nouvelle cuisine

nouvelle cuisine, eclectic style in international cuisine, originating in France during the 1960s and ’70s, that stressed freshness, lightness, and clarity of flavour and inspired new movements in world cuisine. In reaction to some of the richer and more-calorie-laden extravagances of classic French grande cuisine, nouvelle cuisine sought to emphasize the natural flavours, textures, and colours of foodstuffs. Citing the unhealthiness of a diet heavy in fats, sugars, refined starches, and salt, it minimized the use of those ingredients. Nouvelle cuisine was also influenced by the Japanese style of food presentation.

Origins and tenets

In the early 21st century, it was difficult to appreciate just how rigid the grande cuisine system of French chefs Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier had become by the mid-20th century. It was a highly regimented repertoire. Chefs could, and did, invent new dishes, but there was much reverence for the past and its rules for and techniques of food preparation. Indeed, the veneration of the past was so strong that younger chefs began to feel that their creativity was constrained.

By the 1960s a few young French chefs had 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.

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Point’s 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. Although those changes were controversial, by 1972 the innovations had been christened nouvelle cuisine.

Early influential figures in the nouvelle movement 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, had founded the publication in 1969 to 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!” Senderens, in fact, would famously “give back” the stars that Michelin had awarded his famed restaurant, Lucas Carton (now named Senderens), proclaiming, “I want to simplify my cooking, allow myself more liberty and reduce the average check.”

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In 1973 Gault published “The Ten Commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine,” giving the movement a set of precepts that helped nouvelle cuisine reach a wider audience. The 10 commandments were:

1. Thou shalt not overcook.
2. Thou shalt use fresh, quality products.
3. Thou shalt lighten thy menu.
4. Thou shalt not be systematically modernist.
5. Thou shalt nevertheless seek out what the new techniques can bring you.
6. Thou shalt avoid pickles, cured game meats, fermented foods, etc.
7. Thou shalt eliminate rich sauces.
8. Thou shalt not ignore dietetics.
9. Thou shalt not doctor up thy presentations.
10. Thou shalt be inventive.

Critics

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 (also known as Robert Courtine), the prominent critic at the well-respected Paris daily newspaper Le Monde. Nouvelle cuisine was seen as a threat to French tradition and was often attacked on nationalist grounds. Senderens said 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 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 flavours:

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“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 (1961) . Child saw the new movement as an affront to the logic and grandeur of French haute 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 did not 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?”