The French Chef in America Page 22

  “I don’t want to make dieting a punishment,” said Guérard. Cuisine minceur “will never replace” the refined, traditional cuisine of Escoffier, Guérard vowed. “That would be awful.”

  Simca was impressed. While she “scorned” most of the “debased” nouvelle cuisiniers, she applauded “the inventive, creative spirit of our great chefs…After all, who wants to eat a coq au vin that always tastes the same?” After dining chez Guérard, she wrote: “He is the only one who really did invent a whole new way of cooking…All of his sauces are miraculously light and harmonious, even the ones made with zero-percent fat, low-cal fresh cheese. I growl at foolish women who try to diet for no special health reasons but just want to look like fashion models. But Guérard’s diet ideas convert to truly acceptable, well-balanced, and delicious food.”

  Julia initially expressed doubts about his approach: “I don’t think people are really going to want to go out to an expensive French restaurant to eat puréed carrots,” she told The New York Times. But she later revised her opinion, writing that Guérard’s cuisine minceur was “obviously…a really original style of cookery, a calorie-counting haute cuisine [that was] his alone.”

  Notably, Guérard served two different menus at his spa: a classical, Escoffier-style cuisine gourmande, and his own, groundbreaking cuisine minceur. It was his “continual inventiveness in every realm” that really impressed Julia. In Guérard’s kitchen, at least, the two cuisines were not mutually exclusive, but coexisted harmoniously, commenting on and playing off of each other.

  VI. “A REFRESHMENT OF TRADITIONAL FRENCH COOKING”

  Julia made and revised her position on nouvelle cuisine several times. When the trend first arrived in America, she vociferously rejected nouvelle’s “bouillon-cube”–thin sauces in favor of what she considered properly cooked green beans (with butter), perfectly cooked fish (with cream), and rich brown sauces (with plenty of flour, wine, and butter) à l’Escoffier. Yet, even as she pleaded for authenticity in French kitchens, Julia was moving away from the classics in her own cooking, as evinced by the transnational recipes she included in From Julia Child’s Kitchen in 1975.

  This contradictory message was no doubt perplexing to her fans (at least those paying close attention), though in typical fashion Julia didn’t dwell on it. She seemed to draw a distinction between what the French were, or “should be,” doing, and what was happening on her own stove and in kitchens across America. It took some time for Julia to reconcile this disconnect.

  By 1977, it was clear that nouvelle was no mere flash in the pan, and that for Julia to understand its appeal, and adapt to it, she would have to go to the source. She had occasionally sampled new-style dishes, but had yet to undertake a serious tasting tour of nouvelle restaurants in France. In June, Paul and Julia did just that. They spent a week in Paris, followed by a long weekend at Guérard’s spa in the Pyrenees, and ended with a tour through nouvelle restaurants in Provence. At the end of the trip, Julia asked herself: “What is this nouvelle cuisine, really?”

  Her answer was equivocal. While she remained unconvinced that the new cooking was truly new or especially healthful she decided that the movement itself was promising. She liked the young cooks’ sociability, creativity, and public appeal. She enjoyed their use of gelatinous stocks, or stocks thickened with cornstarch or rice, their focus on fresh ingredients, and their inventive compositions. Best of all to her mind, the nouvellers had excited the public about food, enticed them into restaurants, and inspired people to shop and eat.

  Yet the Childs had also witnessed the dark side of the revolution. One day Julia lunched at an (unnamed) restaurant that had recently lost one of its two Michelin stars. The owner had suffered a nervous breakdown and had just emerged from the clinic. He was heartbroken and had no idea why his food had been demoted by “them,” the anonymous inspectors from the Guide Miche. In desperation, he had turned away from classical cuisine and attempted a nouvelle menu. Julia ordered his magret de canard, a braised duck napped in brown sauce. But the sauce tasted “for all the world like liquefied bouillon cubes,” she judged, “utterly drowning the flavor of that magret.”

  After tasting the hits of nouvelle cuisine—dainty salads, fish poached with a julienne of vegetables and truffles in a white wine sauce, duck with green peppercorns—Julia found herself hungry for “the sanity” of old-fashioned, Escoffier-style brown sauces. She dreamed of a satisfyingly classic bistro meal—oeufs en gelée flanked by thick slices of pâté maison; a blanquette de veau à l’ancienne with new peas; a fresh green salad with a chapon of garlic toast; a cheese course featuring a thick, blue-veined wedge of Roquefort and a rich Camembert; for dessert, a fresh strawberry tart with a crisp, buttery crust and a sturdy dollop of cream, followed by a dense café filtre and a tot of Calvados. That, as far as she was concerned, was a real meal.

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the nouvelle cuisine. I love it! We need it!” she wrote in New York in 1977. “It’s a shot in the arm to good cookery. But please, let’s not throw out the comfortable old glories.”

  In a 1984 interview with Stars and Stripes, Julia modulated her criticism further: “When we were [in France] a long time ago you couldn’t change anything at all. It was just absolutely rigid, too traditional. But I also think that more natural food is going to come back again…People are much more conscious of calories now…Nouvelle cuisine has been needed.”

  To her mind, then, nouvelle was a necessary development and diversification: an approach to cooking that would not supplant classical grande cuisine, but one that would complement and push it in new directions. Nouvelle, Julia concluded, was “a refreshment of traditional French cooking.”

  VII. “ORGANIC, CHAOTIC, AND UNSTOPPABLE”

  Nouvelle cooking landed in New York in 1971 and quickly spread across the country, mutating in wonderfully unpredictable ways. With its year-round bounty and a sunny emphasis on wellness, California was a natural place for nouvelle to take root and flourish.

  At Chez Panisse, which opened in Berkeley in 1971, Alice Waters—inspired by rustic country restaurants in the South of France—and colleagues such as Jeremiah Tower and Mark Miller embraced food that was fresh, light, beautiful to look at, and composed of new ingredients or combinations of flavors. Waters’s acolytes helped to spread the gospel across the country. Miller left Chez Panisse to open Coyote Café in Santa Fe, where he became a star of southwestern cooking. Jonathan Waxman worked at “Chez” and, with Michael McCarty—who had trained in France in the 1970s—applied the fresh-and-light ethos to Michael’s, the famed in spot in Santa Monica. In New York, Waxman cooked California cuisine at Jams.

  In Los Angeles, Wolfgang Puck, the Austrian-born, French-trained chef, brought “modern French cooking for the American kitchen” (the title of his 1981 cookbook) to Ma Maison. In the 1990s, he popularized California-style pizzas—topped with nontraditional ingredients, such as goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, or smoked salmon—at Spago. Today, Puck is a ubiquitous celebrity chef and TV actor, and his Wolfgang Puck Companies run more than twenty restaurants, and catering and merchandise businesses across the country.

  When Michel Guérard helped to open Regine’s nightclub in New York, in 1976, the American chefs Larry Forgione and Michael Romano worked under him, and later opened their own restaurants—Forgione’s An American Place, and Romano’s Union Square Cafe—in the city. Charlie Trotter trained in the United States and Europe, and opened his eponymous restaurant in Chicago in 1987, won two Michelin stars, and promoted a healthier menu.

  These chefs and legions of others were inspired to make “edible art” that promoted their American roots. Their kitchens filled with plastic squeeze bottles used to paint slashes, smears, and squiggles of multicolored sauces. They made culinary puns, layering grilled vegetables into savory “napoleons,” or adapting the classic navarin of mutton into lobster navarin. They served their creations on large white plates, as the Troisgros brothers did. And they created a new kind
of menu with long, evocative explanations of their food. As the New American chefs pushed gustatory boundaries, magazines ran colorful, stylized photographs of gorgeous plates and wrote about traditional recipes “with a twist”—substituting cilantro for tarragon in béarnaise sauce, for instance, a simple trick that had never been used before the arrival of nouvelle. Inspired, home cooks demanded the ingredients used by their culinary heroes—arugula, flavored olive oils, Cajun spices, Mexican chiles, Japanese wasabi—from specialty food stores.

  Today nouvelle cuisine and its American cousins have been so thoroughly subsumed into our daily eating habits that they have become invisible. But this is not surprising, and has been the fate of most immigrant traditions in the New World. Much as English, Dutch, and German recipes were adapted to American ingredients by the colonists of “Thirteen Feasts,” nouvelle cuisine techniques were adapted by the Californian and New American chefs in the seventies and eighties. With a premium on creativity, freshness, and healthfulness, the new cooking enlarged people’s idea of what great food can be. For chefs, it was liberating; for investors, it was remunerative; for food purveyors and home cooks, it was inspiring; for diners, it was satisfying.

  “What that movement left was a feeling to pursue our goals without the pressure of conforming,” said the chef Larry Forgione. “A sense of freedom was felt by every culinary artist throughout the world. That is why nouvelle cuisine should be recognized as one of the most powerful culinary movements of our time.”

  In 2013, Christopher Kimball, then host of America’s Test Kitchen and editor of Cook’s Illustrated, appraised the gastronomic uprising of the 1970s: “A by-the-book American revolution, the culinary shift to come bubbled up without guidance or permission from established authorities. It was, and still is, organic, chaotic, and unstoppable.”

  10

  A Go-To Cultural Figure

  I. JACQUES AND THE CLAM STRIPS

  It’s not very tender,” Julia says reprovingly, as she munches a bit of the spinach that Jacques Pépin is sautéing in a pan.

  “It’s not?” Pépin replies with amused Gallic incredulity.

  “It tastes okay,” she continues. “I like that old-fashioned way of boiling it and squeezing it. You get it tender, and you don’t get that slight bitterness to it…But, you can do it either way.”

  “I mean, I tend to do it this way,” Pépin replies, with a hint of defensiveness, as he briskly mounds the cooked spinach into cleaned artichoke hearts. “With less loss of nutrients—”

  “We don’t care about nutrients!” Julia interrupts.

  “We don’t care about nutrients, okay…,” he mumbles.

  “We care about taste!”

  “Yes,” Pépin says with infinite patience. “But when we can have both, together—you know?”

  “It’s still a little…it’s not very tender,” Julia says. “It still has a slight bitterness to it.”

  Pépin tastes the spinach for himself, gives the camera an imploring glance, and defends his technique. “It is very tender!”

  “Ha-ha.” Julia laughs, and slips in the last word. “Well, maybe you have sharper teeth than I do!”

  This scene was typical of Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home, the popular PBS series that debuted in 1999. By then, Child and Pépin had been honing their he-said, she-said act for years in live performances across the country. Their genial sparring was as educational as it was amusing, and it made for great television.

  Jacques first met Julia in New York in 1961 when they were both unknowns. He was fresh off the boat after cooking for President Charles de Gaulle. She was in Manhattan with Simca and Judith Jones, promoting the just-published Mastering the Art of French Cooking. They spoke about food in French that night, and began a conversation that would last until the end of her life. “It always felt completely natural between us,” Pépin recalled, whether “at home, in front of a live audience, or on television.”

  He was born in a small town near Lyon, and learned to cook at his mother’s restaurant, Le Pélican, before moving to the Plaza Athénée in Paris, cooking for the French secretary of the treasury, and then for President de Gaulle at the Élysée Palace. In August 1959, when Pépin was twenty-four years old, he sailed from France to Quebec City aboard the converted troopship Ascania, and took a train to New York City in search of a new life. Arriving in Manhattan with just a few words of English and hardly any money, Pépin discovered that a promised job had disappeared. Within days, he found his way to Le Pavillon, Henri Soulé’s shrine to gastronomy on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street. There, he met Chef Pierre Franey, who hired Pépin “on the spot,” Pépin recalled. “Number one, because I was French; and number two, because I was a chef.” Franey had arrived in New York in 1939 to cook at the French pavilion at the World’s Fair, and stayed. Pépin and Franey hit it off and began to cook up a storm.

  So successful were they that in 1960 the two Frenchmen were poached from Soulé’s haute cuisine restaurant by one of his regular customers, Howard D. Johnson, who ran the eponymous restaurant and motel chain. “HoJo’s” was the largest such chain in the country; its orange roofs appeared along most American highways, and catered to the motorized masses. So why would two noted French chefs care to join such an establishment?

  Johnson had started the business in 1925 with a $2,000 loan, which he used to buy a corner pharmacy with a soda fountain in Wollaston, Massachusetts. By 1961, the company had gone public and had expanded to include 605 restaurants (265 company owned and 340 franchised) and 88 Howard Johnson motor lodges, ten Red Coach Grill restaurants, and manufacturing plants across thirty-three states and the Bahamas. Known for serving quality fried clams and twenty-eight flavors of ice cream, HoJos were distinguished by iconic turquoise cupolas topped by weather vanes in the shape of the company’s Simple Simon and the Pieman logo. By the mid-seventies, Howard Johnson’s included nearly 1,000 restaurants and more than 500 motor lodges across the United States and Canada, and had become synonymous with the American car and turnpike culture. (In 1959, Howard D. Johnson handed daily operations over to his son, Howard B. Johnson, though he kept a hand in the business until his death in 1972.)

  The HoJo’s business model relied on serving prepared food made with high-quality ingredients at countertops or in traditional dining rooms. Johnson hired Pépin and Franey to keep standards high and innovation constant. But first, he believed that his new recruits needed to learn the business of serving mass-produced food to Americans. He subjected the three-star chefs to a crash course in flipping burgers, grilling hot dogs, frying hash browns, scooping ice-cream sundaes, and baking apple pies at his restaurants around New York City.

  Pépin didn’t view his new job as a step down in culinary stature, but rather as “my most valuable apprenticeship.” He worked as a line cook at the HoJo’s on Queens Boulevard, in Rego Park, and did an even longer stint at the company’s outpost in Times Square. Franey would later gain fame as co-author with Craig Claiborne of the New York Times column “60-Minute Gourmet,” and spin-off books. He and Pépin spent a decade working for the Johnsons, pushing standards at the roadside restaurants higher and higher.

  Like crazed inventors sequestered in a remote laboratory, the chefs worked until all hours of the night at the company’s Queens Village commissary. They grew accustomed to making 250 pounds of mayonnaise in gigantic mixing machines, and cooking 3,000-gallon batches of clam chowder. They experimented with dozens of versions of beef stew and tweaked elaborate dishes, like scallops in a subtle mushroom sauce, for the HoJo’s in Des Moines, Kalamazoo, and Oklahoma City. “After working on a standard Howard Johnson’s recipe in the test kitchen, Pierre and I would prepare it in progressively larger quantities, improving its taste by cutting down on margarine and replacing it with butter, using fresh onions instead of dehydrated onions, real potatoes instead of frozen ones,” Pépin recalled. “We made fresh stock in a quantity requiring three thousand pounds of veal bones for each batch, and we daily boned a thousan
d turkeys and made ten tons of frankfurters.”

  Pépin and Franey were given carte blanche by Howard Johnson Sr., a connoisseur who often stopped by the test kitchen to debate the proper thickness of a stew, ask why they had changed the size of the chicken croquettes, or debate the merits of frozen versus fresh mushrooms in their beef Stroganoff.

  On their off-hours Pépin and Franey would go undercover to HoJos along the New England Thruway or on the New Jersey Turnpike to see how their food stood up to the rigors of roadside dining. And they especially enjoyed slipping into the Times Square restaurant, to eat fried clams washed down with “the best Manhattan cocktail in town,” which was served with a full pitcher for refills.

  When the noted Swiss pastry chef Albert Kumin joined them, the trio began producing ten tons of Danish pastries a day, and thousands of apple, cherry, blueberry, and pumpkin pies for Mr. Johnson’s empire. The three Europeans also influenced the menus at the Red Coach Grill, the Ground Round, and other restaurants owned by the company, as well as the supermarkets and schools supplied by the HoJo’s grocery operation.

  Pépin loved the work, earned a BA from Columbia University on the side, and turned native. During the sixties, he and Franey immersed themselves in American eating habits and witnessed firsthand the nation’s culinary revolution. “We were foot soldiers, not chefs working in an elitist restaurant, serving food to only a few privileged people,” Pépin wrote. “The most important thing I [learned] at HoJo’s was that Americans had extremely open palates compared to French diners. They were willing to try items that lay outside their normal range of tastes. If they liked the food, that was all that mattered. I wasn’t constantly battling ingrained prejudices as I would have been in France, where something as simple as adding carrots to boeuf bourguignon could have gotten me guillotined, not because carrots make the dish taste bad (they are great), but because it wouldn’t be the way a boeuf was supposed to be made…In the States, if it tasted good, then fine, the customer was happy. A whole new world of culinary possibilities had opened up before me.”