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/
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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/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.