Au Revoir to All That Read online

  While Grimod focused on the practical, Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer by training, took a philosophical approach to food and wine. The Physiology of Taste, which he published in 1825, is the most celebrated gastronomic treatise ever written. The compendious book was a meditation on fine dining, exploring how history, biology, and culture influenced how and what we ate. It was full of now-famous aphorisms (“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are”) and included a number of charmingly quirky detours, such as a look at the aphrodisiacal properties of truffles. The point of the book was to establish fine dining as a thinking man’s activity, as much a mark of cultural refinement as was a love of literature, art, and music. In one of his more sweeping pronouncements, Brillat-Savarin declared, “Animals fill themselves; people eat; the intelligent person alone knows how to eat.” With The Physiology of Taste, gastronomy was given a highbrow gloss, and gourmandism—defined by Brillat-Savarin as “the passionate, reasoned and habitual preference for objects that flatter taste”—acquired the status of a noble avocation.

  But a culture of gourmandism could not have flourished in France without the acquiescence of the church. According to Jean-Robert Pitte, there was, from the early Middle Ages on, a religious divide in France on the question of dining. On one hand, there were clerics who believed that eating and drinking well was an integral, even divinely sanctioned, part of Christian life; they didn’t live to eat, but they believed it was acceptable to find enjoyment in food. Arrayed against them were those peddling an ascetic brand of Christianity that made little distinction between the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the table. In their view, food was nothing more than a source of sustenance, and to treat it as more was indeed a sin.

  These opposing views had their decisive clash during the Protestant Reformation. French Protestants, known as Huguenots, represented the abstemious school; they decried luxury dining, denounced alcohol consumption, and otherwise tried to stamp out gourmandism. The most famous of their number was the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; he had no use even for the sense of taste and would just as soon have done without. But a majority of French preferred a sunnier Christianity, one in which the faithful could find sensual pleasure at mealtime and still have their tickets punched to the next world—and, of course, there were well-fed clerics ready to provide theological justification for having one’s cake and eating it. “Gourmandism indicates a willing resignation to the orders of the Creator who, having commanded us to eat in order to live, invites us to do so through appetite, sustains us through taste, and rewards us through pleasure,” wrote Abbot Migne in 1848.

  A century earlier, Cardinal de Bernis, Louis XV’s ambassador to the Vatican, had made the same point, albeit rather more amusingly. Asked why he used a good Meursault while saying Mass, he explained that “I would not wish my creator to see me grimace at the moment of communion.” The cardinal’s choice of a Meursault was symbolically resonant in another way: It was in the village of Meursault, early in the twelfth century, that Cistercian monks were given their first vineyard, by the Duke of Burgundy. As more vineyards came into their possession, they experimented with a number of grapes and ultimately settled on Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, which remain Burgundy’s signature varieties. In addition, the monks exhaustively studied variations in soil and exposure among the plots of land they farmed and noted differences in the character and caliber of the wines these plots yielded. In time, they expertly carved up the vineyards so as to match grapes to land. In recognizing that certain parcels produced better wines than others, the Cistercians arrived at an insight that would come to serve as the central organizing principle of French viticulture: terroir, which can be loosely translated as “location, location, location.” Not only did the ecclesiastical authorities sanction a culture of gourmandism in France; they helped foster it.

  By the 1870s, four decades after Carême’s death, his new cooking had grown old and it was felt that French cuisine needed an overhaul. It was at this moment that another transformative figure emerged. Georges Auguste Escoffier’s reputation would eventually eclipse Carême’s, and more than seventy years after his death, he remains France’s most celebrated chef. The irony is that he spent most of his career outside of France. Born in 1846 in a village near Nice, he began his culinary training at the age of thirteen, working in a restaurant owned by his uncle. While serving as chef at the Hôtel National in Lucerne, he met a young Swiss entrepreneur, César Ritz, with whom he formed a business partnership that would revolutionize not just the hotel industry, but also (again) haute cuisine.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first luxury hotels appeared in European cities. It was a period of relative calm and prosperity, and with the proliferation of rail connections on the Continent, it became easy for the affluent to travel to distant cities on business and for pleasure. Accustomed to being pampered at home, they wanted to be no less comfortable on the road, and suitably lavish hotels were established to cater to their whims. Escoffier and Ritz were at the forefront of this development. In 1890, they teamed up at the newly opened Savoy Hotel in London. Nine years later they started their own posh London property, the Carlton, where Escoffier would spend the rest of his career. The two men also collaborated on the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, which welcomed its first guests in 1898.

  Cooking for large numbers of people, most of whom now had neither the time nor the desire to spend countless hours at the table, confronted chefs with some unique challenges. It was Escoffier who updated haute cuisine to meet these demands, and in the process he radically altered its preparation and service, and the manner in which it was eaten. For one thing, he completely revamped the organization of professional kitchens. Until this point, kitchen stations essentially functioned as autonomous fiefdoms; each station was responsible for certain dishes and there was generally little interaction between stations. Whatever its virtues, this arrangement was completely unsuited to the high-volume, high-speed cooking required of hotel kitchens. Escoffier kept the stations in place, but instead of assigning them specific preparations, he divided them by specific functions. Thus, the garde-manger was responsible for cold dishes, the saucier was in charge of sauces, the rôtisseur oversaw grilling, roasting, and frying, and on down the line. Indeed, it was an assembly-line approach to cooking, in which several stations typically contributed to a dish. As Stephen Mennell observes in All Manners of Food, this emphasis on specialization and interconnectedness was a reflection of the times: Escoffier had brought the industrial revolution into the kitchen, and the function-based division of labor that he introduced has remained standard procedure.

  So, too, the changes he introduced to menus and presentation—changes that were also imposed by circumstance, as Escoffier himself acknowledged. “The complicated and sometimes heavy menus,” he wrote, “would be unwelcome to the hypercritical appetites so common nowadays; hence the need of a radical change not only in the culinary preparations themselves, but in the arrangements of the menus and the service.” Traditional French service, in which all the dishes were delivered simultaneously, had largely given way to service à la russe, in which dishes were brought to the table and consumed one at a time. Escoffier took the logical next step and organized his menus by courses: Grouped at the top were appetizers, below which were listed fish and meat dishes, which then gave way to desserts. He also invented the à la carte menu, another concession to the times: It allowed busy diners to construct meals as they wished rather than having to submit to endless banquets.

  Escoffier was not just a managerial genius; he was also a gifted and inventive cook who conceived more canonical dishes than had perhaps any chef in history. Although he bemoaned the dining public’s preoccupation with novelty and complained of the physical and mental burdens of having to satisfy its seemingly endless appetite for new taste sensations, his imagination was equal to the task. Tournedos Rossini and Peach Melba, his most famous creations, were just two of many influential preparations that em
anated from the kitchens of the Savoy and the Carlton. As Stephen Mennell notes, some of Escoffier’s signature dishes, such as Peach Melba, were truly unique; others were twists on classics; and still others were regional peasant dishes given haute-cuisine makeovers. The dishes in this last category spoke to the symbiotic relationship that now existed between haute cuisine and bourgeois fare. The former provided the latter with recipes and instruction; the latter furnished the former with talent (then, as now, top French chefs generally came from the countryside, having received their early tutelage from their mothers and grandmothers) and inspiration (the kind of inspiration that would lead Émile Jung, many years later, to create the aforementioned, marriage-challenging baeckeofe).

  Like Carême, Escoffier was anxious to simplify haute cuisine—to make preparations less complicated, to achieve greater harmony among ingredients, and to produce more subtle, elegant flavors. “Keep it simple” was his famous dictum. (Of course, in embracing Carême’s philosophy, Escoffier was also implicitly critiquing the old master’s cooking: The fare that he derided as unbearably heavy and hopelessly antiquated had its origins in Carême’s kitchen.) Escoffier built on Carême’s legacy in other ways. To Carême’s four mother sauces, for instance, he added a fifth: tomato sauce. His five-thousand-recipe doorstop, Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1903, supplanted L’Art de la cuisine française as the definitive text on French cooking and established Escoffier as the “great codifier” in the words of Julia Child. Thereafter, it was Escoffier’s cuisine that was the dominant form, a position it would retain late into the twentieth century. Even now, Le Guide Culinaire remains an indispensable reference for young chefs.

  During his career, Escoffier trained numerous chefs (and one future revolutionary: Ho Chi Minh is said to have done a pastry stage at the Carlton in 1911). Like Carême, he saw food as a means of transmitting Gallic values and influence, and the French chef as a kind of ambassador. “The art of cooking may be one of the more useful forms of diplomacy,” he wrote. “Called to every part of the world to organize the restaurant services of the most lavish hotels, I have always been careful to provide French materials, French products, and above all, French personnel. Because the development of French cooking is largely due to thousands of cooks who work in all four corners of the world. They have expatriated to make known, even in the most remote countries, French products and the art of preparing them. It is a great satisfaction for me to have contributed to this development. Throughout my entire career, I have ‘sown’ some two thousand cooks all over the world. Most of them have founded lines in these countries, and you could say that they are so many grains of wheat sown in uncultivated territories. Today, France harvests the bounty.”

  And as was true of Carême, Escoffier was convinced that France was uniquely blessed in the quality of its foodstuffs and uniquely disposed to culinary greatness. “I am often asked for reasons why French cooks are superior to those of other countries,” he wrote. “The answer, it seems to me, is simple: you only have to realize that the French soil has the privilege of producing, naturally and in abundance, the best vegetables, the best fruits, and the best wines in the world. France also possesses the finest poultry, the most tender meat, and the most delicate and varied game. Its sea coasts provide it with the most beautiful fish and crustaceans. Thus, it is completely natural for the French to become both gourmands and great cooks.” By this logic, French mastery in the kitchen wasn’t primarily a function of training or traditions; it was mainly the result of superior terroir. Those who advanced this notion were explicitly claiming that France, insofar as gastronomy was concerned, was the Chosen Land—God’s Pantry. The implications were clear: In the realm of cuisine, France had certain insurmountable advantages. This conviction fostered immense pride; later, it would encourage complacency.

  After three decades in London, Escoffier retired to Monte Carlo, where he died in 1935. By then, another revolutionary influence had arrived on the French food scene: the Michelin Guide. The tire company, founded in 1888, had begun publishing a traveler’s guide to France in 1900. In 1926, Michelin introduced its now-famous star system, awarding individual étoiles to restaurants whose food merited recommendation. In 1931, the Guide added a more complex system of ratings for food. A single star now denoted “a very good restaurant in its class”; two stars were bestowed for “excellent cooking, worth a detour”; and three stars were given to restaurants with “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

  Although Michelin’s timing was not ideal—France, like the United States, was then in the throes of the Great Depression, and another war loomed just over the horizon—the union of motoring and meals proved to be a masterstroke, not only for Michelin (the publicity generated by the Guide was a boon for tire sales) but also for French gastronomy. The advent of the automobile during the 1920s gave city dwellers easy access to the French countryside, and all the urbanites now hitting the roads needed places to eat and the skinny on the best local food. The rural hospitality industry flourished, especially along the main north-south route between Paris and the Riviera. The Guide became an invaluable resource for the just-passing-through tourist, calling his attention to the finest tables in Burgundy, Lyon, the Rhône Valley, Provence, and the Côte d’Azur.

  In 1933, Michelin awarded three stars to Fernand Point’s La Pyramide, a restaurant in the town of Vienne, south of Lyon. Point, born in 1897, was a brilliant chef, and on the back of those stars, La Pyramide became perhaps the most celebrated restaurant in French history. Joseph Wechsberg, in his classic book Blue Trout and Black Truffles, wrote of making numerous pilgrimages to Vienne “undaunted by distances, borders, and custom guards. Each meal has been a memorable event—one of those rare moments when you know that it couldn’t be any better … Point is incontestably the greatest chef on earth. His perfection, like the perfection of Toscanini, is a blend of hard thinking, much work, and a dash of genius.” Point was revered for such dishes as queues d’écrevisses en gratin, turbot au champagne, volaille de Bresse truffées en vessie, and his famous gâteau marjolaine (read it and drool: ganache, vanilla cream, and hazelnut cream set atop layers of almond meringue). He was also cherished for his hospitality, playfulness, and wit. It was Point who offered possibly the sagest advice on how to choose a restaurant: “Go to the kitchen to shake the chef’s hand. If he is thin, have second thoughts about eating there; if he is thin and sad, flee.” For the record, the six-foot four-inch Point tipped the scales at a jolly 365 pounds. It was not his corpulence, however, that earned him the nickname “Magnum”; credit for that belongs instead to the magnum of Champagne that he drank every day.

  Point, who died in 1955 at age fifty-eight (it was the girth that did him in), didn’t produce a compendious cookbook à la Carême and Escoffier; a posthumous collection of his recipes stands as his only contribution to the literature. His contribution to French cuisine’s human capital, however, remains unrivaled. In the decade between the end of the Second World War and his death, Point trained the most glittering collection of talent ever assembled at one stove, a roster that included future three-star chefs Louis Outhier, François Bise, Claude Peyrot, Jean and Pierre Troisgros (who would mentor not only Guy Savoy, but also another future three-star recipient, Bernard Loiseau), and Paul Bocuse, who came to be considered Point’s greatest student, his surrogate son, and his heir. So coveted was a spot in Point’s atelier that even the reject pile included future legends. A young Alsatian cook named André Soltner, having heard that La Pyramide was the place to work, once wrote a letter to Point requesting a job. He was turned down, and he eventually ended up migrating to New York and opening an establishment there called Lutèce, which became America’s most lauded French restaurant.

  Like all chefs of his generation, Point was strongly influenced by Escoffier, and in keeping with the prevailing style, his food was unabashedly rich (he famously said, “Butter! Give me butter! Always butter!”). However, Point departed from convention in several important w
ays. For one thing, he served rustic local specialties alongside his more elaborate, Escoffian creations. He was also fanatical about freshness, which might sound unremarkable now but was a major innovation at the time. In the 1930s, top restaurants generally didn’t change their menus to reflect what was available in the market, nor did they hesitate to serve dishes that had been prepared the day before. Point would have none of that; he did much of his own shopping, bought whatever looked best and adjusted his menu accordingly, and insisted on making everything from scratch each morning. This emphasis on freshness would later serve as the cornerstone of the nouvelle cuisine revolution, which was led by some of La Pyramide’s most famous alumni.

  Aux Armes, Cuisiniers!

  FROM PHOTOS, I KNEW that the exterior of Paul Bocuse’s eponymous restaurant in the village of Collonges au Mont d’Or, near Lyon, was painted in flamboyant shades of red, yellow, and orange and that it was adorned with decals of roosters, cakes, and roast chickens. But seeing it for the first time in person, on a sunny November morning in 2006, I decided it wasn’t quite as hideous as the pictures had led me to believe; it just looked like a particularly colorful music box. Nor, contrary to my expectations, was the restaurant purely a monument to Bocuse. The courtyard was enclosed by a long wall decorated with murals of Antoine Carême, Fernand Point, the Troisgros brothers, and—funnily enough—Julia Child.