Nouvelle Cuisine History
Nouvelle cuisine, ( French: “new cuisine”) eclectic style in international cuisine,
originating in France during
the 1960s and ’70s, that stressed freshness, lightness, and clarity of flavour
and inspired new movements in world cuisine. In reaction to some of the richer
and more-calorie-laden extravagances of classic French grande cuisine,
nouvelle cuisine sought to emphasize the natural flavours, textures, and
colours of foodstuffs. Citing the unhealthiness of a diet heavy in fats, sugars, refined starches, and salt, it
minimized the use of those ingredients. Nouvelle cuisine was also influenced by
the Japanese style of food presentation.
Origins And Tenets
In the early 21st century, it was
difficult to appreciate just how rigid the grande cuisine system of French
chefs Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier had
become by the mid-20th century. It was a highly regimented repertoire. Chefs
could, and did, invent new dishes, but there was much reverence for the past
and its rules for and techniques of food preparation. Indeed, the veneration of
the past was so strong that younger chefs began to feel that their creativity
was constrained.
By
the 1960s a few young French chefs had started to take issue with the system.
Many of them had trained with Fernand Point, a brilliant chef whose career
began in the age of Escoffier but then took a different turn. Point developed
his own experimental cuisine, anticipating the changes that his protégés would
perfect. Ultimately, his role as a mentor for the next generation of chefs was
more important than his own direct contributions.
Point’s former students began to
experiment and abandon tradition, creating lighter menus, introducing lower-fat sauces and
vegetable purees, borrowing ingredients from non-French cuisines, and plating
dishes in the kitchen instead of at the table. Although those changes were
controversial, by 1972 the innovationshad
been christened nouvelle cuisine.
In
1973 Gault published “
The Ten Commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine,” giving the movement a set of precepts that helped nouvelle cuisine reach a wider audience. The 10 commandments were:
1.
Thou
shalt not overcook.
2.
Thou
shalt use fresh, quality products.
3.
Thou
shalt lighten thy menu.
4.
Thou
shalt not be systematically modernist.
5.
Thou
shalt nevertheless seek out what the new techniques can bring you.
6.
Thou
shalt avoid pickles, cured game meats, fermented foods, etc.
7.
Thou
shalt eliminate rich sauces.
8.
Thou
shalt not ignore dietetics.
9.
Thou
shalt not doctor up thy presentations.
10.
Thou
shalt be inventive.
Critics
Many of the chefs championed by Gault
and Millau quickly garnered respect and Michelin stars, but the new style drew
fire from established French food critics, particularly La Reynière (also known
as Robert Courtine), the prominent critic at the well-respected Paris daily
newspaper Le Monde.
Nouvelle cuisine was seen as a threat to French tradition and was often
attacked on nationalist grounds. Senderens said that in 1978, when he
introduced soy sauce into his cooking after a trip to China, “a food
critic ripped me to shreds.” In 1979 sociologist Claude Fischler wrote an
article for Le Monde titled “The Socrates of the Nouvelle Cuisine,
” in which he
subtly mocked the movement’s emphasis on letting ingredients express their true
flavours:
In the United States one of nouvelle cuisine’s chief critics was celebrity
chef Julia Child, author of the best-selling Mastering the Art of French
Cooking (1961) . Child saw the new movement as an affront to
the logic and grandeur of French haute cuisine. She particularly disliked the
nouvelle cuisine penchant for serving barely cooked meat and vegetables, which
she believed did not properly develop the “essential taste” of the ingredients.
She also accused Gault and Millau of “pushing the Nouvelle cuisine
relentlessly” to the point of “browbeating” restaurants that did not embrace a
nouvelle cuisine ethos.
Other American gastronomes shared
Child’s wariness of the new movement. As renowned San Francisco cooking teacher
Jack Lirio quipped to Newsweek in
1975, “Without butter, cream, and foie gras, what’s left of French cooking?”
Impact
Despite such criticism, the nouvelle
movement took hold of the culinary landscape in France and spurred new trends
in world cuisine. The extent of nouvelle cuisine’s impact is evident in a
longitudinal study that followed roughly 600 elite French chefs (those with one
or more Michelin stars) from 1970 through 1997. Northwestern University sociologist
Hayagreeva Rao and his colleagues analyzed each chef’s top three signature
dishes and found that, in 1970, 36 percent of the chefs had just one
nouvelle-cuisine signature dish and 48 percent had none. By 1997 only 6 percent
had none, and 70 percent were predominantly nouvelle cuisine (with two or more
signature dishes in the nouvelle style). The study, published in 2003,
concluded that nouvelle cuisine was a true social movement,
not a mere culinary trend.
Nouvelle
cuisine was clearly a successful revolution; it succeeded so well that by the
early 21st century French cuisine was largely seen through its lens. High-end
chefs made great dishes born in the prenouvelle years, but usually that work
was a self-conscious throwback to an earlier age. Many long-cherished aspects
of Escoffier’s grande cuisine, such as sauces made with meat extracts and
thickened with flour-based roux, were discarded outright.
The nouvelle movement
also fundamentally changed restaurants. Escoffier had championed service à
la Francaise, in which empty plates were set before each diner and
waiters served and carved food at the table. Nouvelle cuisine featured plated
dishes, assembled in the kitchen by chefs. The waiter simply set the prepared
plate in front of the diner.
Yet in another sense, nouvelle cuisine
was a rather limited revolution, because it was all about techniques and
ingredients. The famous 10 principles of nouvelle cuisine championed by Gault
and Millau all had to do with rather technical aspects of cooking—important to
chefs and food critics who had been steeped in the traditions of la
grande cuisine—that seemed quite ordinary in the 21st century.
High-end food was, ultimately, still high-end food, just with a slightly
different set of techniques.
Outside France, nouvelle cuisine had
an enormous impact in some places and barely any in others, depending on the
country and its local gastronomic culture. In the United States, nouvelle cuisine
was deeply influential, helping to inspire “New American” cuisine. American
chefs borrowed techniques from nouvelle cuisine, but more important than any
single technique or principle was the idea of revolution itself. American chefs
had not been steeped in la grande cuisine,
so instead they rebelled against mass-produced uninspired food. Those chefs,
including the likes of Alice Waters and Charlie Trotter,
created a distinctive New American cuisine based on regional ingredients and
food traditions but with a clear nod to nouvelle techniques.
The same effect occurred in the United Kingdom,
where a generation of “New British” chefs emerged, adamant that British food was not
synonymous with bad food. Chefs such as Nico Ladenis, Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay,
and Fergus Henderson took principles of nouvelle cuisine and applied them in
their own characteristic ways. With the help of a number of French
expatriates—such as Albert and Michel Roux, Raymond Blanc, and Pierre
Koffmann—those chefs took French nouvelle cuisine directly to British diners.
As in the United States, that helped lead a movement toward higher-quality food
and dining.
In Spain, the effect
of nouvelle cuisine was much more limited. It was clearly an inspiration for
Spanish Basque chef
Juan Mari Arzak, who created his own distinctive style that would later inspire
other Spanish chefs. But throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Spanish food was
largely unaffected by the developments in France.
Italy had even less of a reaction to the nouvelle
revolution. In part, that was so because Italian cuisine had always been highly
regional and did not have centralized standards. There was no set of oppressive
grande cuisine rules to rebel against.
Legacy: New
International And Fusion Cuisines
Over time, successive generations of
nouvelle chefs carried forward the torch of culinary innovation, but in
an evolutionary rather than revolutionary fashion. In part, that is because
nouvelle cuisine carved out some notion of independence for the chef. Whereas
Escoffier (and Carême before him) had explicitly sought to establish rules and
conventions, nouvelle cuisine gave more leeway to the individual chef, so over
time there were fewer strictures to rebel against. For example, Joël Robuchon,
named “chef of the century” by Gault and Millau in 1989, was known for
relentless perfectionism. His cuisine was nouvelle in the sense that it
followed the 10 commandments, but at the same time it was clearly his own. Much
the same could be said of Frédy Girardet, a self-taught Swiss master chef who
was often listed as the best chef in the world. He too was clearly staying
inside the boundaries of nouvelle cuisine but developing a unique repertoire.
What
started as nouvelle cuisine has become one branch of what is called “New
International” cuisine. Around the world, one can find national cuisines that
were clearly inspired by the nouvelle movement, borrowing both cooking
techniques and the general attitude of rebellion. That trend includes various
innovative approaches to Asian cooking, or so-called fusion cuisine, which
melds Asian spices and techniques within a Western nouvelle-inspired backdrop.
New and exotic ingredients have
thereby found their way onto menus. Wagyu (well-massaged) beef and fish such as
hamachi and toro (tuna belly) have always been found in Japanese restaurants,
but in the 21st century they also can be found on the menu at a New
International restaurant nearly anywhere in the world. Similarly, ostensibly
Japanese restaurants now incorporate their own take on foie gras,
jalapeño peppers, and
other completely non-Japanese ingredients—yet another sign of the lingering
influence of the nouvelle revolution.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/nouvelle-cuisine
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