France is a has-been, now trying to catch up - they got tired of being laughed out of international food events. The leading cuisines in the Western World are now Spain, California, and Scandinavia.

The French "High Cuisine", originally a fast food system (created by very talented chefs) in Post Revolution France, is fading fast, except maybe in effete San Francisco.

Here in Los Angeles, a fancy French restaurant has a life span measured in months. The latest gourmet sensation puts the previous one out of business, and that one will soon succumb to the next. They need rich people who eat out several times a week to survive, and they're all chasing the same 500 customers (according to a lady who was opening her 4th French restaurant after having closed 3).

Everyone else here is enjoying practically every other cuisine in the world. So much so that Saveur magazine, a few years ago, devoted an entire issue just to Los Angeles.

Do be aware, though, French provincial cuisines, all quite different from what people know as "French cuisine", continue as they have for centuries. Provincal, a Mediterranean cuisine between Spanish and Italian and still showing some Roman inflluence, is quite popular with home cooks here.

Italian, is very popular all over California, due to history and it's Mediterranean climate. The huge Bank of America was originally the Bank of Italy, and they still teach that to new employees. Almost every Artichoke grown in the US is, and always has been, grown by Italian families in California. The Zucchini was first popularized by restaurants in Los Angeles, and has spread to the world from here.

And now, with Los Angeles the capital of the Pacific Rim, Asian cuisines are extremely popular here. Who the hell needs France?

And, just to finish off that stupid map, Russian Salad is NOT French, it is Belgian.

I have the major cookbooks of Dione Lucas, first woman to graduate from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and Mapie Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec, a foremost expert in the real cooking of France. They have some recipes for "the same thing". Typically, Lucas' recipe has 12 ingredients an Mapie's has 6.

Of course Auguste Escoffier's 2973 recipes are very short, because they were written for experienced cooks who knew how to do the details.

Danish: Det nye nordiske køkken, Swedish: Det nya nordiska köket, Norwegian: Det nye nordiske kjøkken, Finnish: Uusi pohjoismainen keittiø

This is an organized movement among the Nordic countries. It is based on traditional and seasonal ingredients, combining traditional and modern methods, emphasizing freshness, preserving natural flavors and natural textures.

A leader in this movement is the Danish restaurant Noma, voted best restaurant in the world 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 by Restaurant magazine. There is also a Noma in Japan with the same objectives for Japanese foods. I have a thick book titled The Noma Guide to Fermentation outlining some of their techniques.

New Scandinavian cookbooks such as Fire and Ice (2015) are greatly influenced by this movement, but Cool Cuisine (Icelandic cuisine), dated 2004, considered the year of the foundation of the New Nordic Cuisine, already has a whole lot of more modern influence, dating from the 1960s onward. No doubt this is true of the other Nordic countries as well.