Entrée

An entrée (/ˈɒ̃treɪ/, US also /ɒnˈtreɪ/; French: [ɑ̃tʁe]), in modern French table service and that of much of the English-speaking world, is a dish served before the main course of a meal. Outside North America, it is generally synonymous with the terms hors d'oeuvre, appetizer, or starter. 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 English-speaking Canada, the term entrée instead refers to the main course or the only course of a meal.

The word entrée as a culinary term first appears in print around 1536 in the Petit traicté auquel verrez la maniere de faire cuisine, more widely known from a later edition titled Livre fort excellent de cuisine, in a collection of menus at the end of the book. There, the first stage of each meal is called the entree de table (entrance to the table); the second stage consists of potaiges (foods boiled or simmered "in pots"); the third consists of one or more services de rost (meat or fowl "roasted" in dry heat); and the last is the issue de table (departure from the table). These four stages of the meal appear consistently in this order in all the books that derive from the Petit traicté.

The terms entree de table and issue de table are organizing words, "describing the structure of a meal rather than the food itself". The terms potaiges and rost indicate cooking methods but not ingredients. The menus, though, give some idea of both the ingredients and the cooking methods that were characteristic of each stage of the meal.

Sausages, offal, and raw watery fruits (oranges, plums, peaches, apricots, and grapes) were apparently considered uniquely appropriate for starting the meal, as those foods appear only in the entree de table. Other dishes considered appropriate for the entree stage also appear in later stages of the meal, such as venison cooked in various ways (in the entree, potaiges, and rost services) and savory pies and sauced meats (in the entree and rost services). The distribution of dishes is very similar to that of the menus in the Ménagier de Paris, written 150 years before the Petit traicté.

The stages of the meal underwent several significant changes between the mid-16th and mid-17th century. Notably, the potage became the first stage of the meal and the entrée became the second stage. By 1650, the term "entrée" had lost its literal meaning and had come to refer to the stage of the meal after the potage and before the roast, entremets, and dessert. The term "entrée" also came to refer to the dishes served in the entrée stage, and not just to the stage itself.

While cookbooks and dictionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries rarely discuss the type of dishes appropriate to each stage of the meal with any specificity, entrées and the dishes of the other stages of the meal can be distinguished from each other by certain characteristics, such as their ingredients, cooking methods, and serving temperatures. The distinct characteristics of the entrée were at first loosely observed, or perhaps more accurately, the "rules" were in a formative stage for several decades. By the early 18th century, though, certain ingredients and cooking methods were increasingly confined to the entrée stage of the meal.

In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, entrées on meat days included butchers' meats (but not ham), suckling pig, fowl, furred and feathered game, and offal. Eggs were never served as entrées on meat days; they were served only as entremets. Vegetables often made up part of the sauce or garnish, but entrées on meat days were always meat dishes; separate dishes of vegetables were served only as entremets.