Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

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Scientists in a 1960s food lab study raw
vegetable specimens.
For more on James Kraft’s invention
of processed cheese, see page
4·222. For more on Clarence
Birdseye’s innovations in freezer
technology, see page 306.
Le Guide Michelin—first published in
France by the Michelin tire company in the
1930s as a way to promote car travel—assigned
its star ratings with travel in mind:
a three-star designation means “worth a
journey,” and two stars means “worth a
detour.” The star ratings in the guide have
been the standard of career achievement
for chefs in France from the onset.
Recently, the guide has expanded to
include New York City, Tokyo, Las Vegas,
and other major cities.
But the harsh words and tactics didn’t last.
Today, France is the second most profitable
country for McDonald’s (the United States is still
first), with 1,140 restaurants. Incredibly, McDonald’s
is also the largest private-sector employer in
France. Even in the land of haute cuisine, fast food
seems to have a place.
One side effect of the industrialization of food is
that the discipline of food science was born. New
inventions in food technology have often led to
the creation of enormous corporations. James L.
Kraft developed a method for making pasteurized
processed cheese, which led in part to the launch
of Kraft Foods. Clarence Birdseye invented a way
to quickly freeze food, inspired by techniques he
gleaned on ice-fishing trips in Labrador, Canada.
As food companies grew, so did the amount of
research they put into perfecting and improving
their products.
Universities, particularly land-grant colleges
that focused on agriculture, created food-science
departments to study every aspect of the food
chain, from harvest to processing. Without the
food industry, there would have been far less
reason to apply science and technology to food.
The first part of the 20th century had a Modernist
revolution in every major cultural institution
except food. But that time period did have a food
revolution of a different kind. It occurred at the low
end of the market. This revolution wasn’t sparked
by a group of artists and intellectuals with Modernist
ideals, as it was with the Impressionist
painters or the Bauhaus architects. Instead, the
food revolution encompassed a wider cast of
characters: gas station attendants and paper-cup
salesmen who turned into fast-food magnates;
chefs who became canned-sauce icons; and
tea-shop owners who turned into supermarket
titans. This revolution utterly changed what people
in developed and industrialized nations ate.
Perhaps one of the reasons that high-end
cuisine stayed relatively constant from Escoffier
through the 1960s is that people were already
absorbing tremendous change in what they ate.
The rise of fast food, supermarkets, and industrial
food caused a revolution in people’s everyday
diets. High-end restaurant food was, comparatively,
an island of stability in what was otherwise a
storm-tossed sea of culinary change.
The Nouvelle Revolution
It is hard for us today to appreciate just how rigid
the system of Carême and Escoffier had become
by the 1950s in France. It was a highly regimented
repertoire. Chefs could, and did, invent new
dishes, but there was much reverence for the past
and its rules. Indeed, the veneration of the past
was so strong that it constrained the creativity of
chefs in the present. Who were they to challenge
the cuisine of Escoffier and Carême?
By the 1960s, a few young French chefs 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.
His 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 (see Plated Dishes, next page). All of this
experimentation stirred up controversy. By 1972,
it had a name: Nouvelle cuisine.
Early influential figures in Nouvelle cuisine
included Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and the
food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau of
Le Nouveau Guide. Gault and Millau, with their
friend André Gayot, founded the Guide in 1969 to
THE INVENTION OF
Plated Dishes
Go to any fine restaurant in the
world, and at least part of your
meal will most likely arrive as an
attractive arrangement of several
kinds of food on a single plate—
what chefs call a “plated dish.” This
approach is such a common method
of presentation, and food
pairings are now such a focus of
haute cuisine, that one might
assume that restaurants have
always served food this way. In fact,
the plated dish is a relatively recent
innovation.
In the classic cuisine formalized
by Escoffier (see Early French
Gastronomy, page 9), food was
brought to the table on serving
platters and dished onto plates
there, either by the diner (in causal
settings) or by the waiter or maître
d’hôtel (in high-end restaurants). This
approach was common in numerous
cuisines around the world. Chinese
The first plated dish was salmon in sorrel sauce.
chef and out of his or her control.
Jean-Baptiste Troisgros, who
frequently chatted with customers in
the dining room, picked up on their
desire to see some sort of “signature
from the chef” on their plates. He
encouraged his sons to start plating
food in the kitchen. Pierre and Jean
soon realized that standard plates
were too small for the artful presentations
they had in mind, so they commissioned
new plates, about 32
cm / 12½ in across, to serve as a larger
palette for their work. They first
began using these plates in 1966 for
two dishes in particular: salmon in
sorrel sauce (a signature dish of the
restaurant to this day) and beef
entrecôte.
The innovation was very well
received, according to Pierre’s son,
the celebrated chef Michel Troisgros.
“Customers liked having more space
on their plate, more room to breathe,”
food, for instance, was traditionally served in a similar manner,
with food placed on the table for people to serve themselves.
This “family-style” approach was also used to serve
Italian, German, and American food.
The French chefs Pierre and Jean Troisgros, at the urging of
their father, Jean-Baptiste, pioneered the practice of plating in
the late 1960s, becoming the first chefs in a top-quality
restaurant to embrace the new trend. At the time, the Troisgros
brothers were running the kitchen at the Hôtel Moderne
in the city of Roanne. Cooking in a style that would later be
termed Nouvelle cuisine, they emphasized high-quality
ingredients, lightness and simplicity, and creativity and selfexpression.
They felt constrained in their artistic expression, however,
because, at that time, tradition required the chef to place
each finished dish on a large platter. This was service à la
Russe, which meant the table was set with empty plates
(often with a centerpiece of fruit, flowers, or other decorative
elements), and guests were served tableside. Virtually
all aspects of the presentation happened away from the
he says. Plating dishes in the kitchen has numerous advantages.
It gives the chef more control and allows him to
prepare more complicated dishes. From a restaurateur’s
perspective, it is faster and cheaper because it allows the
restaurant to operate with a smaller waitstaff, who require
less training. The combination of aesthetic and economic
advantages rapidly made plating popular. Within a decade,
the practice had spread throughout Europe and made its
way to the United States.
In many restaurants, however, dessert is still served in the
old style. Carts displaying whole cakes and other sweets are
rolled to the table before being cut. Even elBulli had a desert
trolley until 1992 (see page 33). The cheese course is another
bastion of tradition; it, too, is often served from a cart
brought to the table.
Plated dishes can now be found in restaurants in every part
of the globe. They are so common that it seems as though
food has always been presented fully plated. But that is not
the case. The plated dish was a radical innovation, albeit one
that caught on.
24 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 25