Steal the Menu (17 page)

For a larger version of this menu, click
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An embarrassment of choices at the French Laundry, in Yountville, California. Will it be a tasting of classics like oysters and pearls or foie gras from the meat
dégustation
menu, or more intensely original treatments of peas and beets on the vegetarian roster? We ordered both in 2004. (
illustration credit 4.2
)

Guérard was an even greater, if sincere, contributor to the miasma of hygiene that befogged nouvelle cuisine in its period of maximum press attention.

Hidden behind this screen of contradictions and opportunistic rhetoric, nouvelle cuisine was actually something radically new that had sprung right out of the social fabric of postwar France. Young chefs had eliminated the formally garnished banquet platters of Escoffier (which were themselves simplifications of the grandly sculptural cuisine inherited from Carême and other classical nineteenth-century practitioners). In this cleansing of the repertory, these chefs were following not only the relatively inconspicuous and mild reforms of Escoffier but also the more trenchant and simplifying example of their mentor Fernand Point. They were, in fact, picking up a thread first spun in the period between the wars when the influential gastronomic writer Curnonsky had directed the attention of chefs like Point to the treasures of French regional cooking. In a series of blue booklets aimed at the new breed of gastronomically inclined motorists, Curnonsky not only recorded these local dishes but also insisted that they should reflect their ingredients, should not disguise the taste of the things from which they were cooked. Today this may seem like an obvious principle, but the extremely complex recipes of nineteenth-century haute cuisine were edible fantasies remote from the raw materials of the larder.

And so, when Paul Bocuse prided himself on his
cuisine du marché
(market cooking) and took reporters like me with him to the market in Lyon to hunt for the best raw materials available on a particular day, he was showing his commitment to ingredients, to their intrinsic taste and quality, and to the resources of his own region. And by the time Bocuse and the other Young Turks had achieved national and international fame, they had gone further than Point.

By the mid-seventies, I had eaten in most of their restaurants. On a meal-by-meal basis, no clear picture of a unified direction had emerged. What, if anything, was the connection between Bocuse’s gargantuan sea bass en croûte with a
sauce Choron
(béarnaise with tomato puree) and the black, unglamorous, juniper-infused thrush pâté at Troisgros?

Then I happened to compare the pictures in Point’s posthumous
Ma gastronomie
(1969) with those in Guérard’s
Cuisine gourmande
and still other photographs in Jean and Pierre Troisgros’s
Cuisiniers à Roanne
(1977). Point’s food looks radically simple alongside the platters depicted in the
Larousse gastronomique
, with their garnishes of turned vegetables and pastry boatlets, but with Point we are still in the world of the banquet, the world of the platter on which a suckling pig or a whole tart is presented to a tableful of people or a large family assembled for a dramatic occasion.

The younger chefs selected photographs of individual plates, with the food on them arranged meticulously to make a visual effect on its own. In their book, the brothers Troisgros credit their father as the source of the “custom of both presentation and service on each guest’s individual plate—very large plates, which we were the first to use.”

By now we have all encountered the nouvelle cuisine plate and its studied placement of sliced vegetables, arranged in circular or
other geometric patterns. While it would be wrong to dispute that this new mode of decoration arose in France and quite naturally from trends emerging over decades, it is also the case that the full efflorescence of nouvelle cuisine was, to an important extent, an exotic bloom fertilized by new ideas, aesthetic and culinary, that traveled to France from abroad, in particular from Japan, and took root in traditionally xenophobic soil.

In the postwar era, exotic ingredients—the avocado, the mango and, before all others, the kiwi—arrived in France by jet. Meanwhile, French people traveled outside the mother country in unprecedented numbers. Bocuse himself jetted off so often to Japan that diners complained that the master was rarely at his own stove. Senderens abandoned his research in premodern French recipes to study Japanese cuisine.

The flow of ideas from Japan to France brought a highly developed food aesthetic—one based on delicate visual effects and achieved most often on individual plates—to young French chefs already predisposed to paint with food on the circular field of a plate. Nouvelle cuisine rapidly evolved into a feast for the eyes,
à la japonaise
. It also incorporated some of the basic ideas of Japanese cuisine itself, notably a predilection for raw ingredients, which fulfilled Curnonsky’s notion of ingredient purity to perfection. A slice of raw scallop tasted, by definition, of nothing but the scallop itself.

The global success of this new mode of cooking is a fact of contemporary life, reinvigorating national and regional food traditions. It is to this global yet regional school of cookery that we in America now owe the so-called new American cuisine, which combines French principles of food preparation, Japanese plate decoration and regional, folkloric American ingredients.

On wings of chic, I wrote in
Natural History
, the new gospel soared over oceans and continents. Japanese chefs trained in
France reigned supreme in Manhattan. Homegrown cooks learned the lessons of the day and presented sophisticated diners from coast to coast with morels foraged in Michigan woods and hitherto neglected sea urchin gonads from Pacific waters. Aided by food processors, modish restaurants offered julienned vegetables of every hue with each floridly designed entrée. Following the lead of their French mentors, they were open to ideas from cooking traditions around the world, mixing all the great ethnic and national dishes in a mishmash of eclecticism that is every bit as intricate in its way as were the now-abandoned platters of yesteryear.

Even this superficial analysis of nouvelle cuisine would have surprised most of its happiest consumers, but there was more to this global movement in the kitchen than unfamiliar ingredients and painterly plates. Considered historically, nouvelle cuisine, as I argued almost thirty years ago, had deep roots in European gastrolinguistic tradition and was the logical conclusion of centuries of change in the way food was brought to the table and served to individual diners.

I thought about these matters first during a wedding in New Haven, in 1985, when I meditated briefly in a small church about deconstruction (then the latest fad in French literary analysis, which had captured the energies of the Yale English department) and its relation to trends in food. Almost all of the original claims made about and for the nouvelle cuisine had turned out to be exercises in public relations, but everyone who had experienced the food itself knew that it had a coherence, a recognizable cluster of characteristics. It was a style.

But it was a sly style, one whose true nature had barely ever been discussed by its practitioners. They were not shy, but the language they used was almost an ideal text for deconstruction because it was so purely metaphorical. I was using language here
in a broad sense to include both chefs’ words—their menu language and their recipes—as well as their dishes.

The world of nouvelle cuisine, I argued in
Natural History
, is a forest of symbols and allusions that the knowledgeable diner can “read” and decode, much as a literary deconstructionist might decode the figurative code of a poem. Classic cuisine was also a code, literally, couched in the language of menus and cookbooks. Dishes were identified with terms such as “Montmorency” and “Paloise,” words that in ordinary speech refer to people and places but that in the world of traditional haute cuisine denoted, respectively, a roast duck sauced with cherries and a béarnaise sauce made with mint instead of tarragon. In most cases these chefs’ terms were a pure code without even a tangential connection to their names’ everyday referent. Espagnole sauce was in no way Spanish. The old culinary language simply gave names to dishes that honored people and places and rarely offered the uninitiated any direct information about the dish they were going to get.

The leaders of nouvelle cuisine were all trained in this nomenclatural code. They knew exactly what garnishes and sauce went with
sole à la normande
. The sole, poached in fish and mushroom stock, was surrounded by poached mussels and shrimp with a line of four poached oysters and four fluted mushroom caps alternating down its center. All of this was coated with
sauce normande
, an elaborate concoction of fish stock, mushroom and mussel cooking liquids, egg yolks and cream, and then additionally garnished with six truffle slices and six croutons cut in lozenges alternating around the perimeter of the sole. Four gudgeons, the freshwater fish
Gobio gobio
, fried at the last minute and themselves decorated with paper sleeves, were arranged on the platter with four medium crayfish. All the elements were compulsory; not until 1912 did Escoffier finally concede, in parentheses, that the truffles were optional.

The names of traditional haute cuisine dishes were, although sonorous, primarily useful as shorthand devices. They performed a real service for waiters, who did not have to memorize and then rattle off the four canonical garnishes associated with
rôti de veau Maubeuge
. Haute cuisine lingo saved everyone the bother we now endure from waiters who do not benefit from a convenient code and have to tell you that tonight’s special is moose haunch with wild rice balls, broiled shiitake mushrooms and a partridge in a pear mousse. Wouldn’t it be easier if that particular collection of foods were always identified as moose Mamaroneck?

Yes, it would be simple, but the culinary world we live in is an unsettled place. You can almost count on not getting moose with the same accompanying side dishes on another night in another restaurant (or often not even in the same restaurant).

But in the world set down in Escoffier’s
Guide culinaire
, chefs did repeat the official garnish combinations. Over the 150 years that stretched from the time of Carême, in the early nineteenth century, until the dawn of nouvelle cuisine, French chefs refined a closed system of dishes whose basic unit was a serving platter dominated by a main food item—say, a roast—tricked out with its prescribed garnishes. Nouvelle cuisine not only abandoned the old culinary code and its heraldic certainties of
garniture
and presentation, it also abandoned platter service itself and substituted for it an equally intricate method of service based on individual plates arranged in the kitchen and then brought out to diners.

These attacks on the structure and meaning of the old style of dining are the truly revolutionary part of nouvelle cuisine, but the threat to the old order was masked in many ways. Nouvelle cuisine was marketed as the cuisine of modern slim people who valued fresh food or food presented with streamlined simplicity and provocative ingredients. All those elements were present and important, but they fronted for the real revolution, which transformed
the old code by repurposing it as material for a most elaborate system of culinary parody, punning and metaphor.

Nouvelle cuisine looks at Escoffier through the wrong end of the telescope. It puts ironic quotation marks around Carême and sets the old code in italics so that the old words mean something else, are metaphors for new ideas for which no names previously existed.

In the dawn of the nouvelle era, gastronomic pilgrims trekked to dismal Roanne, near Lyon, to eat chez Troisgros, where they were served the great prix fixe menu of the postwar period: that deceptively dull-looking black-gray thrush pâté flavored with juniper berries, then thin slices of salmon in sorrel sauce, followed by local Charolais beef in an intense but transparently clear brown sauce and, finally, many, many desserts.

I ate this meal in 1969, the same year the term
la nouvelle cuisine
was coined by Gault and Millau to describe the food on the maiden flight of the supersonic jet passenger plane the Concorde.

The Troigros brothers’ chaste dishes embodied the key elements of the mature movement. The salmon dish, especially, was a sign of things to come. The sauce was pulled together quickly, without flour for thickening, from a highly reduced fish stock, crème fraîche and sorrel. The taste was extraordinary, as was that of the salmon, almost Japanese in its near rawness. And what might be called the design of the dish emphasized lightness with its unnaturally thin pieces of fish.

These were the things that caught my eye in 1969 in that poky little dining room near the Roanne rail station. But the most important feature of the dish was the name on the menu. If the salmon had been cooked until it flaked and if the sauce had been thick and conventional, this dish would still have been a symbol of revolt because of its witty name:
escalopes de saumon
. The Troisgros brothers were serving salmon scaloppine. They had transferred
(metaphorized) a classic (foreign) food idea onto a surprising and provocative new form. The sharp-eyed diner would notice that the chef had cut the salmon into thin flat slices, or scallops, and then had pounded them thinner, just as an Italian chef would have pounded veal scallops, except that the Italian would have pounded the veal because he wanted to make it tender as well as attractively thin. Pounding salmon will indeed change its texture in a minor way, but the main gain was conceptual. The thin salmon pieces were mock scaloppine. They were delicious, but they were also witty.