Pay was low, hours were long, and underlings suffered brutal abuse. The chefs de partie (heads of stations) were well into their forties, and even the most talented sous-chef (the second in command) might well retire before ever finding a post as chef de cuisine. Staffs were so large and the hierarchy so regimented that first-year apprentices might never approach a stove. Cooks worked standing, conversation was discouraged, and singing, whistling, and laughing were prohibited.
Commis and apprentices spent hours fluting mushrooms and turning vegetables into uniform “olives” or seven-sided shapes like a long garlic clove or dicing vegetables into cubes 2 millimeters on a side for brunoise. Things could be done only one way, and underlings were required to prepare superfluous decoration with perfect fastidiousness. The great classically influenced kitchens, where Nouvelle Cuisine chefs such as Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers learned the trade, remained stiflingly rigid. It was, by necessity, a cuisine of pomp and ceremony in which dishes were named after favored customers or their mistresses and the ground rules required showy presentation and conspicuously expensive ingredients. How was it that Escoffier, whose best-known saying was “Above all, make it simple,” became so damned?Ĭlassical French cooking reached its height in European grand hotels before the First World War. Nouvelle Cuisine, said the chef Michel Guérard, famous for his cuisine minceur, was born out of years and years of frustration. His enduring monument, the turn-of-the-century Guide culinaire, still so dominated French cooking that Gault or Millau, never at a loss for words, compared it to Chairman Mao’s little red book. That exhausted style was indissolubly linked to Georges Auguste Escoffier, who had died in 1935. It is now 40 years since the Paris critics Gault and Millau announced the arrival of a Nouvelle Cuisine - lighter, fresher, more spontaneous - to replace a style of cooking that for decades had been ostentatious, absolute, and downright stodgy.
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