The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (36 page)

Under such belt-busting leadership, it is not surprising that French cuisine burgeoned during Louis’ reign. It was during this period that the famous chef François Pierre La Varenne published the first major cookbook,
Le Cuisinier français
, Dom Pérignon invented champagne, the ritual of the dinner service became established, and a distinct new method of French cookery evolved. This new culinary style broke with the medieval tradition of the heavy use of spices, adding herbs instead to bring out the natural flavour of the food. Then, as always, the chef’s calling was a matter of the highest honour. Take, for example, the noble case of François Vatel, chef to the Prince of Condé (Vatel was portrayed on screen in a 2000 feature film of the same name by – who else? – Gérard Depardieu). According to the Marquise de Sévigné, to whom we owe an account of the events, in 1671 Vatel was given charge of preparations for an enormous feast to receive Louis XIV at the Château de Chantilly. Having barely slept for twelve nights during the frantic preparations, Vatel was beside himself when only two of the fish deliveries for the dinner turned up. Not realizing that the rest were on their way, he exclaimed: ‘I cannot outlive this disgrace!’, retired to his room, set the hilt of his sword against the door, and after two ineffectual attempts succeeded in the third, forcing the sword through his heart. At
that very moment, the missing fish arrived. Dinner went ahead as planned.*
1

* Noble gesture or case of overkill, Vatel’s act seems to have started something of a tradition of honour among French chefs. Centuries later, in February 2003, the celebrated chef Bernard Loiseau committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a shotgun over the prospect of losing a Michelin star.

T
here are five divisions of the fine arts: painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and architecture, of which final category the principal branch is pâtisserie.
ANTONIN CARÊME (1784
–
1833)

The French Revolution put many of the French master chefs out of a job, with the result that they either went to cook for foreign monarchs (thus exporting French cuisine around the world), or opened one of the new breed of eating establishments that were taking root around Paris: restaurants. The word ‘restaurant’ originally referred to a type of soup called a
bouillon restaurant
(‘restorative
bouillon
’), served in the world’s first such hostelry, founded by a Monsieur Boulanger in Paris in 1765. Previously, guests at inns would partake of a meal together at the innkeeper’s table, but Boulanger introduced the innovation of guests dining at separate, small marble tables. This idea caught on, and soon restaurants were mushrooming all over the capital. It was at this point that the lawyer and journalist Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière – the father of modern food journalism – published his restaurant guide,
L’Almanach des gourmands
(1803–12). An early ancestor of Michelin and Zagat, the
Almanach
was a periodical in which Grimod evaluated cafés and restaurants in Paris: he established ‘tasting panels’ of distinguished testers to whom restaurateurs, pâtissiers and charcutiers would send their dishes for evaluation and subsequent listing, with a rating, in the
Almanach
.
†

† To obtain a rating it was sufficient to send the dish to M. Grimod at his address at the rue des Champs-Elysées, but it was made clear that all dishes for which transport costs were not discharged would be refused.

At the same time, food philosophers like Brillat-Savarin (see here) wrote compendiums of meditations about the pleasures of gourmandism, containing such aphorisms as:
Dis-moi ce que tu manges et je te dirai ce que tu es
(‘Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are’)
.

Over this period of growth in public dining, the principles and practices of French
haute cuisine
were being codified by one of the greatest of all French chefs: Antonin Carême, often dubbed the father of French cooking. Born the son of a destitute drunkard in 1784, Carême established himself as one of the foremost confectioners of his time, studying books on Greek and Roman architecture in the national library to give his sugary palaces, temples, follies and ruins stunning authenticity. A stint serving the English Prince Regent and future King George IV was a disaster (he couldn’t cope with the London fog), and so for some years Carême worked for the Russian tsar Alexander I, who later remarked that ‘he taught us how to eat’. Towards the end of his life, Carême focused on the
magnum opus
that was to become the Bible of French
haute cuisine
:
L’Art de la cuisine française
.*

* At least, until Escoffier’s
Le Guide culinaire
, whereupon Carême became the Old Testament and Escoffier the New.

This weighty tome codified the principles and philosophies of French culinary art, including establishing the four ‘mother sauces’ that constitute its cornerstones. Burgundian by origin, Carême’s work (like that of so many great French chefs) built upon the cuisine of his roots, elevating such earthy peasant fare as snails to the heady delights of the classic
escargots de Bourgogne
.

If Carême was the founding father of French
haute cuisine
, his successor Georges Auguste Escoffier was the first celebrity chef. Coming from a dirt-poor background (as was beginning to be a requirement for French chefs), Escoffier showed remarkable culinary genius from an early age. In 1884 he met the budding young hotelier César Ritz at the Hôtel National in Lucerne, Switzerland; the rest, as they say, is luxury. Escoffier and Ritz together took over the Savoy Hotel in London in 1890, then the Ritz in Paris, and subsequently the Carlton. Understanding opulence as only the sons of poor men can (Ritz also came from humble origins, having been a hotel groom), the pair redefined fine living for the élite. Escoffier’s motto was ‘keep it simple’ (he never did), but he did streamline the overelaborate cuisine of Carême for a modern age, introducing revolutionary innovations still in use today. It is to Escoffier that modern restaurant kitchens owe the ‘kitchen brigade’ system of dividing tasks between separate sous-chefs working under the direction of a
chef de cuisine
, while he was also responsible for introducing the
à la carte
menu. Escoffier also worked on the new luxury liners, where it is said that once, having been served a superb dish of salmon steamed in champagne, Kaiser Wilhelm II asked him, ‘How can I repay you?’ His alleged reply was, ‘By returning Alsace-Lorraine to France.’

In the later twentieth century French
haute cuisine
was ‘simplified’ yet again (although somehow, these progressive simplifications never really made it simple), this time by the
nouvelle cuisine
of the 1960s: smaller portions, lighter ingredients, fewer buttery sauces (or, as Elizabeth David cuttingly put it, ‘lighter food, less of it, costing more’
2
).

French gastronomy undoubtedly has an illustrious history, but is it still the king of cuisines and the cuisine of kings? Many think not. French gastronomy has had to take a lot of heat in
recent years. The artery-clogging richness of the food, the pernickety presentation, the grandiose self-importance of the French restaurant, the traditional
froideur
of the waiting staff – all have been subject to a grilling. The French just got too complacent, it is said, and their top chefs became too glitzy. Food fashion has supposedly moved elsewhere – to the simplicity and freshness of Italian cooking, the gutsy innovation of Spanish, or the modernist minimalism of Japanese. The buzzwords are no longer
French
(= stuffy and boring), but new and trendy concepts like
Fusion Food, Molecular Gastronomy
or – even better, combining two for the price of one (sorry, price of three) –
Science Fusion
. Who, after all, wants a plain old
escalope de saumon à l’oseille
, when you can have exploding milkshakes, foaming mushrooms or bacon and egg ice-cream?*

* ‘Molecular Gastronomy’ is a relatively recent fad in cooking, which aims to use scientific techniques and chemicals to create unusual or spectacular food. Leading proponents are the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià and the British chef Heston Blumenthal.

Even the ‘Red Bible’, France’s own Michelin Guide, has recently given the cuisine of its homeland the cold shoulder. The 2012 Guide declared Tokyo the culinary capital of the world, awarding it a total of sixteen stars over Paris’ fourteen.
†

† The Michelin Guide, France’s famous annual restaurant ratings book, was first published by car tyre tycoons the Michelin brothers in 1900 and given away as a free handout to motorists. Over the years it has garnered enormous prestige and become a French national treasure, but a fact often forgotten is that it is still essentially a marketing tool for selling car tyres. Underscoring the
bon viveur-
ishness of it all, the company’s trademark, the rotund, rubbery figure whom we call the ‘Michelin man’ is known in French as
Bibendum
.

Michelin itself has felt the heat recently for its alleged stuffiness, with a clutch of decorated chefs handing back their stars to great media acclaim (cynics might point out that giving back stars actually attracts more column inches than getting them). But it is not only Michelin that is sounding the death knell for French cooking. Every other food journalist has been proclaiming the demise of French cuisine, which judging by the stream of journalistic commentary in recent years, must have died more often than Darla in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. The fact that French food was
recently added to UNESCO’s list of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ (along with Peking opera and Corsican polyphonic chant) seems only to have had the effect of laying a funeral wreath on a moribund institution that is now officially a museum piece.

B
ouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.
NORMAN DOUGLAS, BRITISH NOVELIST (1868
–1952
)

But is French cuisine really dead? The French themselves don’t seem to think so. Over the last few years, the nation’s favourite dish has been consistently French, although the dish traditionally occupying the top spot, the hallowed
blanquette de veau
(veal in white sauce), has now been usurped by the upstart, smoky duck dish
magret de canard
, a child of 1960s
nouvelle cuisine
.*

* Study by TNS Sofres for
Vie pratique gourmand
, 2011. With 21 per cent of votes,
magret de canard
was just ahead of the Belgian dish
moules-frites
(20 per cent) and the North African
couscous
(19 per cent).

Nor do ordinary British people (as opposed to their journalists) seem to think French food is dead: French cuisine was ranked number two in a 2010 survey of British tastes in food, after Italian.
3
For the untrendy amongst us who are not rushing to pay a fortune for a prandial pyrotechnic display out of a test tube, regional French cuisine retains its timeless appeal: the crispness of a real
salade niçoise
in summer, with crunchy crudités and ripe Saint Pierre tomatoes; a hearty
bouillabaisse
with croutons and a fiery cayenne
rouille
sauce on a winter’s day; Breton crêpes doused in burnt sugar and Calvados for a romantic
dîner
à deux
.
†

† The ingredients of a real
salade niçoise
are the subject of hot debate, but the people of Nice
– who can be presumed to know something about the subject – are adamant that only raw vegetables cut the mustard, and that cooked potatoes are therefore a Parisian bistro abomination.