The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Perhaps, Julia added, Rosalynn Carter would “do something about improving it.”

  Julia had been impressed by the “deep-South flavor” of a meal the Carters had served visiting members of Congress in Georgia—fried chicken, country ham, baked cheese grits, candied apples, turnip greens, corn bread, and biscuits. “That sounds mighty good to me,” Julia wrote, “I am all for trotting out American regional cooking for official visitors.”

  Though she questioned the practicality of cooking fried chicken for 150 people at a formal White House event, and wondered if serving peanut soup would be considered a conflict of interest for the Carters (a peanut-farming family), she encouraged the First Lady to look deeply into her larder and consider its symbolic importance—and her role in emphasizing “the good in American cooking.”

  Sensing that authentic “down-home” cooking “just has to be born and bred into one,” Julia encouraged Mrs. Carter to fly her cook from Plains, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., to bring the “authentic deep-South flavor” to her banquets. And she should fly in chefs from other regions, as well, Julia suggested. “We most certainly must act to preserve our culinary heritages, and what better way to encourage them than at the White House.”

  In France, the press reports the menu of virtually every official function, from a sparsely attended book award held at a country inn to a crowded state dinner at the Élysée Palace. The practice emphasizes the importance of food, and, Julia noted, “we should certainly do likewise.

  “Whatever our new First Lady does to make White House entertaining more American, let her vigorously publicize it. The good news about good food at the White House should be trumpeted far and wide.”

  9

  The New French Revolution

  I. “ADVENTURES IN EATING ARE IN”

  After the bicentennial celebration of July 1976, Julia Child once again found herself at the top of her game but drifting in professional limbo. While The French Chef continued to play in reruns, she told journalists that she was swearing off TV: “It’s gotten much more expensive to do, and it involves a 12-hour day and a 7-day week, and we’ve had it,” she said.

  Julia loved television, and never shied from hard work, but she simply needed a break. She was about to turn sixty-four. She worried about Paul’s health. And after the flurry of sometimes frustrating activity over the past two years, she wanted to spend some quiet time at home with him, tinkering at the stove, reading books, and writing letters. It was time to recharge her batteries. But just as she declared “No More Books!” after nearly every volume, so this would prove a temporary hiatus from television.

  While she enjoyed the domestic nurse role at first, it grew predictably tedious, and Julia became restless and unhappy. To ease the strain, she hired her old friend Liz Bishop (the Boston cook who had assisted on the From Julia Child’s Kitchen book tour) to help clean the house, discard old clothes and books, and pack box after box of Julia’s letters to and from the likes of Simca, M. F. K. Fisher, and Judith Jones. “I am not sentimental,” Julia liked to say, though she was a pack rat who kept nearly every letter, date book, receipt, expired passport, driver’s license, and scribbled note she’d ever had. Once the clutter was exhumed and neatly boxed, Julia was happy to donate the lot to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.

  Julia was nearing her wit’s end at 103 Irving Street when an unlikely savior appeared: McCall’s. Back in the spring of 1970, Julia had resented the magazine for bullying her into posing for Arnold Newman, and Simca’s teary recriminations had hastened the end of their collaboration. But the magazine had bent over backward to smooth things over: the three-part series about Julia and Simca cooking in France helped promote Volume II, and the magazine arranged for Julia to record her impressions of the bicentennial bash at the White House. Now, McCall’s was offering Julia a monthly food column. It was tempting. The magazine had a circulation of several million readers every month, was offering her a creative outlet, a way to generate income and keep her name in the public eye, and would be a welcome distraction from the home front.

  Not one to harbor grudges Julia gladly accepted the assignment. As it happened, she reentered the media stream just as America’s interest in food and dining was reaching critical mass.

  —

  BY THE MID-SEVENTIES, the food business, and food journalism, were experiencing a renaissance. A Newsweek story hollered that “adventures in eating are in.” Kitchenware stores offered vegetable steamers, earthenware roasters, casseroles, whisks, spoons, spatulas, and carbon-steel knives. Between 1970 and 1975, Crate & Barrel tripled its revenue and couldn’t keep up with the demand for Cuisinarts, crepe pans, and porcelain mortars and pestles. “Americans,” observed Gordon Segal, the chain’s owner, “are showing an increased seriousness about food.”

  Across the country, markets carried previously unheard-of specialties, such as escargots, pâtés, and Reblochon cheese. Restaurants served giant snails from Normandy steamed in Pernod, or smoked haddock mousse topped with caviar on a nest of fresh dill. Knowledgeable patrons felt empowered to tell the waiter what was in a sauce, and some knew “more about wine than we do,” admitted a French chef.

  Chinese food was all the rage, and in New York, Shun Lee Palace employed master chefs versed in Peking, Hunan, and Szechuan cuisines. Novelty eateries appeared in former bank vaults, railroad cars, or abandoned warehouses. La Potagerie in New York and Stone Soup in San Francisco served only soup; The Brewery in Chicago served only salad; Dante’s Down the Hatch in Atlanta specialized in fondue. And regional American cookery was having a moment: in Kansas City, for instance, The American restaurant served Minnesota turkey, Montana elk, and Columbia River salmon.

  Enrollment at cooking schools like the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) spiked. “There is a growing appreciation for the dining experience as an art form,” said Henry Ogden Barbour, president of the CIA. “And besides, you can get a job. There were 3.5 job offers for every graduate.”

  In a parallel movement, Americans became increasingly focused on health. We grew enamored of marathon running, bottled waters like Perrier, vegetarianism, and the calorie calculations of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution. In revising The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, food editor Zoe Coulson said, “We really noticed the changes in eating habits. Too many recipes asked for heavy cream or oil.”

  In response to these converging trends, newspaper editors and food magazines scrambled to meet the demand for restaurant news, information about food, and stories about chefs. Gourmet had been founded in 1941, and Bon Appétit first appeared in 1956 (well before Julia brought her signature sign-off, “Bon appétit!,” to television in 1963), but in the seventies, the category blossomed. In 1978, the Batterberry family, with funding from Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, published Food & Wine. They witnessed “a big changeover at the moment we founded” the magazine, from a time when “it was ‘the little wife in the kitchen’ to a period in which more men developed an interest in cooking,” recalled a spokesperson. Cook’s magazine, edited by Christopher Kimball, first appeared in 1980: after selling the magazine to Condé Nast, he launched Cook’s Illustrated in 1993, and built a mini food-media empire of his own.

  Julia was surprised and delighted by Americans’ surging interest in food. “There are now so many people in this country, teaching and writing, who have had wonderful training such as working in restaurants in France, taking courses at Lenotre, etc. I can’t pretend to keep up with them,” Julia wrote to Louisette Bertholle. “It is amazing what a revolution in cooking has taken place in this country—I wonder if young people in France are that much interested? Or as expert? It has perhaps not yet happened there as it has here.”

  It was against this backdrop that one of the most hyped, confusing, and impactful food trends to hit the United States in years arrived from France: la nouvelle cuisine, or “the new cooking.” Rooted in French culinary experiments of the 1950s and ’60s, nouvelle jumped the pond to America in the
early 1970s, where it led to simultaneous cries of delight and gnashing of teeth.

  More of a philosophy than a strictly defined regime, nouvelle cuisine was difficult to codify. It was “a bit like pornography…people knew it when they saw it,” one wag observed. In essence, nouvelle was a style of cooking that emphasized fresh seasonal ingredients, personal creativity, healthfulness, and artistic presentation. It inspired American chefs such as Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, and Larry Forgione. Craig Claiborne lauded nouvelle as “the greatest innovation in the world of food since the food processor.”

  Thanks to chefs like Paul Bocuse, and food journalists like André Gayot, who popularized and promoted the “culinary French Revolution,” nouvelle cuisine revolutionized traditional butter and flour–reliant French cooking. Then it had a similar impact in America, where the reverberations of the movement are still felt today. Yet nouvelle was controversial. Julia dove into the fray, enthusiastically questioning whether the new cuisine was as “revolutionary” or as “healthy” as its promoters claimed.

  The fight over nouvelle energized Julia, and ushered in a remarkable period in which she engaged American pop culture as never before. In the latter half of the seventies, Julia became more outspoken, used sharper humor, and was willing to use her bully pulpit to promote her agenda in new, sometimes disconcerting ways.

  “The older we get,” she declared in 1976, “the more American we get.”

  II. DOWN WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED, UP WITH THE NEW

  In order to understand Julia’s resistance to nouvelle cuisine, it helps to look back at where nouvelle cuisine came from and why it caught on. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the master chef Auguste Escoffier created la grande cuisine, a luxurious style of cooking based on high-quality ingredients and made possible by a wealthy clientele. Escoffier concocted extravagant dinners of ten or more courses for kings, emperors, and czars across Europe. The menu of a 1903 state dinner in Paris, for instance, included: crème Windsor, oxtail soup, crayfish Nantua, salmon trout with morels, baron of lamb, grouse in sherry, duckling, sherbet, fowl, foie gras, salad, asparagus, peas, tarts, ice cream, and fruit, accompanied by wines at least twenty-five years old.

  But la grande cuisine was ill suited to the twentieth century. By the early 1970s, the world was grappling with the effects of war, recession, social and political turmoil, the OPEC oil embargo, and jet and space travel. In France, young chefs turned away from Escoffier’s excess to focus on nouvelle cuisine’s seasonal ingredients prepared in a simple, straightforward way. In America, meanwhile, the public had discovered “natural” foods, meaning healthful dishes with fewer calories and more nutrition at a reasonable cost.

  The term “nouvelle cuisine” was coined by the French food critic Henri Gault in 1972, but the movement began with Fernand Point, the three-star chef at La Pyramide, in Vienne, in the 1950s. Trained to cook à l’Escoffier, Point grew bored with the classics and began to tinker with them. Vowing to “protect the integrity of the raw product,” he emphasized simple, fresh ingredients and elemental techniques. One of his sous-chefs, Paul Bocuse, embraced this approach and took it several steps further after Point’s death in 1955.

  Bocuse was raised in Lyon—which many aficionados believe is the true culinary capital of France, rather than Paris—on regional specialties such as rabbit stew, pork sausages, tripe, and offal. During the Second World War, he dropped out of school to work in the canteen of a Vichy youth camp, learned to butcher calves and pigs procured on the black market (“excellent training,” he’d say), and joined the Free French against the Nazis. After the war he apprenticed under Point at La Pyramide, and admired him for being “a little mean” in the kitchen, a practice Bocuse was proud to continue.

  By 1962, Bocuse had opened his own restaurant and was awarded two Michelin stars. His career as a classical chef took off, but, inspired by Point, Bocuse began to innovate. He drastically cut the use of butter and intensified the taste of fresh ingredients. He seared fish quickly and served it “pink at the bone.” He flash-cooked green beans, to preserve their crunchiness because he liked the taste. He abstained from using flour in sauces and substituted crushed tomatoes as a binding agent. (Bocuse wasn’t always so abstemious: he had a weakness for foie gras, and one of his best-known dishes was Loup de Mer en Croûte, the sea bass in a buttery brioche crust that Julia, Simca, and Patricia Simon feasted on in 1969.) “A chef, even a bad one, can never go wrong if he has good raw materials,” he said. “The point is to render unto a chicken that which is its due, and nothing more.”

  Bocuse’s approach was deemed heretical by traditionalists, but the public gobbled up his creations and demanded more. By the early seventies, he was a culinary superstar, as adept at publicity stunts as he was at creating signature dishes, like his famous truffle soup or chicken cooked in a pig’s bladder. He called himself “the Lion of Lyon,” erected a gigantic “Paul Bocuse” sign atop his restaurant in Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or, cooked for President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration.

  Jean Didier, of the Guide Kléber, wrote: “If Point was God, Bocuse is his prophet.” The prophet and his colleagues were labeled la Bande à Bocuse (Bocuse’s gang), and included Roger Vergé, of the Moulin de Mougins; the Troisgros brothers; Alain Chapel of Chez la Mère Charles; Paul and Jean-Pierre Haeberlin of Auberge de l’Ill; Jean Delaveyne of Le Camélia; Louis Outhier of L’Oasis; and Michel Guérard of Les Prés d’Eugénie.

  “It is a cuisine of friendship,” Bocuse said of nouvelle. “In my father’s day, the chef was a slave. He lived in a stinking hot kitchen underground. He never saw customers. He became a cretin. And, invariably, he began to drink.”

  In contrast, the “nouvellers” shared recipes, socialized with their guests, and proselytized their new cooking at every opportunity. And, importantly, they were comfortable with journalists and worked hand in glove with a brash new group of media entrepreneurs.

  —

  IN MARCH 1969, André Gayot founded Le Nouveau Guide, a monthly magazine devoted to a “new era” of food and wine in France, with Gault and his colleague Christian Millau. They believed that “an evolution seemed necessary” in French cooking.

  At the time, every top restaurant served virtually identical menus of Escoffier’s coq au vin, sole dieppoise, and homard cardinal, while the Guide Michelin awarded the same restaurants three stars year after year. This irked younger chefs, who felt the game was rigged against them. “The profession was contained within the yoke of rules established more than a century ago and nobody thus far had dared to question it,” Gayot wrote. In response, the Nouveau Guide championed unacknowledged chefs and risky, creative cooking. In the magazine’s first issue, the editors wrote:

  Down with the old-fashioned picture of the typical bon vivant, that puffy personage with his napkin tucked under his chin, his lips dripping veal stock, béchamel sauce, and vol-au-vent financière. Singer of mighty drinking songs, pincher of pretty party girls, festooned with medals and knighted by every wine and food society in Christendom, it is his very image we want to wipe from memory.

  Up with the new French cuisine. It is bursting with health, good sense, and good taste!…No more of those terrible brown sauces and white sauces, those espagnoles, those Périgueux with truffles, those béchamels and Mornays that have assassinated as many livers as they have covered indifferent foods. Down with meat glaze! Down with veal stock, and down with red wine, Madeira, pig’s blood, roux, gelatin, and flour in all sauces, and with cheese and starches. They are forbidden! The New Wave should have essences of fresh fish and game, along with lemons, truffles, fresh herbs, and clear sauces that marry with their foods, that exalt them, that sing, that leave the spirit clear and the stomach light.

  The nouvelle cuisiniers were inspired by the French New Wave in cinema. After the “spring fever” of 1968, when massive protests essentially shut France down, “les copains”—a group of avant-garde filmmakers led b
y Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, and Alain Resnais—shook up the movie industry with fiery articles in their journal, Cahiers du Cinéma. They advocated replacing conventional equipment and narratives with lighter, handheld cameras and inventive free-flowing films that expressed a “more truthful reality.” The movement, known as la nouvelle vague (the new wave), changed French cinema and had an impact on moviemaking around the world. Similarly, the Nouveau Guide advocated for simpler, more creative and naturalistic foods presented on elegantly composed plates.

  To these firebrands, the Guide Michelin—the annual, red-covered guide to Europe’s best-known hotels and restaurants published by the Michelin tire company—was public enemy number one. The “Guide Miche” is a highly regarded, if occasionally capricious, arbiter of taste. The Guide’s anonymous reviewers have tremendous power to make or break careers, and have at times been accused of cronyism, lax standards, or, as The Guardian put it, of being “a tool of Gallic cultural imperialism.” (The three-star chef Bernard Loiseau, of La Côte d’Or, committed suicide in 2003, when it was hinted he would lose a Michelin star. It was later revealed that he was distraught about mounting debts, and the restaurant did not lose a star.)

  The cover of Le Nouveau Guide’s first issue proclaimed, “Michelin: Don’t forget these 48 stars!” It was a challenge, or plea, for the public to pay attention to forty-eight accomplished but relatively unknown chefs that the editors considered rising stars.

  To counter the mandarins of the Guide Miche, Gault and Millau published their own directory, Guide de la France, known as “GaultMillau,” or simply “GM.” While Michelin awarded chefs one to three stars and black toques (a chef’s hat symbol), GM used one to four bright red toques, plus a numerical rating from 1 to 20. And while the Guide Miche simply listed a starred restaurant and three of its culinary specialties, the Guide de la France included lengthy descriptions of décor, atmosphere, wines, and foods in its listings. Rarely did the two guides agree. In 1973, Michelin anointed the celebrated Parisian restaurant Taillevent with three stars, while GM rated it 17/20 (very good)—meaning, Julia wrote, that “it is clearly too old-fashioned for the tastes” of the nouvellers.