Entretien avec une étudiante brillante du Cordon Bleu

What does “cordon-bleu” mean in French?

Un cordon-bleu is someone who cooks beautifully. It works for a home cook as readily as a professional, and the noun usually stays masculine even about a woman: ma grand-mère est un vrai cordon-bleu. The literal reading is “a blue ribbon”, and the phrase comes out of an old royal order whose members ended up better known for their dinners than for their rank.

The order was the ordre du Saint-Esprit, founded by Henri III in 1578; its knights wore their cross on a blue ribbon, and their banquets became a byword for eating well. The cooking sense is recorded from the early 1800s. Le Cordon Bleu school — where this interview is filmed — took its name from La Cuisinière cordon bleu, an 1895 cookery magazine. The breaded ham-and-cheese cordon bleu on menus is a separate, much later use.