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Julia Child’s book brought French cuisine
to the United States. It both led to a shift
in American home cooking and paved the
way for French restaurants in the U.S. Her
love of French food was traditional; she
disliked Nouvelle cuisine and spoke out
against it.
In the United States, the leading restaurant
guide is the Zagat Survey. Unlike the
Michelin guide or Gault Millau, Zagat’s
results are based on voting by the public.
Many consumers view the guide as being
far more accurate and reliable than the
others.
protest the Michelin guide, which they criticized
as “a stubborn bastion of conservatism” that
ignored “the new generation of French chefs who
had guts.” The inaugural issue of Le Nouveau
Guide featured a cover story on Bocuse, Guérard,
Louis Outhier, Alain Senderens, and 44 other
chefs under the headline “Michelin: Don’t Forget
These 48 Stars!” In 1973, Gault published “The
Ten Commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine” (see
next page), giving the movement a name and
essentially launching a publicity campaign that
helped Nouvelle cuisine reach a wider audience.
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
(a.k.a. Robert Courtine), the prominent critic at
Le Monde. Nouvelle cuisine was seen as a threat
to French tradition and was often attacked on
nationalist grounds. Senderens says 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, the 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 flavors: “The artist
in this field is no longer characterized by his
overpowering authority, but rather by the opinionated
modesty of an exponent of the maieutic
art: In place of the cook as mercenary of the
kitchen stove, we now have the Socratic cook,
midwife at the birth of culinary truth.”
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. Child saw the new movement as an
affront to the logic and grandeur of French
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 didn’t 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?”
Despite this criticism, the movement took hold
of the culinary landscape in France and around
the world in the 1970s, and it continued to shape
French cuisine for many years thereafter. 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
colleagues analyzed each chef’s top three signature
dishes and found that in 1970, 36% of the
chefs had just one Nouvelle-cuisine signature
dishwhich, in many cases, was a copy of Troisgros’s
famous salmon in sorrel sauce (see The First
Plated Dish, previous page)and 48% had none.
By 1997, only 6% had none, and 70% were predominantly
Nouvelle cuisine (with two or more
signature dishes in the Nouvelle style). The study,
published in 2003, concluded that this was a true
social movement, not a mere culinary trend.
Nouvelle cuisine was a successful revolution; it
succeeded so well that today we view French
cuisine through its lens. High-end chefs still make
great dishes of the pre-Nouvelle years, but usually
as a self-conscious throwback to a lost age.
The first wave of Nouvelle cuisine represented a
real revolution, analogous in some ways to Impressionism
in its rebellion against the establishment
and the attendant controversy. Many long-cherished
aspects of Escoffier’s grande cuisine, such as
sauces made with meat extracts and thickened with
flour-based roux, were discarded.
The system of the restaurant changed as well.
Escoffier had championed service à la Française, 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. All the waiter did was
set the 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 ten
principles of Nouvelle cuisine championed by
Gault and Millau (enumerated on the next page) all
have to do with rather technical aspects of cooking.
They were a big deal to chefs and food critics,
who were steeped in the traditions of la grande
cuisine, but they seem quite ordinary to us today.
High-end food was, ultimately, still high-end food,
just with a slightly different set of techniques.
As Nouvelle cuisine won the battle for the
hearts and minds of both chefs and diners, the
revolution matured into a new culinary establishment.
Successive generations of chefs carried
forward the torch of culinary innovation, but in an
evolutionary rather than a revolutionary fashion.
In part, that is because Nouvelle cuisine carved
out some notion of independence for the chef.
Escoffier (and Carême before him) had explicitly
sought to establish rules and conventions. Nouvelle
cuisine gave more leeway to the individual
chef, so there seemed to be little incentive to rebel.
As young chefs rose to prominence, they
extended the range of Nouvelle cuisine, although
at that point it was no longer new. Joël Robuchon,
named “chef of the century” by Gault Millau in
1989, was known for relentless perfectionism. His
cuisine was Nouvelle in the sense that it followed
the ten commandments, but at the same time it
was clearly his own. Much the same could be said
of Frédy Girardet, the self-taught Swiss master
chef who was often listed as the best chef in the
world. Again, he was clearly staying inside the
boundaries of Nouvelle cuisine but developing a
unique repertoire.
Within the movement, some chefs were known
for tending toward more unusual and daring foods
and combinations. Michel Bras, Pierre Gagnaire,
and Marc Veyrat took their own paths, each
fiercely original and extremely inventive. Yet none
of these chefs has been described as being outside
the mainstream, and all were lauded by both the
Michelin and Gault Millau guides.
Outside of France, Nouvelle cuisine sometimes
had an enormous impact and other times had
barely any, depending on the country and its local
gastronomic culture. In the United States, Nouvelle
cuisine was deeply influential, helping to
inspire “New American” cuisine (see next page).
American chefs borrowed techniques from
Nouvelle cuisine, but more important than any
single technique or principle was the idea of
revolution itself. American chefs weren’t steeped
in la grande cuisine; instead, they rebelled against
the doldrums of mass-produced, uninspired
American food. These chefs created a distinctive
New American cuisine based on regional ingredients
and food traditions, but with a clear nod to
Nouvelle techniques.
T HE HISTORY O F
The Ten Commandments
of Nouvelle Cuisine
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the French culinary world was
radically altered by the advent of Nouvelle cuisine (see Early French
Gastronomy, page 9). In 1973, food critic Henri Gault published “The
Ten Commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine,” an article defining the
principles of the new culinary movement he saw taking place in
France. These commandments were as follows:
1. Tu ne cuiras pas trop. (Thou shalt not overcook.)
2. Tu utiliseras des produits frais et de qualité. (Thou shalt use fresh,
quality products.)
3. Tu allégeras ta carte. (Thou shalt lighten thy menu.)
4. Tu ne seras pas systématiquement moderniste. (Thou shalt not be
systematically modernistic.)
5. Tu rechercheras cependant ce que t’apportes les nouvelles
techniques. (Thou shalt nevertheless seek out what the new
techniques can bring you.)
6. Tu éviteras marinades, faisandages, fermentations, etc. (Thou shalt
avoid pickles, cured game meats, fermented foods, etc.)
7. Tu élimineras les sauces riches. (Thou shalt eliminate rich sauces.)
8. Tu n’ignoreras pas la diététique. (Thou shalt not ignore dietetics.)
9. Tu ne truqueras pas tes présentations. (Thou shalt not doctor up
thy presentations.)
10. Tu seras inventif. (Thou shalt be inventive.)
Commandment four (thou shalt not be systematically modernistic) is
of particular interest in the context of what happened next: the Modernist
revolution in cuisine. The Nouvelle cuisine movement, from the
very onset, was trying to be new without going all out for Modernism.
26 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 27