The United States of Arugula (37 page)

The media-savvy Sontheimer demonstrated his machine for James
Beard, who put Sontheimer in touch with Williams and other retailers. With the gushing endorsements of Beard, Claiborne, and Franey—the latter two of whom marveled in the
Times Magazine
over the Cuisinart’s ability to make “a devastatingly good guacamole” (using Diana Kennedy’s recipe from
The Cuisines of Mexico);
to shred “50 pounds of cabbage into the base for sauerkraut, one of the most tedious of things to do, in what could be reckoned in minutes”; and to “grind to a fine purée fish such as salmon, pike, or sole for such dishes as mousse of fish or pike quenelles,” a task that used to require Franey to “pound the fish fine, then laboriously push it through a hair sieve”—the upwardly mobile home cook needed little persuading to buy the contraption. Like Italian balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes, the French-designed food processor became far more popular in the United States than in its land of origin, where chefs and
mamans
remained wary of violating kitchen traditions with
électronique
equipment. Even in earth-toned Berkeley, Gene Opton found that Cuisinarts flew out of her little shop, the Kitchen. “The Birkenstock trade were horrified at something over a hundred dollars,” she says, “but it was probably the first time that people were enthusiastic over something not only because it was a useful piece of equipment but because it was a gleam-in-your-eye kind of thing. Like the Sub-Zero fridge is now, but not quite as foolish.”

Newsweek
may have been heralding a “new wave” in American appreciation of food, but its cover subject, in his toque and whites, with pots, pans, and strung-up lobsters surrounding him, looked for all the world like a central-casting French chef-—which, in a sense, he was. Paul Bocuse, then forty-nine years old, had apprenticed under Fernand Point at La Pyramide and was now running his own eponymous restaurant, rated three stars in
Le guide Michelin
, in a small town just north of Lyons. Tall and calculatedly imposing—he modeled himself on Point, who he admiringly described as “a little mean,” and dismissed the notion of women in professional kitchens by saying, “The only place for them is in bed”—Bocuse was the great and feared Oz to gourmets, “indisputably the most famous chef in the world,” as Claiborne wrote. Yet he was at the forefront of a progressive movement
that, in some intellectual quarters of France, was regarded as the culinary analogue to the French New Wave film movement that produced the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer. He was the face of nouvelle cuisine.

In 1969, with France still in the grips of the revolutionary spirit fomented by the previous year’s student riots and corresponding labor strikes, the journalists Henri Gault and Christian Millau founded a magazine called
Le nouveau guide
—a
Cahiers du cinéma
for insurgent foodies—whose debut issue featured the cover line
MICHELIN: DON
’
T FORGET THESE 48 STARS!
The “stars” in question were relatively unknown chefs who didn’t warrant the attention of the “establishment” restaurant guide, which the tire company Michelin had been publishing for seven decades. The idea was that Michelin awarded
its
stars to stodgy places that hewed closely to Escoffier and masked the flavors of meat, fish, and vegetables with heavy sauces and overcooking. Bocuse, who had been running his own restaurant since 1962, was as highly Michelin-rated as chefs came, but, like Point, he regarded his classicist training as a springboard from which to invent, not an orthodoxy to which he had to rigidly adhere. He told
Newsweek
that he had admired the way Point violated traditionalist code by barely cooking his green beans, serving them crunchy “because his instinct told him they were better that way.”

Gault and Millau lionized Bocuse and such contemporaries as Roger Vergé, Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel, Georges Blanc, Louis Outhier, and the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros as avatars of France’s new, improved restaurant cookery. In 1972,
Le nouveau guide
ran a manifesto, immodestly entitled “The Ten Commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine,” in which Gault and Millau set out to codify what they were talking about. The first commandment was “Reject unnecessarily complex preparations,” and the second was “Reduce cooking times.” Like any dogmatists, Gault and Millau made up some rules that bordered on the nonsensical; Commandment Five, for example, forbade marinades and the hanging of game, on the grounds that “marinating meat hides its taste,” and that “if game is hung at all it should only be for a very short time, otherwise its flavor is altered and an undesirable
fermentation begins”—never mind that this fermentation is precisely what many game aficionados are after. But the two men played an important role in bringing attention to these chefs, and, indeed, in making them aware of one another—all the more so when the crusading journalists spun off an annual guidebook from their magazine called
Le guide Gault-Millau
, a pithier, wackier, more descriptive reference than
Le guide Michelin.
*

In the years since the early seventies, nouvelle cuisine’s identity has been so distorted and misunderstood that to many in the food community, the movement is a joke. Nora Ephron calls it a phony trend fabricated by Yanou Collart, Bocuse’s and Vergé’s aggressive Frenchwoman publicist, who became chummy with Claiborne and arranged junkets in which American food writers such as Ephron and
Town & Country’s
James Villas were whisked from one elaborate Gault-Millau-ratified meal to another. Bocuse himself has cracked that even he has no idea what the term “nouvelle cuisine” really means. But in the movement’s early years, at least, the term was genuinely useful in describing the cookery of French chefs who, while not outright rejecting the precepts of Escoffier, had the temerity to lighten their recipes, flash-cook fish, use more vegetable juices and stocks, and plan menus according to season rather than to the dictates of grand-hotel dining tradition.

Contrary to widespread popular belief, nouvelle cuisine was not dietetic and low-cal, except in the case of Guérard’s
cuisine minceur
, which was explicitly conceived as a slimming cuisine
(minceur
means “leanness”), since Guérard operated his restaurant out of a spa in the Pyrenees called Les Prés et les Sources d’Eugénie. While Guérard was experimenting with fat-free offerings like aubergine puree infused with saffron steam, Bocuse’s signature
dish was
loup de mer en croûte
, fish stuffed with lobster mousse, encased in a labor-intensive pastry shell that visually reproduced the fish’s scales, and served with Choron sauce, essentially a hollandaise tinted pink by the addition of pureed tomato. Bocuse justified this dish’s nouvelle-ness to
Newsweek
by noting that the fish itself had been cooked for just two minutes under high heat rather than slow-braised.

Culinarily, nouvelle cuisine’s most significant across-the-board departure was its general avoidance of flour as a binding agent for sauces. Flour, and not butter, was what gave the white béchamel and brown
espagnole
sauces of Carême and Escoffier their opaque quality and heavy texture. The nouvelle crew, with their emphasis on “letting the ingredients taste like what they are,” were more inclined to deglaze a pan in which meat had been cooked with some liquid (such as water, wine, or vegetable stock), and then swirl in some butter or cream, resulting in a light sauce that complemented, rather than masked, the flavor of the main ingredient. Julia Child, in a curious comment in the
Newsweek
article, said that the French chefs had “finally gotten it through their thick heads that there are some people who don’t want to be stuffed full of fat and truffles,” but she rather missed the point.
*
The nouvelle-ists were not against calories or decadence per se—Bocuse was also famous for his truffle soup, which Jeremiah Tower, America’s Mr. Extravagance, re-created for one of his New Year’s bashes at Chez Panisse—but against a French cuisine they felt had grown leaden, gloopy, and uninspired.

The excitement over nouvelle cuisine reverberated well beyond the circles of traveling businessmen who could afford $300 meals, inspiring many a young American and European to seek out the opportunity to
stage
in the kitchens of Gault and Millau’s favorite chefs. By the eighties, when these youngsters came of age and assumed command of their own kitchens, Americans began to feel the full force of the nouvelle movement. Hubert Keller
(of San Francisco’s Fleur de Lys) and Daniel Boulud (of New York’s Le Cirque and then his own Daniel), both Frenchmen, trained under Vergé in the seventies at his Le Moulin de Mougins restaurant on the Côte d’Azur, as did David Bouley (of Montrachet and then Bouley), a son of Rhode Island; Keller and Bouley also logged time working in Bocuse’s kitchen. Larry Forgione (of New York’s River Café and An American Place) was slated to work for Guérard in the mid-seventies but was rebuffed by the French government “because by that point,” he says, “there was a big crackdown on non-French apprentices. French apprentices were complaining that they couldn’t get work in the better kitchens because there were so many Americans and Japanese.”
*
Forgione settled for a
stage
in London’s Connaught hotel, whose kitchen, he says, was then going through a “borderline nouvelle cuisine” phase.

Judy Rodgers, on the other hand, the future star of San Francisco’s Zuni Café, ended up spending her senior year of high school living in the Hôtel Troisgros in Roanne—home to the three-star Les Frères Troisgros restaurant—through sheer happenstance. In 1973, a businessman neighbor of her family’s in St. Louis who frequently lodged at chez Troisgros when his work took him to France—“like you’d stay in Hampton Suites,” she says—mentioned to Rodgers’s parents that Jean Troisgros was interested in sending his teenage daughter to America to learn English in an exchange program. Rodgers ended up being the other half of the exchange. An indifferent eater up to that point, Rodgers was transformed into a food person by
her long hours in the company of her host dad, Jean Troisgros, who christened his sixteen-year-old guest Mata Hari, and, in Henry Higgins fashion, educated the young lady about fresh ingredients, the glory of simplicity, and the
batterie de cuisine.
*

“The first thing I ever tried to cook, the summer after I got home from France, was Jean’s little salad of green beans,” Rodgers says. “Just little velvety green beans coated with a little crème fraîche, and he would put little ribbons of champignons de Paris [button mushrooms] in it. It was one of my favorite things at Troisgros, an absolute home run with the bases loaded. I thought, ‘Heck, I can make this.’ But I found out that I wasn’t gonna find these ingredients in St. Louis in 1974. The green beans in the supermarket in St. Louis were like Lincoln Logs. And I made the salad, and it was just dreadful. I’d heard all year at Troisgros, ‘It’s the ingredients, it’s the ingredients’—and I’d violated that.”

But in Los Angeles, where quality ingredients were easier to come by, the nouvelle ethos took hold much earlier. Among its early champions was the chef Jean Bertranou, who ran two of the best French restaurants in the city, La Chaumière, which opened in 1965, and his masterwork, L’Ermitage, which he opened a decade later. Bertranou is something of a forgotten figure now, having died of a brain tumor in 1980, when he was only fifty years old, but he is the unsung hero of the LA restaurant scene, the man who pushed the city toward gastronomic credibility. The food journalist Colman Andrews, eulogizing Bertranou in
New West
magazine a few weeks after his death, credited the chef with fostering “the beginnings of a whole new restaurant community, French and otherwise.”

Though his early career in the United States saw him cooking in places where the quality of the food was an afterthought—he seemed to be following Frank Sinatra’s restaurant-going trajectory, working at El Morocco in
New York, followed by the Hollywood hangout Ciro’s, followed by the Sultan’s Table at the Dunes hotel in Las Vegas—Bertranou kept abreast of what was going on in his native France and was inspired to rescue LA from its gastronomic hick-town status. “It’s still cowboy country,” he complained to
Los Angeles
magazine in 1972. “Everybody wants the duckling crisp, like plywood. Duck should be moist, and pink inside.” Sounding downright Beardian, Bertranou lamented the obliviousness of Angelenos to the excellent seafood they had right under their noses: “There’s good fish here. Fresh salmon from the northwest, sand dabs, corvina, and Pacific lobster which is in season from the fifteenth of September to the fifteenth of March.”

In 1975, Bertranou launched L’Ermitage, which, despite its location on a trafficked stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, he likened to Vergé’s Le Moulin de Mougins.
*
His operative words were “light” and “clean.” There were lots of fish entrées in flourless sauces, such as poached salmon covered in a mousseline of sole (a fish sauce with whipped cream beaten into it to lighten the texture) and complemented by a beurre rouge that was nothing more than a reduction of vinegar, red wine, butter, and herbs. Bertranou even reconceived the most colon-punishing of Escoffier classics, veal chops Prince Orloff, as a lighter dish, forgoing the traditional heavy Mornay sauce and mountains of truffles in favor of a thin layer of duxelles and a restrained soubise of cream and pureed onions.

Among Bertranou’s friends and admirers in his L’Ermitage days were two young fellows on the make in the LA restaurant scene: an Austrian named Wolfgang Puck, and a rich kid from Westchester County in New York named Michael McCarty. Both were indebted to Bertranou for his cooking guidance and his sourcing of ingredients. With McCarty, who went on to open the Santa Monica restaurant Michael’s in 1979, Bertranou even formed a partnership to raise ducks he called “mullards,” lean, flavorful hybrids of the Pekin and Muscovy breeds. “We had an enormous duck farm in
Acton, California, which was known as the crystal-meth capital,” says Mc-Carty. “There were lilacs, there was our duck farm, and then there were, every so often, in the far desert, these little explosions.”