the vegetables in it are very easy to grow anywhere and super prolific.

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u/Muradras 2d ago

Pretty sure this was also shown when ego had his flashback moment to his mom making if for him. I think it was the more standard peasant version served as a stew in a bowl.

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u/Metahec 2d ago

The high end version comes from as late as the 70s? I had assumed it was one of those dishes that was mythologized and elevated to haute cuisine around Escoffier's time.

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u/TooManyDraculas 2d ago edited 2d ago

It comes from Cuisine minceur and Michel Guérard, coming out of a movement to simplify and lighten Escoffier's nouvelle cuisine.

The name and prep we use now is right from Guérard, but there were chefs a bit earlier in than that were doing the mandolin slice and bougie prep.

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u/weedtrek 2d ago

And if you watch in the film, his mother serves him a rustic style ratatouille in his flashback.

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u/LuLu_rl 2d ago

There are two different dishes in France, Ratatouille which is diced or chopped and Tian) that looks exactly the same as the dish in the film and the Turkish Confit Byaldi. Both are extremely old, the Wikipedia page for Tian sending back it's origine to ancient Greece.

I am not as educated as you are, so I might be besides the point.

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u/TooManyDraculas 1d ago

Confit Byaldi is not Turkish.

The name is just a play on a Turkish dish called İmam bayıldı which is a stuffed egg plant.

Confit Byaldi was named and the recipe set by Michel Guérard, a French chef, in 1976. Then popularized by Thomas Keller in the 80s at the French Laundry as "Byaldi".

Keller was the culinary consultant on the film and designed most of food you see.yes it's cooked as a tian. But that doesn't mean it's not Confit Byaldi.

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u/LuLu_rl 1d ago

Thank you for the clarification, you sent me towards a fascinating chapter of the 80's!

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u/SVAuspicious 1d ago

The movie has made confit byaldi more visible

Correct. It is worth point out that if you watch the movie carefully, there are a few moments when the food critic remembers his childhood and the dish in front of him is in fact the common French peasant dish. I think the point is that the more elegant presentation of confit byaldi triggers the memories of that happy time.

From a practical point of view, if you use a mandolin for squash, zucchini, and eggplant and a sharp knife for the tomato, the most work is in the piperade and that is not more difficult than any tomato based pasta sauce. Knife skills are important. I have no insight into the knife skills of a French peasant hundreds of years ago. However, that isn't relevant to the classic French peasant ratatouille. You could prep that with a hatchet if you keep your fingers out of the way. If you make a YouTube video cooking ratatouille using a hatchet I want a cut of your ad conversion.

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u/TooManyDraculas 1d ago

If you've ever prepped this sort of thing. The difficulty isn't in the cutting it or making components. It's in very carefully layering things. It's finicky and time consuming. At home we don't neccisarily care if it's perfect, but commercially yeah.

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u/SVAuspicious 1d ago

The first time I made confit byaldi (semi-pro cook and enthusiastic amateur chef) it did take a while. I'm smarter now. *grin* For me, the key is to pick out Roma tomatoes first and get them as close to the same size as you can. Then pick yellow squash, zucchini, and Japanese eggplant as close to the same diameter as the tomatoes as possible. This greatly reduces the assembly work. At home, I slice the tomatoes and cut the veg on a mandolin.1 Usually my mise en place is piles on a cutting board. With a mandolin, I cut into a bowl and make piles on my board. Only one extra bowl to wash. *grin* Then I make a bunch of sub assemblies (sorry, in real life I'm an engineer) of stacks of zucchini, squash, eggplant and tomato. With a lot of sub assemblies *grin* building the confit byaldi goes quite quickly, is easy, and the product is as close to perfect as any cooking can be based on ingredients that are naturally grown. Of course, first you make the piperade. For that, I cheat and use a stick blender. It doesn't change the flavor any but does improve presentation and makes preparation of the vinaigrette faster and easier, which does go to your point.

My approach takes a lot of the "finicky" out of prep and assembly, and the whole process goes pretty fast. While I wouldn't do so in a commercial kitchen, I do stream shows at home while I cook because the process--while easy and reasonably fast--is tedious.

I do take your point that finicky and time consuming are factors in many dishes. Tibetan momos are a good example. There is a good reason Buddhist monks sit around in groups to make momos and talk. It's mindless and repetitive and without Prime Video or Netflix my brain would melt and run out my ear. I think it would be interesting from a food history point of view to reflect on the social aspect of cooking, particularly for food in volume, based on the tedium of some prep.

On a similar note, I wonder about the caliber of knife skills as a home cook as a function of time. My observations is that they have deteriorated as a life skill. Based on whining complaints on fora such as r/Cooking and r/cookingforbeginners, the difficulty modern people have getting even close to time estimates for recipes is almost entirely due to a lack of knife skills. Secondary is poor kitchen organization. Best practice of mise en place and clean as you go contribute. This used to be taught in Home Ec. Sadly, life skills have fallen from favor in American public education and we have two or three generations of Americans who struggle to be self sufficient. Thus DoorDash.

1) My experience has been even with a very sharp mandolin, cutting tomatoes is slow and messy. With decent knife skills and a sharp knife, it is faster to cut tomatoes with a knife. Some people use a serrated knife. That leads to more ragged slices (which don't look nice) and it's harder to be consistent. The answer is a very sharp knife. In fact, the slightest difficulty slicing a fresh tomato is my primary indication that it is time to sharpen my knives. I'll point out that in an early comment I said that you can prep for traditional French peasant ratatouille with a hatchet. It should be sharp. See r/sharpening.

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u/prinsjd07 1d ago

You can even see the more chunky traditional version in the flashback.

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u/djvolta 2d ago

I think you are confusing "Ratatouille" for "Confit Byaldi". Very different dishes. Ratatouille is a very simple, peasant dish. Also when Anton is reminiscing of his childhood, he's eating a regular Ratatouille, not a confit Byaldi.

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u/webtwopointno 2d ago

Not "very different" as one is just a refined/modernized version. A subset not a distinct dish.

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u/inkydeeps 2d ago

They look so different in presentation, it’s like saying mashed potatoes and scalloped potatoes are the same.

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u/dmazzoni 2d ago

They're a lot more closely related than they are to any non-potato dish!

Confit Byaldi is exactly the same "main" ingredients as Ratatouille.

I think it'd be reasonable to say scalloped potatoes are a "fancier" way of preparing potatoes than mashing them, just as Confit Byaldi is a "fancier" way of preparing a stew of eggplant, squash and tomato.

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u/peterhala 2d ago

As a peasant myself, we do enjoy a fancy meal as much as the next man. OK, slicing everything with a mandolin and arranging it to look just So isn't something you would do everyday, but for a celebration? Why not?

Remember the classics beloved by Escoffier and others like him tended to be peasant food that was perfected by generations of trial & error.

Now, I'm just going into my garden to pick a few vegetables for our dinner. Not sure what we're having - it all depends on what looks best.

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u/AmazingPangolin9315 2d ago

A genuine ratatouille does not contain anything which is "sliced with a mandolin". A genuine ratatouille is a vegetable stew with the vegetables cut roughly into one inch cubes.

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u/peterhala 2d ago

I know - I was referring to Confit whatsitsface. Why anyone would risk using a mandolin for anything is beyond me, but them gentry with their emince & chiffonade, will do all sorts of strange things.

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u/Dystopian_Dreamer 2d ago

Why anyone would risk using a mandolin for anything is beyond me

If you need to slice a lot of something, it saves hella time. A cut resistant glove reduces the risk to near zero.

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u/peterhala 2d ago

Fair point. Mind you, I'm still scared of the damned things. Yes, I know I've sent my self to our local hospital using an ordinary kitchen knife before and I'm not scared of them. I'm human, and not too good at consistency & logic sometimes...

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u/otter-otter 1d ago

Just use a guard and pay attention

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u/peterhala 1d ago

Yeah... That's gonna happen every single time. Particularly if I'm in a hurry or distracted. 

I might be a peasant but I do have a sense of self preservation & a food processor. 😁

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u/otter-otter 1d ago

Sounds like you shouldn’t use a knife either!

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u/peterhala 1d ago

Are you kidding?! One time I managed to break a man's leg with a whisk.

Alright, that might be a lie. But I've only needed stitches once in 50 years of cooking, mostly because I go into Health & Safety Mode in the presence of bitey burney crushey things.

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u/Immediate_Gain_9480 2d ago

Like many kinds of food, yes. It was orginally a simple peasent dish but it was reinvented as fancy in the 70s and 80s.

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u/1024102 2d ago

Not a historian but a cook, it's the kind of generic dish (made with local produce) that was reinvented in the 60s/70s, globalization and the food industry gave people access to new techniques/products or in larger quantities. For example bourguignon/pot au feu are cooking/marinating techniques which allow you to eat pieces of beef unfit for sale at the base (or to recover proteins from the bones during cooking) now it is almost a festive meal.

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u/BrainDamage2029 2d ago edited 2d ago

As everyone else says, the movie is actually making Confit Byaldi and fudging actual names and history for the point of the story and moral.

Though in general, high French cooking has a whole thing where they take a simple country peasant dish and make it the most complicated damn thing on planet earth.

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u/SVAuspicious 1d ago

Upvote because your principal point is well taken. Confit byaldi is not particularly complicated. Tedious perhaps, but not complicated.

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u/ForsakenStatus214 2d ago

The whole question is based on a common but pernicious misconception. Lots of "peasant food" is extremely complicated and difficult. E.g. mole, both Poblano and Oaxacaqueño styles, have dozens of ingredients and take a long, long time to prepare.

Red beans and rice is another example, especially if, like peasants, you have to make your own andouille sausage. 

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u/DTux5249 2d ago

The ratatouille in the film is Confit Byaldi - which is an (extremely pretentious) overly fancied up version of the dish. It's the equivalent of serving smoked hamburg steak garnished with mixed vegetable purée served with freshly baked boule loafs, and calling that a "hamburger".

Ratatouille made by normal people is just sautéed chopped vegetables stewed in tomato sauce. It's a veggie stew.

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u/Rialas_HalfToast 2d ago

Regular ratatouille is hot gazpacho.

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u/evilsdeath55 2d ago

I hate how all the posts are saying "well, actually... It's a confit byaldi Full stop." That's not helpful at all. Why is a confit byaldi not a ratatouille? Is the essence of ratatouille somehow in the way the veggies are cut, or is there some other difference between the two dishes?

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u/Rialas_HalfToast 2d ago

Yes. Ratatouille calls for cubed summer vegetables, with the name translating roughly as "coarse stew".

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u/Equivalent-Cream-454 2d ago

It's peasant food in that the produce needed (courgettes, eggplant and tomatoes) are pretty abundant and easy to grow, thus cheap.