Steal the Menu (16 page)

When I used it as a shorthand way of tagging the food at an inventive California restaurant in a letter to M. F. K. Fisher shortly before her death in 1992, the ever-acute chronicler of foodways from Sonoma to Dijon replied, “Nouvelle cuisine? Isn’t it just the way we eat now?”

Yes, but along the way to that knowing dismissal lay twenty years of misunderstanding about nouvelle cuisine and its ripple effect in professional kitchens around the globe. The chefs marched ahead with an instinctive grasp of the dynamic process they were caught up in, even as it swept them forward. But all around them
was confusion. Especially in North America, where the terms of the debate were fundamentally garbled in translation, the new cooking got hijacked by publicists and trend-riding journalists who floated various semitruths that gelled into orthodox explanations of complex change at the top of the food world.

Without meaning to mystify, two restaurateurs deeply devoted to the French past had completely bamboozled the public about its future.

Michel Guérard, the most gifted of the leaders of the nouvelle cuisine, wrote a best-selling diet book,
Cuisine minceur
, published in the United States in 1976. After his epoch-making Le Pot au Feu had been razed to widen a street, Guérard had followed his wife to a palatial spa in southwest France owned by her father. Guérard offered spa clients a modern, nouvelle cuisine–informed menu of slimming dishes, while serving regular gastronomes a calorie-insensitive carte of grand and brilliant creations that eventually appeared in his masterwork, the far less popular but far more important
Cuisine gourmande
(1977 in France, 1978 in English translation).

Guérard was undoubtedly sincere in believing that the lighter, less baroque dishes he served his fat-obsessed guests at Eugénieles-Bains would make them thinner without depriving them of the delights of great cooking. He had clearly been won over to a fervor for health by his new wife, a lifelong purveyor of healthy regimens who said in an interview shortly after her marriage to Guérard, “We will not grow old and fat together.”

Guérard, who had lost a lot of weight under pressure from his wife, found a way of linking their spa menus to his premarital work at Le Pot au Feu, which, along with many other innovations, replaced the flour-thickened brown sauces of yore with flourless and highly reduced
jus
. And in press accounts that accompanied
Cuisine minceur
, the notion of flourless sauces adopted from nouvelle
cuisine as the central instruments of Guérard’s diet program crowded out nuance and contributed to the widespread and mostly ineradicable misconception that nouvelle cuisine itself was a dietary program, a three-star method for taking off pounds.

Although the new sauces were indeed flourless, it had never been the case that the great kitchens of France, under Carême or Escoffier or Point, bathed food in gluey brown gravies. It was true that the demi-glace of Escoffier incorporated a very small amount of flour in the form of roux, flour browned in butter before it was whisked into a sauce. But this did not thicken a demi-glace in anything like the crude way that flour thickened the gravy on a hot turkey sandwich in school cafeterias and greasy spoons all over America in that era.

But it was that reflex confusion, between a subtle difference in the practice of top-level French chefs and the blatant viscosity of an American “classic” brown sauce, that misled U.S. readers of reviews and other accounts in the press of
Cuisine minceur.
^†
Since virtually none of them had ever eaten a nouvelle cuisine meal, it was easy for them to conclude that Guérard and his confreres had given up their bad old ways and converted to a fancy form of nutritional sanctimony.

Anyone who actually read
Cuisine minceur
could not have put much stock in this (so to speak). In fact, it now seems totally incredible that diet-obsessed Americans would have taken
Cuisine minceur
seriously as a guide to weight reduction. No nutritional breakdown of any dish is offered. Calories are neither counted nor even mentioned, except in the titles of recipes like “low-calorie mayonnaise,” which is still caloric enough for Guérard to advise
using it sparingly. The first half of the book is a thoroughly conventional set of basic cooking instructions hardly different from what could have been found in any French culinary primer.

It is true that the preponderance of recipes that fill the second half of the book are on the lean and mean side. Sautéeing is suppressed in favor of poaching, but the poaching is done in chicken stock instead of water. Yes, the desserts are very fruit forward. Guérard recommends artificial sweetener to replace sugar. He chooses a soufflé that depends entirely on egg whites. But he just can’t resist including directions for cream puff dough—yielding only enough
pâte à choux
for an individual portion.

To be fair, someone who turned to
Cuisine minceur
after a misspent life of three-martini meals, burgers and French fries, and apple pie à la mode would almost certainly lose weight if she stuck to Guérard’s recipes religiously and gave up, as he demands, all alcohol. But
Cuisine minceur
is not a dietary method, and its recipes were not invented from the ground up to combine nutritional sobriety with gustatory interest. They are, almost all of them, standard dishes selected from the French repertory because they are low in fat, flour and sugar. Their real interest, however, is in their relationship to Guérard’s overall practice as the most innovative of all the nouvelle cuisine chefs.

As in his nutritionally unbridled
Cuisine gourmande
, Guérard applies his culinary intelligence to vegetables. I mean he purees all manner of vegetables not normally treated that way, ending up with sharply focused flavors and pools of brilliant natural colors to brighten plated entrées. These purees of watercress and beets and spinach and green beans stood in, with daring minimalism, for the fussy garnishes of the Escoffier platter.

In
Cuisine minceur
, they are every bit as dramatic as they are in
Cuisine gourmande
, and Guérard could present them simply as low-calorie side dishes. But you can see still his “gourmande” intelligence
at work in the recipe for watercress puree II, which includes lemon juice and a bit of crème fraîche for a slightly grander, more unctuous effect. (The same dish would appear in
Cuisine gourmande
a year later, with some butter and a far greater quantity of crème fraîche.)

These purees were called
purées mousses
in the original French, which carries nuances lost in the plainer English “puree,” meaning something blenderized to perfect smoothness. In everyday French, though,
purée
(all by itself) could mean mashed potatoes (as would
mousseline
). So to my ear, the ever-metaphorical Guérard wanted his French readers to think of his Technicolor vegetable purees as glamorous cousins of mashed potatoes. Which, of course, they are.

Elsewhere in
Cuisine minceur
, he retreats even further from the diet book mode and into the improvisational full sun of nouvelle cuisine with a dish originally called
gratin de pommes du pays de Caux
. In Narcisse Chamberlain’s English translation, this comes out as Normandy fruit and artichoke gratiné, which is perhaps too helpful. Guérard’s title leaves out the artichoke as well as the fresh apricots, which are all parcooked and then baked in a custard. Undoubtedly, Guérard meant to surprise and amuse French readers (and the guests they served) with the unmentioned (and hitherto uncombined) ingredients.

When served, they would have been invisible or at least unrecognizable in the custard, until their tastes gave them away. They also added two extra textures—one more solid (the artichoke), the other softer (the apricot)—to that of the pure apple people were expecting to find in a dish they could see was not a gratin, because it had no layer of melted cheese on top. This “gratin” looked, in fact, like the rustic custard or fruit dessert called
clafoutis
.

What is “minceur” about this “gratin”? Guérard specifies nonfat dry milk—but also lists two whole eggs for the custard.

In
Cuisine gourmande
, the full panoply of Guérard’s genius was on display: an entire chapter of foie gras recipes; a metaphorical carnival of frogs’ leg Napoleons; a seafood stew (
navarin
) steamed over seaweed; beef cheeks à l’orange; beef in the manner of fish (
filet de boeuf en poisson
). This last dish involved butterflying an entire beef tenderloin, inserting truffle slices all over its interior to resemble fish scales, closing it up for roasting, then reopening it on a serving platter and putting a puff pastry fish head and fish tail at either end, to make a faux fish. There was also a sauce, truffle juice thickened with over a half pound (250 grams) of butter. Here was the real Guérard, a more fully achieved version of the genius of Le Pot au Feu. It was this Guérard who earned three stars in Michelin
^‡
in 1977 and won the general agreement of the cognoscenti that he was the outstanding French chef of his generation.

After
Cuisine gourmande
and cookbooks from other nouvelle cuisine chefs began appearing in English, American chefs and wannabes read those books and soon found ways to infiltrate their authors’ kitchens in France, returning home to establish beachheads of modern innovation.

David Bouley prepared for his career as a New York star chef by enrolling in the Sorbonne and then “studying” at the feet of five of the new wave’s A team: Paul Bocuse, Joël Robuchon, Roger Vergé, Frédy Girardet and the patissier Gaston Lenôtre. Returning home, he worked at top established restaurants until surfacing in Tribeca’s first serious restaurant, Montrachet, in 1985, and then opening Bouley in 1987.

In a less obvious trajectory from French training to his own temple of post-nouvelle cuisine, Thomas Keller first knocked around the American restaurant world. Then he fetched up at a French-owned country inn in the woodsy hinterland of Catskill, New York. La Rive was a treasure of traditional French cooking for anyone who could find it. I remember it well, a rustic piece of France in the Hudson Valley. But I had no idea that an American was behind the scenes, imbibing tradition from his strict employers, René and Paulette Macary. Keller spent three years there, experimenting on his own with smoking and other old-fashioned farmhouse techniques. He wallowed in organ meats and might have continued on this path to retro, down-home
aubergisme
, if he had been able to buy La Rive. When he couldn’t pry it loose from its owners, he decamped for France in 1983 and went straight to the top of the Parisian food scene, cooking in the most celebrated of traditional kitchens at Taillevent and at the cleverest of second-generation modern restaurants, Guy Savoy.

At the back, Thomas Keller at La Rive, near Catskill, New York, ca. 1981, with his employers, René and Paulette Macary, and the rest of the staff of this very French country inn (
illustration credit 4.1
)

Back in New York, he practiced traditional French elegance at La Reserve and then spent time at the city’s main colony of
nouvellisme
, Raphael. In 1987, Keller, like Bouley, moved downtown, where he showed his radical colors at Rakel, whose menu mixed French technique with native ingredients such as the jalapeño pepper. Rakel closed at the end of the eighties and Keller spent some years in the wilderness before ascending to the summit of the U.S. restaurant world in the undeniably French but thoroughly modern and original French Laundry, in the wine village of Yountville, California, in 1994.

So nouvelle cuisine eventually trickled across the Atlantic. Before long, it was taken for granted by a new generation of American chefs trained by those who had apprenticed in France. They and their customers had gotten the message, but I felt the message itself had never been properly articulated. In my
Natural History
column and elsewhere, I set out to tell its complex story and to “deconstruct” its essence.

On the technical level, all the original chefs in the movement agreed that flour-thickened sauces were an abomination, but their preference for sauces built around heavily reduced stocks or stocks thickened with cream or egg yolks or hollandaise sauce did not amount to a revolution. Neither did the new emphasis on fresh ingredients, al dente vegetables, and raw fish and meat. lt was this ingredient-centered, health-conscious side of early nouvelle cuisine that understandably misled people into thinking that Guérard, Bocuse et al. were a bunch of health-food enthusiasts with good knife skills. Bocuse encouraged this confusion when he said his innovations were aimed at the new gourmet, a hypothetical diner consumed with a passion for great food but preoccupied as well with staying trim.

This was undoubtedly a shrewd insight into the upscale clientele of three-star restaurants, but even a cursory glance at the
ingredients actually served up by Bocuse and the other Young Turks should have convinced us all that the dietary claims blandly proffered in interviews by Bocuse and Alain Senderens, of L’Archestrate in Paris, were a soufflé of rationalization.