All dishes labeled as Florentine, whether Chicken Florentine, Sole Florentine, or Eggs Florentine have one ingredient in common: spinach. In modern culinary shorthand, adding the word Florentine to a menu item simply means that the dish features spinach, usually paired with cheese, cream, or a white sauce. Toss fresh spinach leaves into scrambled eggs, add them to a quiche, or include them in a cream sauce over grilled chicken, and contemporary restaurants will call it “Florentine-style.” Most diners will assume that Florentine refers to the culinary traditions of Florence, Italy. It would seem logical, then, that this city is famous for growing spinach, or that its home cooks have an historic devotion to leafy greens. In reality, the dish isn’t Italian at all but instead a cornerstone of classic French haute cuisine. Under the rules of traditional French cooking, preparing a dish à la Florentine more than just adding spinach into a dish. It describes a four-part classical preparation, layered in the following order:
- Seasoned bed of cooked spinach, traditionally wilted, blanched, and sautéed or gently simmered in butter.
- A protein placed on top of the greens, most commonly poached eggs, tender white fish (like Dover sole), or light poultry.
- Generous serving of Mornay sauce, the classic French mother sauce in which with grated Gruyère, Emmental, or Parmesan cheese is added to a béchamel.
- Grated cheese and breadcrumbs, placed under a broiler or salamander until the top is bubbling, golden-brown, (aka gratinated or au gratin).
Over the 20th century, modern cooks steadily stripped away the strict classical requirements. Hollandaise replaced Mornay, quick garlic-cream sauces replaced the slow béchamel roux, and in many restaurants, “Florentine” was reduced to a few handfuls of baby spinach wilted into pasta. Still, the question remains, how did a classic French culinary method built around butter, cheese, and spinach get named after a Renaissance city in Tuscany?
Did Catherine de’ Medici Really Invent It? (The Myth vs. Reality)
The usual story given to explain the origin of the culinary term Florentine is a certain Renaissance fairy tale about Catherine de’ Medici and her army of Florentine cooks:
In 1533, the fourteen-year-old Florentine noblewoman Catherine de’ Medici arrived in France to marry the future King Henry II. Appalled by the crude, barbaric state of French cooking, she brought an entire retinue of master chefs, pastry cooks, and gardeners from Florence. Catherine loved spinach so much that she insisted it be served at every meal, demanding that seeds be planted in the royal gardens. To appease their Italian queen, French court chefs began creating dishes centered around her favorite green vegetable, naming them à la Florentine in honor of her hometown.
While this tale is popular, it has been thoroughly debunked by food historians.
Dismantling the Medici Fairy Tale
In her landmark work Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789, culinary historian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton combed through the French royal household records starting from Catherine’s arrival in 1533. She found zero evidence of a brigade of Italian master chefs transforming the French court. Catherine’s personal entourage consisted of basic domestic staff, while the royal kitchens remained in the hands of established French cooks.
Furthermore, spinach was hardly an exotic foreign novelty to 16th-century France. The French had already been cultivating and eating spinach for hundreds of years, having inherited it from Mediterranean trade routes centuries prior.
Even the idea that Catherine’s native Florence had a particular love for spinach-and-cream casseroles is a fantasy. Authentic Tuscan cooking (la cucina povera) is famously rustic, relying on white beans, bread, olive oil, and roasted meats. It has never heavily featured French béchamel based sauces. As food writer Emiko Davies points out in her investigation for Food52, actual Florentines visiting France or America are often completely baffled by dishes labeled à la Florentine.
So where did the legend come from? The myth of Catherine as the fairy godmother of French haute cuisine was largely manufactured in the 19th century by French gastronomic writers like Antonin Carême and Charles Monselet. They romanticized the Renaissance, inventing a legendary Italian culinary invasion to give modern French classical technique an ancient, aristocratic lineage.
How “Florentine” Really Got Its Name
If Catherine didn’t introduce spinach to France, why did French chefs attach the name of an Italian city to it? The true answer is: food historians don’t actually know. The most realistic answer, based on the historical evidence, is that the designation was purely fanciful and random.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, French chefs began codifying menus using elaborate regional and foreign monikers to describe specific garnishes, sauces, and preparations. Some of these made sense based on local agriculture:
- À la Provençale: garlic, tomatoes, and olive oil (staples of Provence).
- À la Normande: butter, cream, and apples or cider (specialties of Normandy).
- À la Romain: vinegar, chervil, or anchovies (hallmarks of classic Roman cooking)..
Many others, however, were completely arbitrary, fanciful, and outright inaccurate. French culinary nomenclature frequently assigned exotic place names to dishes simply because they sounded elegant or cosmopolitan:
- Disparate garnishes were labeled à la Polonaise (Polish-style), à la Flamande (Flemish-style), or à la Hongroise (Hungarian-style) based on whatever a particular Parisian chef decided cook up.
- Dishes labeled à la Milanaise often involved macaroni tossed with julienned tongue, ham, mushrooms, and truffles, a distinctly French banquet garnish bearing zero resemblance to everyday cooking in Milan.
When French chefs named a preparation built on a bed of cooked spinach and covered in a Mornay sauce, they called it à la Florentine. It is likely that this name simply fits into the latter more fanciful category rather than the practical naming conventions.
Even the influential culinary encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique, which popularized the classic definition of Florentine as fish, poultry, or eggs served with spinach and Mornay sauce, admits that the connection between the city of Florence and spinach is unknown.
There is no record of Florence having a robust spinach industry and no evidence of a Medici court decree. There is certainly no association between Florence and spinach gratins. Therefore, the association appears to be nothing more than an arbitrary French kitchen convention that caught on and was codified in classical French manuals. The folklore concerning Catherine de’ Medici was probably invented to explain the name after the fact.
Where Spinach Actually Came From (Etymology and History)
Spinach (Spinacia oleracea) is native to ancient Persia (modern-day Iran), where it still grows wild and has been cultivated for well over 2,000 years.
The ancient Persian word for the green was aspanakh. The plant reached China in the 7th century, where ancient records labeled it “the Persian herb.” During the medieval Islamic golden age, Arab agriculturalists embraced the crop, rendering the Persian name into Arabic as isbanakh.
It was Arab migration and trade that carried the vegetable into Europe, rather than Italian merchants. The Moors introduced spinach to Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) in the 11th century, and Arab forces brought it to Sicily by the 9th century. From Spain, throughout the Middle Ages, spinach steadily spread across Western Europe. It became prized by medieval cooks and monastic communities because it was one of the few fresh, leafy greens that could survive cool weather and be harvested during the early spring and Christian Lenten fasts.
By the time spinach arrived in England in the mid-1500s, English scribes were spelling the Araic word phonetically based on the Old French espinoche. Early English gardening and household ledgers listed it under many variations, including spinech, spinage, spinnedge, and spynoches. By the 16th century, spinach was thriving in France, Spain, and England, centuries before it became associated with cheese sauce and gratin preparations.