IS THERE A CRISIS IN FRENCH COOKING?

Nine o’clock on a Friday morning, and David Angelot, the commis at the restaurant Arpège, on the Rue de Varenne, has begun to braise tomatoes for dessert. The tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs is one of the few dishes in the Michelin red guide whose place on the menu has to be clarified with a parenthesis (dessert), indicating that though it sounds like a veggie, it eats like a sweet. It is a specialty of the kitchen of the great chef Alain Passard, which a lot of people think is the best and most poetic in Paris, and probably all France; it requires a hair-raising amount of work by the commis, the kitchen cabin boy; and many people who care about French cooking believe that it is a kind of hopeful portent—a sign that the creative superiority of French cooking may yet be extended indefinitely. Normally, a braised tomato becomes tomato sauce. (“The limitations of this insight,” one of Passard’s admirers has noted gravely, “describe the limitations of Italian cuisine.”) .To make a tomato get sweeter without falling apart not only is technically demanding but demonstrates, with a stubborn, sublime logic, an extremely abstract botanical point. Tomatoes are not vegetables; they are fruit. For David, who may not see M. Passard all day long, they are work. David, who is eighteen, and who studied cooking at a government school just outside Lyon, cuts the tomatoes open (about fifty of them, from Morocco, in the winter), scoops them out, and makes a farce, a stuffing of finely chopped orange and lemon zest, sugar, ginger, mint, pistachios, star anise, cloves; then he makes a big pot of vanilla-scented caramel and braises the stuffed tomatoes in it, beating the caramel around the tomatoes vigorously for forty-five minutes without actually touching them. The tomato is a fruit, and can be treated like one, but it helps to beat a lot of caramel into its body, to underline the point. 
While he works, he thinks about his girlfriend (who is also a cook, and with whom he lives in an apartment in north Paris), his future, and his desire to someday visit Japan. He works in a tiny basement room in the small, two-story space of the kitchen, and he shares that room with another, more experienced assistant, Guilhem, who spends his mornings making bread. (All the bread at Arpège is made by hand.) Guilhem, while he works, thinks of going back to Washington—he calls it “D.C.”—where he has been before, where there is a constant demand for good French food, and where he has an offer to work in a French bakery. If David’s job at Arpège embodies one of the principles of high French cooking—the gift of making things far more original than anyone can imagine—Guilhem’s embodies the opposite but complementary principle: the necessity of making things much better than anybody needs.
This morning, he will make three kinds of bread: a sourdough raisin-and-nut loaf; trays of beautiful long white rolls; and a rough, round peasant bread. All the bread will be sliced and placed in baskets to be presented upstairs in the dining room, and then mostly pushed around absentmindedly on the plates of people who are looking at their menus and deciding what they really want to eat. This knowledge makes Guilhem a little bitter. He thinks about D.C. In the main kitchen, a short flight up, Pascal Barbot, the sous-chef, is keeping things under control. The atmosphere there, with eleven serious short men in white uniforms going about intricate tasks in a cramped space, does not so much resemble the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie as it does the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie after it has been taken over by the Euroterrorists led by Alan Rickman: that kind of intensity, scared purposefulness, quickness, and heavy, whispered French.
The kitchen is white and silver, with a few well-scrubbed copper pots hanging high up—not like the lacquered copper you see in rusticated, beam-heavy restaurant interiors but dull and scrubbed and penny-colored. The richest colors in the kitchen are those of French produce, which is always several glazes darker than American: the birds (chickens, pigeons, quail) are yellow and veined with deep violet, instead of the American white and rose. The assistant chefs start at nine o’clock, and will remain at their stages until one o’clock the next morning. When the service begins, around twelve-thirty, they will experience an almost unendurable din, which, after a few days of work, they learn to break down into three or four distinct sounds: the thwonk of metal in water hitting the sides of a sink as a pot is washed by one of the Malinese plongeurs; the higher, harsh clank of one clean saucepan being placed on another; the surprisingly tinny, machine-gun rat-a-tat of a wire whisk in a copper pot; and the crashing, the-tent-just-fell-down-on-your-head sound of hot soiled pans being thrown down onto tile to be washed again. (In a good kitchen, the pans are constantly being recycled by the plongeurs.) The kitchen crew includes three Americans. They have worked mostly at California and New York restaurants of the kind that one of them describes as “grill-and-garnish joints.” They are all converts to Passardism. There is never anything entirely new in cooking, but Passard’s technique is not like anybody else’s. Instead of browning something over high heat in a saucepan and then roasting it in an oven, in the old French manner, or grilling it quickly over charcoal, in the new American one, Passard cooks his birds and joints sur la plaque: right on the stove, over extremely low heat in big braising pans, sometimes slow-cooking a baby gigot or a milk-fed pig in a pot for four or five hours on a bed of sweet onions and butter. “He’s just sweating those babies,” one of the Americans marvels under his breath, looking at the joints on the stoves. “Makes them cook themselves in their own fat. It’s like he does everything but make them pluck their own feathers and jump into the pan. Fucking genius.” Downstairs, another of the Americans is slicing butter and teasing Guilhem about his D.C. plans. “Look at this butter,” he says to himself. “That’s not fucking Land O’Lakes.” He turns to Guilhem. “Hey, forget about D.C.,” he says. “It’s cold. There are no women. Where you want to go is California. That’s the promised land. Man, that’s a place where you can cook and have a life.” Guilhem looks genuinely startled, and turns to speak. “You can?” he says, softly at first, and then louder, calling out to the back of the American cook as he races up the stairs with the butter pats for the dining room. “You can?”        

Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again. My first night in Paris, twenty-five years ago, I ate dinner with my enormous family in a little corner brasserie somewhere down on the unfashionable fringes of the sixteenth arrondissement. We were on the cut-rate, American-academic version of the Grand Tour, and we had been in London for the previous two days, where we had eaten steamed hamburgers and fish-and-chips in which the batter seemed to be snubbing the fish inside it as if they had never been properly introduced. On that first night in Paris, we arrived late on the train, checked in to a cheap hotel, and went to eat (party of eight—no, party of nine, one of my sisters having brought along a boyfriend), without much hope, at the restaurant at the corner, called something like Le Bar-B-Que. The prix-fixe menu was fifteen francs, about three dollars then. I ordered a salade niçoise, trout baked in foil, and a cassis sorbet. It was so much better than anything I had ever eaten that I nearly wept. (My mother, I am compelled at gunpoint to add, made food like that all the time, too, but a mother’s cooking is a current of life, not an episode of taste.) My feelings at Le Bar-B-Que were a bit like those of Stendhal, I think it was, the first time he went to a brothel: I knew that it could be done, but I didn’t know there was a place on any corner where you could walk in, pay three dollars, and get it. That first meal in Paris was for a long time one of the few completely reliable pleasures for an American in Europe. “It was the green beans,” a hardened New Yorker recalled not long ago, remembering his first meal in Paris, back in the late forties. “The green beans were like nothing I had ever known,” he went on. He sat suddenly bolt upright, his eyes alight with memory. Now, though, for the first time in several hundred years, a lot of people who live in France are worried about French cooking, and so are a lot of people who don’t. The French themselves are, or claim to be, worried mostly about the high end—the end that is crowded into the Passard kitchen—and the low end. The word crise in connection with cooking appeared in Le Monde about a year ago, with the news that a restaurant near Lyon, which had earned three Michelin stars, was about to close. Meanwhile, a number of worrying polls have suggested that the old pyramid of French food, in which the base of plain dishes shared by the population pointed upward to the higher reaches of the Grande Cuisine, is collapsing. Thirty-six percent of the French people polled in one survey thought that you make mayonnaise with whole eggs (you use only yolks), 17 percent thought that you put a travers de porc in a pot-au-feu (you use beef), and 7 percent believed that Lucas Carton, the Paris restaurant that for a century has been one of the holiest of holies of haute cuisine, is a name for badly cooked meat. More ominously, fully 71 percent of Frenchmen named the banal steak-frites as their favorite plat; only people past sixty preferred a blanquette de veau, or a gigot d’agneau, or even a pot-au-feu, all real French cooking. (The French solution to this has been, inevitably, to create a National Council of Culinary Arts, connected to the Ministry of Culture.) To an outsider, the real crise lies in the middle. That Paris first-night experience seems harder to come by. It is the unforced superiority of the cooking in the ordinary corner bistro—the prix-fixe ordinaire—that seems to be passing. This is partly a tribute to the international power of French cooking, and to the great catching-up that has been going on in the rest of the world for the past quarter century. The new visitor, trying out the trout baked in foil on his first night in Paris, will probably be comparing it with the trout baked in foil back home at, oh, Le Lac de Feu, in Cleveland—or even back home at Chez Alfie, in Leeds, or Matilda Qui Danse, in Adelaide—and the trout back home may just be better: raised wild or caught on the line. Even the cassis sorbet may not be quite as good as the kind he makes at home with his Sorbet-o-matic. The fear—first unspoken, then whispered, then cautiously enunciated, and now loudly insisted on by certain competitors—is that the muse of cooking has migrated across the ocean to a spot in Berkeley, with occasional trips to New York and, of all places, Great Britain. People in London will even tell you, flatly, that the cooking there now is the best in the world, and they will publish this thought as though it were a statement of fact, and as though the steamed hamburger and the stiff fish had been made long ago in another country. Two of the best chefs in the London cooking renaissance said to a reporter not long ago that London, along with Sydney and San Francisco, is one of the capitals of good food, and that the food in Paris—“heavy, lazy, lacking in imagination”—is now among the worst in the world. All this makes a Francophile eating in Paris feel a little like a turn-of-the-century clergyman who has just read Robert Ingersoll: you try to keep the faith, but Doubts keep creeping in. Even the most ardent Paris lover, who once blessed himself at every dinner for having escaped Schrafft’s, may now find himself—as he gazes down one more unvarying menu of boudin noir and saumon unilatéral and entrecôte bordelaise and poulet rôti, eats one more bland and buttery dish—feeling a slight pang for that Cuban-Vietnamese-California grill on Amsterdam Avenue, or wondering whether he might, just possibly, enjoy the New Sardinian Cooking, as featured that week on the cover of New York. I would still rather eat in Paris than anywhere else in the world. The best places in Paris, like the Brasserie Balzar, on the Rue des Écoles, don’t just feed you well; they make you happy in a way that no other city’s restaurants can. (The Balzar is the place that plays Gallant to the more famous Brasserie Lipp’s Goofus.) Even in a mediocre Paris restaurant, you are part of the richest commonplace civilization that has ever been created, and that extends back visibly to the previous century. In Paris, restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years, and awaken in a new generation: Lapérouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being overlooked, just come back to life, and is a good place to eat again. Reading Olivier Todd’s biography of Camus, you discover that the places where Camus went to dinner in the forties (Aux Charpentiers, Le Petit St. Benoît, Aux Assassins) are places where you can go to dinner tonight. Some of Liebling’s joints are still in business, too: the Beaux-Arts, the Pierre à la Place Gaillon, the Closerie des Lilas. These continuities suggest that a strong allegiance to the past acts as a drag on the present. But, after several months of painstaking, tie-staining research, I think that the real problem lies in the French genius for laying the intellectual foundation for a revolution that takes place somewhere else. With movies (Méliès and the Lumière brothers invented the form, and then couldn’t build the industry), with airplanes, and now even with cooking, France has again and again made the first breakthrough and then gotten stalled. All the elements of the new cooking, as it exists today in America and in London—the openness to new techniques, the suspicion of the overelaborate, the love of surprising juxtapositions—were invented in Paris long before they emigrated to London and New York and Berkeley. But in France they never coalesced into something entirely new. The Enlightenment took place here, and the Revolution worked out better somewhere else.           The early seventies, when I was first in France, were, I realize now, a kind of Indian summer of French haute cuisine, the last exhalation of a tradition that had been in place for several hundred years. The atmosphere of French cooking was everywhere in Paris then: thick smells and posted purple mimeographed menus; the sounds of cutlery on tables and the jowly look of professional eaters emerging blinking into the light at four o’clock. The standard, practical account of the superiority of French cooking was that it had been established in the sixteenth century, when Caterina de’ Medici brought Italian cooks, then the best in the world, to Paris. It was not until after the French Revolution, though, when the breakup of the great aristocratic houses sent chefs out onto the street looking for someone to feed, that the style of French cooking went public. ]

Carême

The most famous and influential figure of this period—the first great chef in European history—was Antonin Carême, who worked, by turns, for Talleyrand, the future George IV, Czar Alexander I, and the Baroness de Rothschild. He invented “presentation.” His cooking looked a lot like architecture, with the dishes fitted into vast, beautiful neoclassical structures. The unique superiority of French cooking for the next hundred years depended on the invention of the cooking associated with the name Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier’s formula for food was, in essence, the same as Jasper Johns’s formula for Dada art: take something; do something to it; then do something else to it. It was cooking that rested, above all, on the idea of the master sauce: a lump of protein was cooked in a pan, and what was left behind in the pan was “deglazed” with wine or stock, ornamented with butter or cream, and then poured back over the lump of protein. Escoffier was largely the creature of courtiers and aristocratic patrons; the great hoteliers of Europe, and particularly César Ritz, sealed in place the master-sauce approach that remains the unchallenged basis of haute cuisine. It was also an article of faith, dating, perhaps, to Alexandre Dumas père’s famous "Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine", that the cooking of Carême and Escoffier had evolved from a set of provincial folk techniques. At the heart of French food lay the pot-au-feu, the bouillon pot that every peasant wife was supposed to keep on her hearth, and into which, according to legend, she threw whatever she had, to stew for the day’s meal. French classic cooking was French provincial cooking gone to town.        
I heard another, more weirdly philosophical account of this history, from a professor named Eugenio Donato, who was the most passionately intellectual eater I have ever known. Armenian-Italian, reared in Egypt and educated in France, he spoke five languages, each with a nearly opaque Akim Tamiroff accent. (“It could have been worse,” he said to me once, expertly removing one mussel with the shell of another as we ate moules marinière somewhere on the Place de la Sorbonne. “I had a friend whose parents were ardent Esperantists. He spoke five languages, each with an impenetrable Esperanto accent.”) Eugenio was a literary critic whom we would now call a post-structuralist, though he called what he did “philosophical criticism.” Most of the time, he wandered from one American university to another—the Johnny Appleseed or Typhoid Mary of deconstruction, depending on your point of view. He had a deeply tragic personal life, though, and I think that his happiest hours were spent in Paris, eating and thinking and talking. His favorite subject was French food, and his favorite theory was that “French cooking” was foreign to France, not something that had percolated up from the old pot-au-feu but something that had been invented by fanatics at the top, as a series of powerful “metaphors”—ideas about France and Frenchness—which had then moved downward to organize the menus and, retrospectively, colonize the past. “The idea of the French chef precedes French cooking” was how he put it. Cooking for him was a form of writing—Carême and Escoffier had earned their reputations by publishing cookbooks—with literature’s ability to make something up and then pretend it had been there all along. The invention of the French restaurant, Eugenio believed, depended largely on what every assistant professor would now call an “essentialized” idea of France. One proof of this was that if the best French restaurants tended to be in Paris, the most “typical” ones tended to be in New York. Yet the more abstract and self-enclosed haute cuisine became, the more inclined its lovers were to pretend that it was a folk art, risen from the French earth unbidden. For Eugenio, the key date in this masquerade was 1855, when the wines of Médoc were classified into the famous five growths in which they remain today. “The form of metropolitan rationalization being extended to the provincial earth, in the guise of the reflection of an order locked in the earth itself,” he announced once, bringing his fist down on the tablecloth. He was a big man, who looked uncannily like John Madden, the football coach. On that occasion, we were eating lunch in one of the heavy, dark, smoky Lyon places that were popular in Paris then. (There is always one provincial region singled out for favor in Paris at any moment—“privileged” would have been Eugenio’s word. Then it was Burgundy; now it is the southwest. This fact was grist for his thesis that the countryside was made in the city.) The restaurant was, I think, someplace over in the seventh—it may have been Pantagruel, or La Bourgogne. At lunch, in those days, Eugenio would usually begin with twelve escargots in Chablis, then go on to something like a filet aux moelles—a fillet with bone marrow and Madeira sauce—and end, whenever he could, with a mille-feuille.
The food in those places wasn’t so much “rich” as deep, dense. Each plat arrived looking mellow and varnished, like an old violin. Each mouthful registered like a fat organ chord in a tall church, hitting you hard and then echoing around the room: there’s the bass note (the beef), there’s the middle note (the marrow), and there’s the treble (the Madeira in the sauce). It couldn’t last. “We have landed in the moment when the metaphors begin to devour themselves, the moment of rhetorical self-annihilation,” Eugenio once said cheerfully. This meant that the food had become so rich as to be practically inedible. A recipe from the restaurant Lucas Carton I found among a collection of menus of the time which Eugenio bequeathed to me suggests the problem. The recipe is for a timbale des homards. You take three lobsters, season them with salt and pepper and a little curry, sauté them in a light mirepoix—a mixture of chopped onions and carrots—and then simmer them with cognac, port, double cream, and fish stock for twenty minutes. Then you take out the lobsters and, keeping them warm, reduce the cooking liquid and add two egg yolks and 150 grams of sweet butter. Metaphors like that can kill you. Something had to give, and it did. The “nouvelle cuisine” that replaced the old style has by now been reduced to a set of clichés, and become a licensed subject of satire: the tiny portion on the big oval plate; the raspberry-vinegar infusion; the kiwi. This makes it difficult to remember how fundamental a revolution it worked in the way people cooked. At the same moment in the early seventies, a handful of new chefs—Michel Guérard, Paul Bocuse, Alain Senderens—began to question the do-something-to-it-then-do-something-else-to-it basis of the classic cooking. They emphasized, instead, fresh ingredients, simple treatment, an openness to Oriental techniques and spices, and a general reformist air of lightness and airiness.
The new chefs had little places all around Paris, in the outlying arrondissements, where, before, no one would have traveled for a first-rate meal: Michel Guérard was at Le Pot-au-Feu, way out in Asnières; Alain Dutournier, a little later, settled his first restaurant, Au Trou Gascon, in the extremely unfashionable twelfth. In the sad, sedate seventh arrondissement, Alain Senderens opened Archestrate, first in a little space on the Rue de l’Exposition, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and then on the Rue de Varenne. From the beginning, the new cooking divided into two styles, into what Eugenio identified as “two rhetorics,” a rhetoric of terroirs and a rhetoric of épices—soil and spice. The rhetoric of the terroirs emphasized the allegiance of new cooking to French soil; the rhetoric of the épices emphasized its openness to the world beyond the hexagon. The soil boys wanted to return French cooking to its roots in the regions; the spice boys wanted to take it forward to the new regions of outremer. Even as the new cooking tried to look outward, it had to reassure its audience (and itself) that it was really looking inward.        
On the surface, the beautiful orderly pattern continues. Alain Senderens is now in Michel Comby’s place at Lucas Carton and has replaced the timbale des homards cooking with his own style. Senderens’s Rue de Varenne Archestrate is now occupied by Alain Passard, the Senderens of his generation, while the original Archestrate is occupied by a talented young chef and his wife, just starting out, who have named the restaurant after their little girl: La Maison de Cosima. But, twenty-five years later, the great leap forward seems to have stalled. A large part of the crise is economic: a hundred-dollar lunch is a splurge, a four-hundred-dollar lunch a moral dubiety. Worse, because of the expense, the cooking at the top places in Paris is no longer a higher extension of a commonplace civilization. It is just three-star cooking, a thing unto itself, like grand opera in the age of the microphone. Like grand opera, it is something that will soon need a subsidy to survive—the kitchen at Arpège depends on regular infusions of range-struck Americans to fill the space left by the French kids who no longer want to work eighteen-hour days for very little money while they train. And it is like grand opera in this, also: you can get too much of it, easily. It is, truth be told, often a challenge to eat—a happy challenge, and sometimes a welcome one, but a challenge nonetheless. It is just too rich, and there is just too much. The new cooking in France has become a version of the old. At Lucas Carton, you begin with, say, a plate of vegetables so young they seem dewy, beautifully done, but so bathed in butter and transformed that they are no longer particularly vegetal; and then you move on to the new lobster dish that has taken the place of the old one. Where the old lobsters were done in a cowshedful of cream, the new lobsters are done, épice style, with Madagascar vanilla bean. This is delicious, with the natural sugar of the lobster revealing the vanilla as a spice—although, for an American, the custard-colored sauce, dotted with specks of black vanilla, disconcertingly calls to mind melted lunchroom ice cream. For dessert, you might have a roasted pineapple, which is done on the same principles on which Passard’s tomatoes are braised: it ends up encrusted in caramel. This is delicious, too, though intensely sweet. Lunch at Lucas these days can fairly be called Napoleonic or Empire: the references to the revolutionary principles are there, but finally it’s in thrall to the same old aristocratic values. Lucas is hardly representative, but even at the lesser, less ambitious places the cooking seems stuck in a rut: a chunk of boned protein, a reduced sauce; maybe a fruit complement, to establish its “inventive” bona fides; and a purée. The style has become formulaic: a disk of meat, a disk of complement, a sauce on top. The new cooking seems to have produced less a new freedom than a revived orthodoxy—a new essentialized form of French cooking, which seems less pleasing, and certainly a lot less “modern,” than the cooking that evolved at the same time from the French new cooking in other countries. The hold of the master sauté pan, and the master sauce, and the thing-in-the-middle-of-the-plate, is still intact.        
Thinking it over, I suspect that Eugenio put his finger on the problem with the new cooking in France when it first appeared. “A revolution can sweep clean,” he said. “But a reformation points forward and backward at the same time.” The new cooking was, as Eugenio said, a reformation, not a revolution: it worked within the same system of Michelin stars and fifteen-man kitchens and wealthy clients that the old cooking did; it didn’t make a new audience; it tried to appropriate the old one. In America—and in England, too, where the only thing you wanted to do with the national culinary tradition was lose it—the division between soil and spice wasn’t a problem. You could first create the recipes and then put the ingredients in the earth yourself. The American cooks who have followed in Alice Waters’s path-making footsteps at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley—the generation whom a lot of people think of as the children of M.F.K. Fisher—created a freewheeling, eclectic cosmopolitan cuisine: a risotto preceding a stir-fry leading to a sabayon. Then they went out and persuaded the local farmers to grow the things they needed. In France, the soil boys won easily. Some of what they stood for is positive and even inspiring: the terroirs movement has a green, organic, earth-conscious element that is very good news. The marché biologique every Sunday morning on the Boulevard Raspail has become one of the weekly Parisian wonders, full of ugly, honest fruit and rough, tasty country meat. And it is rare for any restaurant in Paris to succeed now without presenting itself as a “regional” spot—a southwest, or Provençal, or Savoyard place. (Even at the exquisite Grand Véfour, at the Palais-Royal, the most beautiful restaurant in the world and a cathedral of the cosmopolitan tradition, it is thought necessary to parade around a plate of the cheeses of the chef ’s native Savoy.) Yet the insistence on national, or local, tradition—on truth to terroirs—can give even to the best new Paris restaurants a predictability that the good new places in London and New York don’t share. The French, who invented the tradition of taking things over and then insisting that they were yours all along, are now shy about doing it. The cooking at a French restaurant must now, for the first time, be French. This tendency came to a head last spring, when a group of important French chefs actually issued a manifesto protesting the spread of exotic food combinations and alien spices in French cooking, and calling for a return to the terroirs. Peter Hoffman, the owner and chef of the influential Savoy, in New York, is one of those American chefs who went to France in the early eighties, were dazzled, and now find that the light has dimmed. He likes to tell about his most recent dinner at the three-star restaurant L’Ambroisie, on the Place des Vosges. “We went to L’Ambroisie and had a classic French dish: hare with blood sauce. It was fabulous, everything you want rabbit with blood to be. But then I got talked into ordering one of the chef ’s specialties, a mille-feuille of langoustines with curry, and it was infuriating. It was a French dish with powder. It was such an insular approach, as though nobody understood that curry isn’t a powder that you apply cosmetically. Nobody had read Madhur Jaffrey, or really understood that curry isn’t just a spice you shake but a whole technique of cooking you have to understand.” As the writer Catharine Reynolds points out, the new cooking in America and England alike is really Mediterranean cooking, inspired by Italy, Tunisia, and Greece. It suits the fat-allergic modern palate better than the old butter-and-cream cooking of the north. France, which has a big window south, ought to be open to its influence, yet remains resistant. The real national dish of the French right now—the cheap, available food—is couscous. But North African cooking remains segregated in couscous parlors, and has not been brought into the main current. A fossilized metropolitan tradition should have been replaced by a modernized metropolitan tradition, yet what took its place was sentimental nationalism. It was the invasion of American fast food, as much as anything, that made the French turn back to their own tradition and, for the first time, see it as something in need of self-conscious protection. Looking at America, the French don’t see the children of M.F.K. Fisher; they just see the flood tides of McDonald’s, which, understandably, strike fear into their hearts. The bistro became an endangered species. To make still one more blanquette de veau suddenly became not a habit of commonplace civilization but a form of self-defense. Waverley Root once divided all Gaul into three fats—lard, olive oil, and butter—and said that they determined the shape of French cooking. That you might be able to cook without putting any fat in the pan at all was an unthinkable notion. The charcoal grill, the brick oven, and all the other nonfat ways of cooking now seem normal everywhere except in France. People who look at cooking more practically than philosophically think that that technical lag is the heart of the problem. “It’s deglaze or die” is how Alexandra Guarnaschelli, an American cook in Paris, puts it. The master-sauce approach remains the basis of French cooking, whereas elsewhere it has been overthrown by the grill. The pan and the pot have always been the basic utensils of French cooking—just what was there—in the same way that the grill was the primary element of American-vernacular backyard cooking. For Americans, grilled food wasn’t new but familiar, and good cooking is made up of familiar things done right. As the excellent American chefs Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby have pointed out, grilling forced an entirely new approach to sauce-making: with no residue to deglaze, the cook had to think in terms of savory complements rather than subtle echoes. Grilling demanded chutney, fruit mustards, spice mixes. Although the French tradition included these things, they weren’t part of the vernacular. Alex has seen some of the predicament at first hand. She is twenty-seven; she arrived in France five years ago and, after training in Burgundy, became a commis at Guy Savoy’s two-star place in the seventeenth arrondissement. Within a couple of years, she had worked her way up to fish chef, and, a little while later, Savoy appointed her second-in-command at his bistro, La Butte Chaillot. (This is like a young Frenchman arriving in New York, all enthusiastic about baseball, and ending up five years later as the third baseman of the Yankees.) The other day, over coffee on the Avenue Kléber, Alex, who is from New York (she went to Barnard, Mom’s an editor at Scribner, Dad’s a professor), said, “I decided I wanted to chop onions, so I tried the C.I.A.”—the Culinary Institute of America, the M.I.T. of American cooking—“but it was like eighteen thousand a year, tout compris, so I decided to go to Burgundy and chop. I started learning the French way, which is half beautiful beyond belief and half ‘Please shoot me.’ It’s by the book. Really, there’s a book, and you learn it. There’s a system for everything, a way to do it. You can’t cut the fish that way, because ça n’est pas bon. You can’t bone a chicken that way, because that’s not good. ‘We do it the way it’s always been done in France.’ When I first started at Savoy, there was one old stager who, every time I did something, would just frown and shake his head and say, ‘It won’t do, it won’t do.’ Finally, I did exactly what he did, and he said, ‘Good, now, always do it exactly the same way.’ So I did. You never get a real attempt to innovate, or to use new flavors. You can change an adjective, but the sentence stays the same. Whenever we make a classic sauce, everybody gathers around and argues about it. Once, we got into a two-hour argument about whether you use chervil as well as tarragon in a true béarnaise. There are certain things these days that I will not do. I will not do mayonnaise or béarnaise. Uh-uh. I don’t have time for the postgame analysis. “Of course, there’s that tomato at Passard’s place,” she went on. “But have you seen the way the poor kid has to work to make it?”
Alex’s existence helps to explain why the new cooking went deeper in America than it could in France: in America the cooking revolution was above all a middle-class revolution, even an upper-middle-class revolution. A lot of the people who made the cooking revolution in America were doing it as a second career. At the very least, they were doing it after a liberal-arts degree; David Angelot started slicing carrots at fifteen. The most mocked of all modern American restaurant manners—the waiter who introduces himself by name—is, on reflection, a sign of something very positive. “I’m Henry, and I’ll be your waiter tonight” means, really, “You and I belong to the same social class. Tomorrow night, I could be sitting there, and you could be standing here.” The French system of education, unrenovated for a long time, locks people in place. Kids emerge with an impressive respect for learning and erudition, and intimidated by it, too. For an American, getting a Ph.D. is a preliminary, before you go someplace else and find your real work, like opening a restaurant. Nobody thinks of changing métiers in France, because it’s just too hard. In America, not only the consumers of the new cooking but, more important, the producers and dealers were college-educated. I once met a pair of American academics who had gone off to live with a flock of goats and make goat cheese. They had named the goats Emily, Virginia, Jessamyn, Willa, and Ursula. It was terrific goat cheese, too.        

Paul Bocuse

Beyond these reasons—the missing grill, the resurgent nationalism, the educational trap—there may be an even deeper reason for the lull in French cooking. A new book," L’Amateur de Cuisine", by an unknown author, Jean-Philippe Derenne, which was published last year, offers an anatomy of French cooking—an effort to organize the materials, forms, and manners of the subject in a systematic way. “This cookbook is a book,” the author writes on the first page, and then attempts to create a whole taxonomy of cooking based not on folk tradition or cosmopolitan recipes but on an analysis of plants and animals and the chemistry of what happens when you apply different kinds of heat and cold to them before you eat them. He begins his market section with the minerals (a crisp page and a half), and then passes to the plants (more than a hundred pages) and the animals, divided into those of the earth and the sky and those of fresh and salt water. (Even “Serpents, Sauriens, Lézards, etc.” get their moment in the sun.) He gives a precise biological description of every imaginable thing there is to eat, then presents an exact analysis of every imaginable method of cooking it and shows how all the glories of cuisine rise out of the limitless intersections of these two forces. It is a vast, eleven-hundred-page volume, comprehensive and radiant; it resembles less a cookbook than a medieval almanac, offering a timeless, secure, benevolent universe of food. Its subject isn’t cooking. It’s plenty. Derenne is a modest and gentle scholar, not a cook or a critic, or even a gourmand. He is a doctor, the head of the pulmonary department at a Paris hospital. Over lunch one afternoon at Arpège, Derenne, who is a small, good-natured man, with the open face and happy appetites of a Benedictine monk, said, “The same week that "L’Amateur de Cuisine"  came out, I published another book, called Acute Respiratory Failure of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.” That was another thousand pages. This, surely, is a record for total weight by one author published in one week. Derenne wrote the cookbook in seclusion, in the garden of his little house near Fontainebleau, only to find himself, on its publication, a new lion of the French culinary establishment: the man who wrote the book. He gets reverential, cher maître–type letters from Paul Bocuse. Passard himself sees him as a friend. Dr. Derenne doesn’t know quite what to make of it all. “My editor said to me, when I gave him the manuscript, ‘Why, you’ve written the first humanist history of food.’ I said, ‘No, not humanist. It’s a religious book, really.’ I was inspired by a history of religion by Mircea Eliade, which attempted the same kind of logical organization: rising upward from the types of religious apparition into the possibilities of organized faith. I’ve done for cooking what that author did for belief: shown an underlying logic without attempting to make it logical.” He went on to talk about a second volume, which he’s just started: “It may be called Free Cuisine, but really it will be about the rejected cuisine. About everything the world throws out. Shells and guts and leaves—the whole world of the rejected. This is religious, too, because religion depends on being able to find the holy in the ordinary. It’s putting together things banal in themselves which nonetheless become transformed into something transcendent. You know who else has this quality? Duke Ellington—he simply used what he had.” There was something surprising about Derenne’s talk, an expansive, open, embracing ardor that a hundred years ago would have seemed more American than French. It seems possible that the different fates of the new cooking in France and America are a sign of a new relation between the two places. A century ago, Americans used to say that what brought them to Europe was its history. At home, there was “no sovereign, no court…no aristocracy…nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals,” as Henry James’s famous list has it. What really brought Americans to the Old World, though, was the allure of power: cultural power, political power, military power—imperial power, as it existed in Europe and only there. What fascinated Whistler and James in the Old World was not its age but the extreme self-consciousness that comes with power, the way that power could be seen to shimmer through manners—the way that what you wore or how you stood (or what you ate) spelled out your place in a complicated and potent social hierarchy. Now that that power has passed into American—or, anyway, English-speaking—hands, the trappings of power which come from extreme self-consciousness are ours, too. Even our cooking—especially our cooking—has become involved with power. Where you stand on, say, the spread of McDonald’s is a political issue, just as where you stood on the outdoor café was in France a century ago. Even the smaller issues of the palate count: most American women define their feminism, at least in part, in terms of their attitude toward the kitchen. A century ago, the modern form of that self-consciousness was invented in Paris. The limitlessly complicated relation of what you eat and where you eat it to where you stand in the social order is the subject of, for instance, the first two chapters of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. But now food and cooking in France have begun to take at least a small half turn back toward their other role, as sources of nourishment, comfort, cohesion. The role of food as anxious social theatre, seen at its crudest in the endless worry in Los Angeles and New York about power tables—where you sit at Spago, what time you leave the Four Seasons—is diminishing in France. We are the worldly, corrupt ones at the table now, and the Europeans, in this regard at least, are the innocents. Even their philosophers eat for pleasure. When the tomate confite, which David Angelot had been working on since nine o’clock, came out at last, Derenne tasted it. Then he said, “You see, he demonstrates for us what we knew from the first, that the tomato is a fruit. Would you call that arrogance or modesty?” Not long after that, I finally did what I had dreaded doing, though it would have been the practical thing to do all along, which was to go back to that first restaurant and see what it was like now. I walked back and found both the hotel and the restaurant, though both had changed their names—the hotel belonged now to the Best Western chain—and, while in memory I had kept them on the same street, they were in fact a street apart. But the exterior of the restaurant was unmistakable; I found it by getting the Eiffel Tower in exactly the same area of my eye as it had occupied when I was fourteen. It was not far from—I am not making this up—the Avenue Marcel-Proust. The restaurant is now called the Tournesol, and the less expensive prix fixe is 114 francs, or about twenty dollars. I ate à la carte. I had a little foie gras, sole meunière, and a cassis sorbet. The food was even better than I had remembered. This proves either that (a) Proust was wrong, and you can always recapture the pleasures of your youth if you just go back to the places where you had them, or (b) there is more good cooking left in Paris than I knew, or (c) I went to the wrong place. Anyway, there’s hope.

By Adam Gopnik in the book "Secret Ingredients": the New Yorker book of food and drink, edited by David Remnick, Published in the United States by Random House, New York, 2007, p.70-86. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.