Entrée

Common food related French words often used by English speakers.

Entrée is one of several savoury courses in a Western-style formal meal service, specifically a smaller course that precedes the main course.

Usage may differ in North America where the disappearance in the early 20th century of a large communal main course such as a roast as a standard part of the meal has led to the term being used to describe the main course itself. In that case what would otherwise be called the entrée is called the first course, appetizer or a starter.

The traditional French menu, goes something like:

Soup.
hors d'oeuvres or/and fish
entrée (or entrées) [i.e. the third course, but not the last, as a the North American English usage would imply]
rôti
final course (perhaps)
dessert.

A modern western (formal) menu goes something more like:

hors d'oeuvres
soup or entrée
main
dessert and cheese (or cheese and dessert if you are French)

To see why the entrée becomes the last main dish in North America, we go back roughly 100 years, to when the ritual of the formal dinner - devised in France and modified for use throughout the West - had come to the end of its golden age. A key venue for displays of refinement by the upper and middle classes, formal dining, though less elaborate than it had been 100 years before, retained a tricky set of rules governing everything from the order in which guests entered the room to which of a dozen utensils was most appropriate for eating conger eel.

By the late 1800s, a typical formal dinner in the UK ran to about six courses: soup, fish, entree, roast (or "joint" - no giggling), maybe another savory course (often a pudding), and dessert. As you'll notice, the entree wasn't the opening act. It was generally a "made" or highly prepared dish - possibly meat and vegetables, maybe sweetbreads or liver - as opposed to the more unadorned roast, but this distinction could be blurry; in the earliest use of entree cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1759, the dish described is a roasted ham. So while one could argue that the entree was the last of the preliminaries, it seems equally defensible to see it as the entrance into a series of what we'd now call main courses. Under main course, in fact, the OED has "one of a number of substantial dishes in a large menu," and in most cases the entree was clearly substantial enough to qualify.

This interpretation prevailed in the U.S., where British conventions held sway, but as American menus became more streamlined in the early 20th century (old-school chefs were already griping about graceless, hurried modern dining as of 1905) some courses got the ax. The roast lost its automatic spot (possibly due in part to WWI meat rationing), the additional savory dish fell away, and soon enough the entree had gone from one of several main dishes to the last main dish standing.

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