Abe Rosenthal would have been proud of my ability to multitask. I will never forget the day I’d complained to him about being overworked and not being able to get going on long-range, non-deadline pieces.
“When I was a correspondent in India,” he said, “I bought a notebook. Every time I heard something interesting, I’d start a new page about that subject in my notebook. When I learned something else about it, I’d add that to the appropriate page. Eventually, when enough material had accumulated on a page, I’d write an article. By the time my stint in India came to an end, I had ninety-three active pages in that notebook.”
The thought of that notebook made me ill, but the lesson sank in. If he could turn his life into a journalism-generating machine, just by keeping track of it, so could I. The key for me, since I didn’t have the constantly gaping maw of a newspaper waiting for my articles, was to arrange a set of reliable outlets in the form of regular columns. At the peak of my seven years of freelancing, which lasted until 1981, I was writing four monthly columns, with a book project simmering away on the side. The first of these, my novel Native Intelligence, was sold to Harper & Row in 1974, just as I was embarking on my new life of self-employment.
With that book off my desk, but still in the center of thinking about where my real future might lie—could I hope to write more fiction? was the rest of my ceaseless “typing” just piecework to support my new role as a literary artist?—I turned with reluctance to grinding through the intricate recipe testing and historical research for the book on classic French sauces I’d naively signed up to do for Knopf while still feeling buoyant and invincible in my catbird seat at the Times.
I’d been attracted to the project because it was a very good idea. I’d seen that the most elaborate and formal part of haute cuisine was organized into families of sauces based on a small number of highly refined and versatile basic, or mother, sauces from which the others derived. In a three-star kitchen, a saucier and his team would produce these intense essences, laboriously, day after day. Their rich tastes then gave the sauces derived from them a glorious profundity, which was one of the main things that separated a grande luxe establishment from a bistro. Bistros also offered diners tasty sauces, but nothing like what bathed the food at one of Michelin’s three-star temples.
So the great sauces had always been beyond the reach of even most professionals in perfectly respectable French restaurant kitchens. It took an American amateur to see that those ethereal mother sauces (and all their progeny) could actually be made with relative ease by any home cook. Yes, a mother sauce was a big job, but once you had it, you could just freeze it in small quantities and melt it down at leisure. Voilà!
I thought the book would set me up as an expert on the most rarefied corner of French cooking. As Simone Beck, one of Julia Child’s French collaborators on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, said later, no one, not even in France, had written anything like it. No one would be able to challenge my credentials in the kitchen ever after. Besides, I would be embarking on a great adventure, skimming my stockpot until its contents reduced to liquid gold. I would be democratizing the last bastion of professional cooking, and I could serve delicious three-star meals at home as easily as broiling a steak.
But now that contract hung over me, eating up my time, forcing me to spend money I didn’t have on luxury ingredients for testing fancy classic recipes. I also had to buy the basic tools for making sauce bases in quantity, including an eighty-quart cast-aluminum stockpot, a butcher’s cleaver and a fine-mesh chinois strainer.
I needed them in order to produce an industrial quantity of demi-glace, the sauce mère, or mother sauce, which is the basis of all the other brown sauces in the traditional French repertoire. There is also a mother white sauce and a mother fish sauce, but demi-glace is the Everest of the mother sauces. It keeps the cook at the stove for many hours, skimming and watching it reduce to a fraction of its original volume. So the efficient method was to produce demi-glace in the largest possible quantity feasible by a single person in a home kitchen.
In traditional French haute cuisine restaurants, where this mother system evolved in the eighteenth century, larger staffs working for coolie wages could be deployed on such tasks. Antonin Carême, the most important chef of the early nineteenth century, perfected the original system in the kitchens of George IV, Talleyrand, Czar Alexander I and James de Rothschild, with huge staffs and princely budgets. Now home cooks could play his game, because they had freezer compartments.
My idea was to match up the assembly-line efficiency of the old sauce system with the preservation magic of the deep freeze. The recipe I developed for brown sauce stretched over six pages in twenty-six terse steps and required the better part of two days to complete. But once she had it, the home cook could blithely pour its five quarts of liquid mahogany into ice cube pans, freeze them and, the next morning, pop the cubes into plastic bags and keep them frozen in modular quantity, ready to be melted down almost instantaneously and then beefed up swiftly with other ingredients to make a classic sauce such as a bordelaise (demi-glace enhanced with a red-wine reduction and cubes of poached marrow).
Except for the ice cube stage, this was exactly how Carême and his culinary progeny operated. In The Saucier’s Apprentice, I gave directions for twenty-five brown sauces, following recipes for their most unremittingly orthodox versions in the Larousse gastronomique. These “small or compound” brown sauces fitted neatly into a family tree, ranging from africaine to poivrade, plus two game sauces descended from sauce poivrade, which constituted a third generation, demi-glace’s grandchildren. Similar families of plain, chicken and fish veloutés gave up their secrets in similar genealogies, as did the béchamels and the emulsified sauces, hollandaise and its cousins, the béarnaise group and the mayonnaise clan.
In this heady company, a sauce duxelles, sounding like the everyday mushroom mixture, and sauce bigarade, in name the orange sauce that has congealed around ten thousand bistro ducks, were elevated into the glistening and deep-voiced “gravies” that convert routine food ideas into great dishes in the classic style. Demi-glace was the reason.
To make it, I started with thirteen pounds of beef shin and thirteen pounds of veal shank on bones cut in three-inch lengths by a successfully cajoled butcher. But it was my job to strip the meat off the bones and cut it into two-inch cubes, which were strenuously browned in step 9. As for the bones, I put on goggles, stood the bones on end on a board, split them with a heavy cleaver and then splintered them further to offer the largest possible surface area for browning in the oven and for the subsequent extraction of their flavor during many hours of simmering in my very large pot.
It was large enough to hold a small child and straddled all four burners of my ancient gas range. When fully loaded with bones and meat and water, it could not be lifted. This pot took forty-five minutes to come to a boil. The heat it gave off blistered the Formica of the stovetop’s backsplash.
While I waited, I picked bone splinters out of my clothes, and hoped I’d be done with this mess of a project before I went broke. I’d agreed to a mingy advance (half of which I wouldn’t see until I handed in the finished manuscript) when I was earning a good wage at the Times and figured I could afford to do something I really wanted to do, for the joy of it. Now the joy part was muffled by night after night of testing elaborate dishes I’d picked from classic sources to go with the sauces.
The chapter on fish sauces was the roughest patch. For the mother fish sauce, I called a retailer in the old Fulton Fish Market and ordered twenty-five pounds of heads and bones.
“Are you a mink breeder?” he asked.
It sounded like a better career path than the one I’d taken. My sons have not forgotten those weeks of fish dinners, night after night.
The Saucier’s Apprentice has never gone out of print, since 1976. The twentieth printing came in the mail in 2011. Students in professional cooking schools get it assigned for class. To me, it means more now
as an early example of my future as a food historian. In addition to the utterly orthodox sauce recipes, the book starts with a historiographical essay on the French cookbook legacy, and it is filled with lovingly gathered tidbits from the food scene of the Parisian Gilded Age. I even invented a period dish to go with sauce bordelaise, because the obvious choice from the classic repertoire, tournedos Rossini, required fresh foie gras, which was then unavailable in the United States.
Since the composer Rossini may have actually invented the dish, I thought I could appropriately name my filet mignon recipe after another luminary of his world. Tournedos Rachel honors the great French actress, born Elisa Felix (1820–1858), by garnishing the steak with artichoke bottoms and marrow instead of the foie gras and the unaffordable black truffles of the original.*
So some of the recipes in The Saucier’s Apprentice were original, but even they were modest variations on haute cuisine standards, and the core of the book, the sauce recipes themselves, were as traditional as I could make them.
Ironically, I was devoting myself in Brooklyn in 1974 to a primer for the most conservative and elite possible form of French cooking, whereas in France, young chefs were turning their backs on Escoffier, and I had been the first English-speaking journalist to herald their revolution in 1972. But I had signed my contract before I’d encountered the nouvelle cuisine in France. So I soldiered on. Moreover, I believed that it was simply too early for an outsider to be writing about the radical upheaval going on in France. The burgeoning practical food historian in me was confident of the need for an analytical, reliable account of the central dogma of haute cuisine, its sauces.
It turned out to be laughable that I was worried about being overtaken by history. The original breakthroughs in French kitchens around 1970 did eventually spread around the world and provoke similar reforms and deconstructions of traditional cuisines, from Peru to the Philippines. Certainly, by the 1990s, the revolution I happened on chez Bocuse and Guérard had so completely prevailed that the term “nouvelle cuisine,” coined by its first and foremost promoters, Henri Gault and Christian Millau, in their influential French restaurant guide, had acquired a period patina.
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.
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