Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  Nothing in the cultural sphere was spared—not even food. The cultural extended into the kitchens of France, and it wasn’t just haute cuisine that was in trouble. France had two hundred thousand cafés in 1960; by 2008, it was down to forty thousand, and hundreds, maybe thousands were being lost every year. Bistros and brasseries were also dying at an alarming clip. Prized cheeses were going extinct because there was no one with the knowledge or desire to continue making them; even Camembert, France’s most celebrated cheese, was now threatened. The country’s wine industry was in a cataclysmic state: Declining sales had left thousands of producers facing financial ruin. Destitute vintners were turning to violence to draw attention to their plight; others had committed suicide. Many blamed foreign competition for their woes, but there was a bigger problem closer to home: Per capita wine consumption in France had dropped by an astonishing 50 percent since the late 1960s and was continuing to tumble.

  This wasn’t the only way in which the French seemed to be turning their backs on the country’s rich culinary heritage. Aspiring chefs were no longer required to know how to truss chickens, open oysters, or whip up a béarnaise sauce in order to earn the Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle; instead, they were being tested on their ability to use processed, powdered, frozen, and prepared foods. France still had its outdoor markets, but hypermarchés—sprawling supermarkets—accounted for 75 percent of all retail food sales. Most ominously, the bedrock of French cuisine—home cooking, or la cuisine familiale—was in trouble. The French were doing less cooking than ever at home and spending less time at the dinner table: The average meal in France now sped by in thirty-eight minutes, down from eighty-eight minutes a quarter-century earlier. One organization, at least, stood ready to help the French avoid the kitchen and scarf their food: McDonald’s. By 2007, the chain had more than a thousand restaurants in France and was the country’s largest private-sector employer. France, in turn, had become its second-most-profitable market in the world.

  Food had always been a tool of French statecraft; now, though, it was a source of French humiliation. In July 2005, it was reported that French president Jacques Chirac, criticizing the British during a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, had harrumphed, “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.” In the not-so-distant past, Chirac, simply by virtue of being France’s president, would have been seen as eminently qualified to pass judgment on another country’s cuisine—and, of course, in disparaging British cooking, he merely would have been stating the obvious. Coming in the summer of 2005, Chirac’s comment revealed him to be a man divorced from reality. Was he not aware that London was now a great food city? Just four months earlier, Gourmet magazine had declared London to be “the best place to eat in the world right now” and devoted an entire issue to its gustatory pleasures. As the ridicule rained down on Chirac, his faux pas assumed metaphoric significance: Where once the mere mention of food by a French leader would have elicited thoughts of Gallic refinement and achievement, its invocation now served to underscore the depths of France’s decline. They’ve even lost their edge in the kitchen.

  French cooking had certainly lost its power to seduce. Several days after Chirac’s gibe made headlines, members of the International Olympic Committee, despite having been wined and dined for months by French officials, selected London over Paris as host city for the 2012 Summer Games—fish and chips over foie gras.

  There were other indignities, less noted but no less telling. In October 2006, New York’s French Culinary Institute marked the opening of its new International Culinary Center with a two-day extravaganza featuring panel discussions, cooking demonstrations, and gala meals. The FCI was one of America’s foremost cooking schools, but it was also a wellspring of French cultural influence—a culinary consulate of sorts. Its faculty included Jacques Pépin, André Soltner, and Alain Sailhac, three expatriated French chefs who had helped unleash America’s food revolution. To assure a suitably splashy debut for its new facilities, the FCI brought ten eminent foreign chefs to New York. Amazingly, though, the list was headed not by a Frenchman but by three Spaniards: Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak, and Martín Berasategui. Not only that: the other seven chefs were Spanish, too. The French Culinary Institute threw itself a party and didn’t invite a single chef from France.

  All this was a reflection of what was happening in France. Twenty-five years earlier, it had been virtually impossible to eat poorly there; now, in some towns and villages, it was a struggle to find even a decent loaf of bread. The France memorialized by writers like M. F. K. Fisher, Joseph Wechsberg, Waverley Root, and A. J. Liebling; that inspired the careers of Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Elizabeth David; that promised gustatory delight along every boulevard and byway—that France, it seemed, was dying. Even those epiphanic vegetables were harder to come by. When Waters started regularly visiting France, she would smuggle tomato vine cuttings home to California; now, she smuggled vine cuttings to her friends in France.

  It saddened me to see this way of eating, and being, disappearing. In France, I didn’t just learn how to dine; I learned how to live. It was where my wife and I had fallen in love, a bond formed over plates of choucroute, platters of oysters, and bowls of fraises des bois (Ladurée pastries, too). When we began traveling to France as a married couple, great meals there weren’t just occasions for pleasure; they were a way of reaffirming our vows. The calendar indicates that our children couldn’t have been conceived in France, but from the moment they were able to eat solid foods, they were immersed in our Francophilia. They became acquainted with crème caramel before they ever knew what a Pop-Tart was. But it now appeared that the France I grew up knowing would no longer be there for them.

  Were the French really willing to let their culinary tradition just wither away? Did they no longer care to be the world’s gastronomic beacon? What did eminent French chefs and restaurateurs such as Alain Ducasse and Jean-Claude Vrinat have to say about all this? And what of the almighty Michelin Guide, long a symbol of Gallic supremacy in matters of food and wine—was it still a force for good in French kitchens, or had it become a drag on progress? Even as France’s culinary influence was waning, the country continued to churn out talented young chefs; what did they think needed to be done to get French cooking out of its slump? As signs of France’s decline continued to accumulate, these and other questions began to weigh on me, and I eventually decided to seek some answers.

  A Potted History of French Cuisine

  IN EARLY MARCH 2007, on a day when spring’s imminent arrival could be felt in the breeze and in the jauntier pace of the sidewalks, I interviewed Guy Savoy at his eponymous Paris restaurant just off the Avenue de Wagram, one of the big boulevards jutting out like spokes from the Arc de Triomphe. Five years earlier, Savoy had earned a third Michelin star, after inexplicably having been denied a promotion for nearly two decades. In the opinion of many seasoned eaters, Michelin’s failure to award its highest rating to the very gifted Savoy had been a travesty, among the worst injustices ever perpetrated by a guide that could be as cruel as it was powerful. Now that the prize was his, the fifty-three-year-old Savoy seemed determined to cash in on long-delayed opportunities. He already operated several very successful bistros in Paris, but now he was moving farther afield. In 2006, he had opened an opulent restaurant at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and restaurants in Moscow, Dubai, and even Kiev were apparently in the works. Following in the path of Paul Bocuse and other three-star chefs, Savoy was turning himself into an international brand, a chef d’entreprise rather than a chef de cuisine. He was in effect hanging a sign in his own kitchen with a message reading: “My work here is done.”

  In light of this, I figured I’d hear a lot of talk about business, perhaps some bravado and bluster, too (the home page of Savoy’s Web site included the extravagant claim, “When art is on the menu”), but probably not much about food. Short and roundish, with a wispy salt- and-pepper beard, dark, bushy eyebrows,
and a receding thatch of gray hair. Savoy turned out to be quite a bit more charming than I’d anticipated, and more reflective than many of the chefs that I’d met. Indeed, he was an excellent interlocutor, offering detailed, considered answers to almost every question I posed. Even so, the conversation kept drifting back to the commercial side of haute cuisine—the expense of running a restaurant in France, the globalization of the culinary profession, the free-spending clients in Vegas. It was all very interesting, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the heart of a chef—of a chef de cuisine—still beat within.

  In one last bid to steer the discussion toward the business of actually cooking, I mentioned the apprenticeship Savoy had done with the brothers Pierre and Jean Troisgros at their three-star restaurant in the city of Roanne. I commented that training with such legendary figures must have been magical. Savoy nodded his head vigorously and said that it had indeed been so. Here, I expected him to recall a moment of culinary genius he’d witnessed or a nugget of wisdom that Pierre or Jean had imparted one afternoon over coffee and a smoke. Instead, though, he told me that the real magic of Troisgros had lain in the ordinary, the routine—in the quotidian act of taking impeccable ingredients and swiftly, respectfully turning them into food of the most glorious quality. In Savoy’s account, this was not merely cooking; it was a ritual suffused with beauty and spirituality. Consider, he said, a freshly caught turbot that has just arrived in the kitchen. “It is a fat, perfect turbot—magnificent to look at, to smell, to touch. It is maybe twenty or thirty years old, with a story of its own. In a matter of minutes, we entirely change its story. We cut it, we season it, we cook it; we instantly turn something that was completely primordial into something refined and sensual; a thing of pleasure. This transformation—for me, that was the magic.”

  With that pithy but gorgeously evocative description of a fish’s last day, Savoy didn’t just answer my doubts about his cardiovascular system; he managed to capture the singular genius of French cuisine. It wasn’t just the way the French prepared food that set them apart from the rest of humanity; it was the way they thought and talked about food. More than any other nation, the French elevated cooking to a creative art and eating to an exalted hobby. In their hands, food became a source of gratification, a noble calling, a subject of impassioned debate, a means to political power, and a point of national pride. In time, they taught much of the world how to cook and eat, and the triumph of French cuisine became arguably the most benevolent example of imperialism the world has ever known—an imperialist tradition Savoy was now helping to perpetuate. As I sat there looking at this acclaimed chef, swooning not over something he’d sautéed but something he’d said, I asked myself: How did these people get to be so good at food?

  It is a question that scholars have been chewing over—often quite literally—for decades now. For a long time, it was believed that the French owed their mastery of food and wine to the Italians, and specifically the Florentine chefs whom Catherine de Médicis, homesick for her native fare, took with her to France when she married Henri II in 1533. But the prevailing wisdom now is that the Italian connection has been exaggerated. The late French philosopher Jean-François Revel called it “le fantôme des Médicis”; his research found that the Italians did nothing more than add a little refinement to the pre-existing court fare, a claim seconded by others who have investigated the matter. The consensus is that a distinctive, modern French cuisine mainly took shape on its own. Le Cuisinier François, a cookbook published in 1651 by Burgundian chef François Pierre de La Varenne, is widely credited with being the first literary work to demonstrate “a clear break with medieval food and the recognizable beginning of the modern French cuisine,” as Stephen Mennell puts it in his excellent book All Manners of Food.

  La Varenne was part of a group of talented chefs who transformed French cuisine—which is to say, French court cuisine—during the seventeenth century. They cut back on exotic spices, long a hallmark of aristocratic fare, in favor of domestic herbs and seasonings, such as thyme, parsley, and shallots. During this period, butter became a staple of French sauces, along with meat and pan juices and the combination of fat and flour. Le Cuisinier François included a recipe for bouillon, from which the base sauces of French cuisine would later emerge, and recipes for such future classics as boeuf à la mode and asparagus with sauce hollandaise. The cuisine that emerged during this period wasn’t just a uniquely French one; as Jean-Robert Pitte notes in his book French Gastronomy, it was also a triumph of northern France over southern—“of the Capetians, of dairy breeding and dairy products over the south.”

  By the sixteenth century, the Bourbon dynasty was ruling France, and several of the kings were world-class trenchermen, none more so than Louis XIV, who ascended the throne in 1643 and remained there until his death in 1715. In keeping with tradition, the Sun King usually dined by himself at Versailles, surrounded by scores of courtiers (more than three hundred people were involved in preparing and serving his food). The big extravaganza was his midday meal, which might consist of a soup and an appetizer, followed by multiple chickens, turkeys, partridges, pigeons, capons, and meats, all washed down by bowls of fruit and dried preserves. It was during Louis XIV’s reign that France became Europe’s leading power—military, diplomatic, and cultural. The European upper classes adopted French as their preferred language, while French art, literature, architecture, and scholarship set the standards of excellence. Thanks in no small part to his majesty’s prodigious appetite, this influence extended to the dinner table, and French cuisine came to be acknowledged as the continent’s finest.

  With the French Revolution (1789–1799) and the fall of the ancien régime, many chefs found themselves out of work, and of necessity they began catering to the general public by opening restaurants, which proliferated in Paris in the wake of the political and social upheaval. The same period saw the emergence of France’s first truly major chef and the first codifier of French cuisine: Marie-Antoine Carême, known as the cook of kings and the king of cooks. Born in 1783 and trained as a pâtissier, Carême defied the prevailing trend and spent his career working exclusively for wealthy patrons. He cooked for the famed diplomat Talleyrand, and he later did stints in London, as chef for the Prince Regent, and in Saint Petersburg, where he fed Tsar Alexander I.

  But though employed as a private chef, Carême, possessed of uncommon talent, ambition, and ego, aspired to both modernize and popularize haute cuisine. In the kitchen, his chief aim was to simplify food: He emphasized the use of seasonal ingredients, continued the trend started by La Varenne and his peers of substituting fresh herbs for aggressive spices, and produced lighter sauces intended to complement meats rather than overwhelm them. It was in the realm of sauces that he left his most enduring mark. Sauce-making was already seen as the essential art of French cooking, but it was very much a free-form art, with few if any organizing principles. Carême devised a classification of sauces, breaking them up into four broad categories, each based on a so-called mother sauce: allemande (egg yolks and lemon juice), béchamel (flour and milk), espagnole (meat stock, brown roux, and mirepoix), and velouté (light fish or meat stock and a white roux). These four sauces were not only the foundation of all other sauces, but of modern French cuisine.

  Carême died at the age of forty-eight; the poet Laurent Tailhade would later write that he had been felled “by the flame of his genius and the charcoal of the roasting ovens.” (In death as in life, he was a trailblazer: the twentieth century would see several leading French chefs die young, done in by the strain.) But he left behind an enormous body of work, not least his magnum opus, L’Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle. Published in five volumes between 1833 and 1847, it is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive cookbooks ever written, consisting of hundreds of recipes. Within each section of the work, there was a linear progression, each recipe building on the ones that preceded it and setting the table for those that followed. When one thinks of French cuisine,
one thinks of order—orderly kitchens, dining rooms, and meals. It was Carême, more than anyone else, who imposed this order.

  Carême also invested French cuisine with a powerful chauvinism. His writings were unabashedly nationalistic manifestos that, collectively, amounted to a cultural imperialist’s call to arms. Carême believed that French cuisine was superior to all others and didn’t hesitate to say so. “O France! My beautiful homeland,” he wrote. “You alone unite in your breast the delights of gastronomy.” And it wasn’t just that French cuisine was better; Carême bluntly asserted that dishes invented elsewhere were inevitably made better by French chefs. His cookbooks contained recipes for a handful of foreign sauces and soups, all of which were given Gallic makeovers and emerged so vastly improved, in Carême’s judgment, that they were no longer foreign and had effectively become French.

  Carême’s literary efforts put him at the vanguard of another important development: food as intellectual fodder. Indeed, his career intersected with those of Jean-Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin and Alexandre Grimod de la Reynière, men of aristocratic backgrounds for whom dining was as much a cerebral pursuit as a restorative one. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson observes in Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, more than any recipe or chef, it was the gastronomic discourse fostered by the writings of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod that cemented “the iconic status of the culinary in French culture.”

  Born in Paris in 1758, Grimod was the world’s first food critic. From 1803 to 1812, Grimod published an annual dining guide called L’Almanach des Gourmands. It proved immensely popular; so much so that in 1806, he started a monthly gastronomic newsletter, Journal des Gourmands and des Belles, which also attracted a wide audience. A man whose sensibilities were firmly anchored in the pre-Bastille era, Grimod intuited that new money loved nothing more than to parade as old money, and he transmitted “the good taste of the defunct regime” to “the nouveaux riches of the Directory, the parvenus of the Consultat, and the arrivistes of the Empire,” as French historian Pascal Ory dryly puts it. In both L’Almanach and a later book he authored, Manuel des amphitryons, Grimod instructed his bourgeois readers in the art of the table—in things like organizing menus, arranging place settings, and carving meats. In offering such guidance, he was both democratizing haute cuisine and ensuring that this particular vestige of the royal court survived the revolution.