The French Chef in America Read online

  Julia thought each camp had merit. Agreeing with the Guide Miche about Taillevent, she wrote that it “excelled in service, comfort, and welcome” and eschewed nouvelle cuisine dogma. But, more generally, she approved of GM’s flexible rating system and in-depth commentary. And she criticized Michelin for continually awarding three stars to restaurants like Maxim’s in Paris, L’Oustaude Baumanière in Provence, and the Pyramide in Vienne, when “none of [them] seems the glorious temple of gastronomy it once was.” While she acknowledged the “terrible responsibility” of adding or subtracting stars, Julia prodded Michelin to maintain consistent standards or risk becoming meaningless.

  In the “Manifesto of Nouvelle Cuisine,” published in the October 1973 Nouveau Guide, Gayot, Gault, and Millau laid out the “constitution” of the movement in the manner of the Ten Commandments. To qualify as nouvelle cuisine, they declared, a restaurant’s food had to be fresh and high quality; dishes should be prepared without flour or butter, to promote health and “reveal the true taste of the food”; chefs should be adventurous and use the latest kitchen tools; each plate should satisfy all of the senses, “starting with sight,” meaning that food should be presented like works of art, with compelling colors and forms.

  The manifesto set off a heated debate on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, newspapers heralded “The French Revolution of the plates.” In America, the press had a field day trumpeting the rift between the nouvelle upstarts and traditional French chefs.

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  AS IT TURNED OUT, the “new cooking” had a similar impact in the States. In the early seventies, the movement blew across the Atlantic like a spore, took root, flowered, and propagated across America. When chefs like Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, and Michel Guérard published cookbooks in English and demonstrated nouvelle techniques in the United States, they inspired similar innovations here. First with the California cuisine of the mid-1970s; and then, under the influence of “fusion” cooking—which incorporated Pacific Rim, Latin American, and European food—in the New American cuisine in the 1980s.

  For Americans, nouvelle cuisine reconciled several conflicting imperatives: our growing enthusiasm for fine food, a focus on healthful cooking, and a heightened concern about fat and cholesterol. Nouvelle’s light, eye-catching style was perfectly suited to the cultural moment.

  As Craig Claiborne described it, nouvelle cuisine expanded into “an accordion-pleated affair that affects amateurs and professionals alike [and] can be expanded or contracted—for better or worse—according to the whims and imagination of the cook or chef.” He would later elaborate: “Nouvelle cuisine is the greatest innovation in the world of food since the food processor and, like that machine, it has opened up and broadened horizons in the world of cooking that slightly more than a decade ago were unthinkable.”

  But not all Americans were ready to embrace lighter, snazzier fare. René Verdon, who had cooked for President John F. Kennedy at the White House, grumbled: “When people go to a French restaurant, they want to eat very well.” And Jack Lirio, a San Francisco cooking teacher, sniped, “Without butter, cream and foie gras, what’s left of French cooking?”

  Julia sided with the dissenters. She did not care for blood-rare quail or pink-at-the-bone turbot, which “does not develop the essential taste.” To her palate, the loss of flour in sauces resulted in thin, plain, and unsatisfying reductions. “Humph!” she declared to The New York Times. “Vegetables astringently crisp, indeed. Why, that’s from people who’ve never had a properly cooked green bean, just those limp frozen ones.” To cook a proper green bean, Julia said, one drops very fresh beans into rapidly boiling water, snatches them out after exactly four minutes, and refreshes them in an ice bath, which fixes the color and texture, then shakes them in a hot pan with plenty of salt and butter.

  Simca concurred: “Nouvelle Cuisine was debased when every hash slinger started trotting out pretentious dishes in big plates, and now it’s almost a dirty expression,” she wrote. “That horror nouvelle…if some hapless cook should happen to serve me crunchy, half-cooked vegetables, I say, ‘Cook it some more, please. I’m not a rabbit.’ ”

  Paul had another take: nouvelle’s supposedly radical chefs were “just doing the same thing that’s been done for years,” he said; their cooking was an evolution not a revolution. While nouvelle chefs tinkered with the details—using new types of herbs, say, or familiar ingredients in different combinations, or plating their food in a new style—they had nevertheless stuck to the basic tenets of traditional French cuisine. (France is an essentially conservative nation, and it is unlikely that patrons would have embraced a truly radical menu.)

  To Julia’s mind, the entire nouvelle narrative smacked of “that Paris PR game.” On the other hand, it got people talking about food and encouraged chefs to try new techniques, which was all to the good. “Well, if they can get away with it—why not?” she said. “They’ve made it a lot of fun.”

  III. AN ELEGANT HUSTLE

  In November 1973, Julia received a query from a fan in New Jersey, a Mr. Philip W. Nash, about the “young Turks” who were stirring up French cooking and getting a lot of press for it. She replied:

  One thing to remember is that these articles are all written by publicity people, not by cooks…It gives them something exciting to write about. Fish baked in seaweed, truffled this and that, amazing sauces with sorrel in them, and so forth and so on…However, you have to thicken a sauce with something—mustard at times, but then it tastes like mustard. You can’t use egg yolks all the time. You can’t reduce a brown meat juice to nothing and not come up with a meat glaze, and that would be too strong. Peeking over the shoulder of the chefs you would probably see a bit of cornstarch, or a spoonful of velouté, or demi-glace.

  She pointed to an article that had appeared in Time, in April 1973, in which the correspondent Steven Englund reported on a lunch chez Bocuse, with parenthetical asides from the chef: “It began with sausage in a brioche (‘You really have to eat sausage when you come to Lyon’) and continued with pâté de foie gras that had been made the same morning. Next came the shrimp soup (‘Escoffier would have been horrified at how simple it is. Just some shrimp, white wine, heavy cream, butter, a few shallots’). The fourth course was wild duck in green pepper sauce (‘If you come in December, you can eat duck that I shoot myself’)…the goat cheese—Collonges goats, of course—but a sense of self-preservation made [me] turn down the pastry and the seven varieties of fruit in wine.”

  In her copy of the story, Julia circled the above paragraph in thick blue ink and scrawled “awful menu!” Writing to Mr. Nash, she added: “What kind of healthy menu is that? Somebody is pulling the hanky-panky, is what…Don’t take any wooden nickels or foie gras.”

  Indeed, there was an element of enterprising showmanship to the nouveller’s shtick that occasionally lurched into farce.

  In September 1971, Chef Pierre Laporte of the Café de Paris in Biarritz invited six other renowned nouvelle cuisine chefs to join him in cooking the “Dinner of the Century.” One hundred and forty diners paid significant sums to eat the meal. As the food writer John L. Hess reported in The New York Times, the meal began with a consommé that melted, unforgivably; moved on to a respectable sea bass in red wine that was paired with an awful pink 1959 Dom Pérignon Champagne (quickly replaced by a different wine, an excellent Château Haut-Brion, 1962); a bland crayfish dish; and a novelty corn purée whipped with foie gras; a dessert of pear sherbet was “without interest.” The dinner was, Hess concluded, “a pretentious fiasco.” Robert Courtine, a leading French food writer, considered the affair “quite simply…a commercial venture, some kind of ‘biznesse.’ ”

  The problem, noted the chef Charles Barrier, was that inviting seven superstars to cook together was “like putting seven artists to work on the same painting.” He believed that each meal should be built around a single spectacular dish. But there was no central focus to the dinner of the century, no crescendo or de
crescendo. The chefs admitted they would never have served such foods in their own restaurants.

  Nevertheless, the idea of treating chefs as stars and promoting marquee culinary events as theater had arrived. In January 1973, Paul Bocuse flew to New York to cook another dinner of the century, this time at The Four Seasons Restaurant. Bocuse’s real agenda was to promote his private-label wine. This dinner of the century began with crayfish soup, proceeded to foie gras and a salad of sliced truffles, a poached chicken stuffed with truffles, a gamy woodcock, green bean threads, and nubbins of goat cheese. It was hardly a simple meal. “The dinner is énormément trop” (“enormously over-the-top”), Bocuse conceded. “It is a dinner for Louis XIV. Simplicity is for Lyon. This is New York.”

  In the fall of 1973, Gael Greene, New York magazine’s vivid restaurant critic, accompanied a pack of celebrities on a three-star Grande Bouffe (or “Great Nosh,” in her translation) to sample nouvelle cuisine in Paris and Biarritz at harvesttime. Greene; the actor Danny Kaye; the editor of Screw magazine, Al Goldstein; the writer Nora Ephron; and others were flown to France aboard a corporate jet. There, they indulged in Champagne and caviar breakfasts, then gorged on a spinach and almond milk soup at Roger Vergé’s Moulin de Mougins, the Troisgros brothers’ famous salmon in sorrel butter, Bocuse’s sturgeon eggs, and—best of all—fish steamed on seaweed followed by pigeon brains at Michel Guérard’s Le Pot-au-Feu in Paris.

  “Never was there a more elegant hustle,” Greene reported. “I have been seduced and I have seduced. But this, dear friends, and gentle mouths…this was a Seduction.”

  The boondoggle had been arranged by Yanou Collart, whom Julia characterized as “the very clever French publicity agent for the 3-star chefs, and also, I am sure, for Gault and Millau.” Julia suspected that many of the nouvellers were motivated by a hunger for revenue and publicity as much as, if not more than, by a sincere quest for gastronomic invention.

  The following year, Julia’s views hardened against this vogue after she attended a gala Dinner for Women in New York, an event orchestrated by Bocuse and his nouvelle brothers Jean Troisgros and Gaston Lenôtre.

  Gael Greene had been the only woman invited to the 1973 Dinner of the Century, a predicament that she loved and hated in equal measure, causing her “feminist spirit [to become] schizophrenic.” This time she was in charge of the guest list and advised on the menu. Greene and Julia were seated with ten other ladies who were ready to eat. They included the playwright Lillian Hellman, “une femme d’un certain âge, wonderfully raddled face (no sacquépage! [sic]),” Julia wrote; Marya Mannes, “a colorful journalist, novelist and personality”; Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times, “a very smart girl”; and Gourmet magazine’s Naomi Barry, “just back from neck surgery, looking very pretty.” There was also Louise Nevelson, “an elderly, long, eccentric and renowned sculptress”; Pauline Trigère, the French clothing designer; and Sally Quinn, from CBS television. Rounding out the group was Margaret Tynes, a black opera singer; Bess Myerson, a former Miss America and former head of New York’s Department of Consumer Affairs; and Dena Kaye, the daughter of Danny Kaye. There were no men present, other than the chefs and waiters.

  When Bocuse landed at Kennedy Airport, U.S. Customs seized his bags filled with a prized rump of veal, a haunch of venison, fresh foie gras, a brace of chickens, strings of Lyonnaise sausages, vats of French cream, and strands of garlic—though the chef did manage to smuggle in two hundred dollars’ worth of black truffles, which he passed off as “chocolates.” Bocuse knew how to play the PR game: he posed for photographs at a McDonald’s and clowned for network TV. Stopping at a butcher shop, Greene reported, he “fondled” a rump of veal and declared, “It’s lovely, but nothing like the ass I lost.”

  In place of the veal, Bocuse baked a loup in seaweed and topped it with scallops and a beurre blanc. He filled a ramekin with truffle ragout, foie gras, and spinach. And he prepared crayfish tails and a salad of dandelion greens.

  The loup was overcooked, and the scallops and dandelions were past their prime, but the truffle ragout and Lenôtre’s citrus sorbets were “exquisite,” Greene wrote. The Bocuse and Troisgros house wines were “simply pleasant country wines, no more…neither complex nor memorable,” she added. “Imagine an evening cuddling with a confirmed virgin. It just wouldn’t give. It’s not ready to be loved.

  “The revolution just didn’t work,” she wrote of the Dinner for Women. “The dinner itself must go down as a bizarre hiccup in the annals of serious gastronomy. There is no question that Bocuse and Troisgros are wizards. But I can’t believe they would have dared serve the same menu to male muck-a-mucks.” As for the all-women conceit, Greene added: “Forgive me Gloria [Steinem]…No one was outrageous or bitchy. No one was noisily brilliant. Men might have provoked us, stirred our unreformed competitive instinct, upped the decibels of wit and the ultrasonic intimations of erotic possibilities. Yes, I know these notions are dangerously revisionist.”

  Julia judged the meal fine, if unmemorable, and agreed with Greene about the lack of dynamism at the table. “Dinner with 12 women is not very exciting!” she wrote. “One so clearly sees that the spark is missing…It’s rather like a class reunion at Smith.” She had enjoyed the meal as spectacle, but left feeling more dubious than ever about the self-important hype of the nouvellers. “Heaven knows what all of this proved, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Julia wrote. “It certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with serious gastronomy, and everything with publicity and promotion, which, of course, all of us were quite well aware of.”

  IV. “IS ESCOFFIER DEAD? REALLY DEAD?”

  In an article for New York magazine titled “ ‘La Nouvelle Cuisine’: A Skeptic’s View,” Julia mocked the exhortations of Gault and Millau: “ ‘Down with Escoffier and his dreadful heavy cooking,’ was the universal cry…It all made very good copy—something revolutionary, at last, to talk about.” But, Julia wondered, “Is it a hoax, a public relations snow job…Does a new cuisine really exist in France?…Is Escoffier dead? Really dead?”

  She didn’t buy it. “It is obvious…that the Gault-Millau publications have had a profound influence in France, since without their continual pushing of the nouvelle cuisine, I do not see how it could have been launched,” she wrote. “Now almost any restaurant of any pretensions has its little salad of green beans more or less lavishly garnished, or has copied the greats with artichoke hearts and écrivisse tails, or a mousse of sea scallops and salmon.” The drawback, as Julia saw it, was “a certain sameness of menu…that is probably inevitable since not every chef is a creator, and those who cannot create will copy those who can.”

  While the Guide Miche granted L’Auberge du Père Bise, at Talloires, three stars, GM accused the same restaurant of oversauced food and a tired menu. “Dieu! How can one refuse to experiment, to perfect, and to share with one’s clients the creative adventure?” Le Nouveau Guide sputtered. The magazine cautioned readers not to patronize Le Père Bise until the chef “understood” the nouvelle revolution. Julia considered such admonishments “browbeating” and accused GM of “threaten[ing] restaurants that they’d better conform.”

  The chefs who “understood” nouvelle cuisine, she noted, were rewarded by GM with favorable reviews. The light puff pastry with sweetbreads and wild mushrooms served by the Troisgros brothers in Roanne was lauded with red toques in Le Nouveau Guide. And so were dishes by Chef Henri Faugeron of Les Belles Gourmandes, and Michel Oliver of Le Bistrot de Paris. Describing in loving detail Chef Frédy Girardet’s salad of crayfish tails and slivers of duck liver at the Hôtel de Ville, in Crissier, Switzerland, GM awarded him four red toques and raved, “You will have one of the great meals of your life!”

  While Bocuse liked to pillory the grande cuisine for its soporific sauces, not all nouvelle chefs agreed with the Lion of Lyon. Indeed, some agreed with Paul Child’s observation that nouvelle was more an evolution rather than a revolution in French cooking. Nouvelle cuisine c
ertainly didn’t mean “down with Escoffier,” a French chef told Julia. “Where would any of us be without him?”

  V. CUISINE MINCEUR

  At least one chef managed to please everyone with his inventive cooking. In April 1977, the Guide Michelin bestowed a third star on Michel Guérard, while Le Nouveau Guide applauded him with a bouquet of red toques.

  It had been a long time coming. When Le Pot-au-Feu, his two-star restaurant in a Paris suburb, was razed to make way for a new superhighway, the five-foot three-inch Guérard sank into despair and put on twenty-six pounds. In 1974, he retreated south, to the Pyrenees mountains, where he restarted his career. At a spa owned by his wife’s family, Les Prés et les Sources d’Eugénie, Guérard banished butter, oil, cream, starches, and sugar from the kitchen. He developed new methods to cook food quickly, using its own moisture, and seasoned his dishes with wild herbs, like heather or pine needles. Cooking wines were heated to burn off the alcohol. Saltwater fish were steamed under fresh seaweed, while freshwater fish were cooked in a light vegetable sauce, and accompanied by a julienne or purée of vegetables. He called this approach cuisine minceur—the “diet of slimness,” or “slimming cooking”—and promptly shed seventeen pounds. And by all accounts the results were delicious.