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 puree. 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 saute 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 pathmaking 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 marche 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 Provencal, or Savoyard place. (Even at the exquisite Grand Vefour, 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 saucemaking: 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 Savoys 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 Kleber, Alex, who is from New York (she went to Barnard, Mom’s an editor at Scribner’s, Dad’s a professor), said, “I decided I wanted to chop onions, so I tried the CIA”—the Culinary Institute of America, the MIT 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 ca 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.