The Secret History of French Cooking: The Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern - Couverture rigide

Barr, Luke

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1524744735 ISBN 13 : 9781524744731

Editeur : Dutton, 2026

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Provence, 1970, a lively, dramatic account of the rise of French “nouvelle cuisine,” and the renegade chefs of the 1960s and 70s who revolutionized modern cooking.

In The Secret History of French Cooking, Luke Barr takes readers inside the culinary rebellion that upended the staid French food world and reinvented the role and cultural importance of chefs and restaurants. The very idea of the chef as creator—as innovator, artist, auteur—can be traced back to the legendary Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and the Troisgros brothers, among other colorful characters. The techniques they pioneered-- fresh food, globally inspired ingredients, shorter cooking times, and avant-garde methods-- both shocked and inspired the restaurants of the day.

The book also tells the largely unknown story of a group of women chefs, including Simone Lemaire, Christiane Massia, and Olympe Nahmias, who fought for recognition in the all-male culinary establishment of the 1970s, and the villainous, all-powerful food critic who cast a shadow over the era.

This is a tale of rivalries, global success, and a ferocious backlash; of celebrity, money, politics, and incredibly delicious food. The Secret History of French Cooking reveals the origins of modern food and restaurant culture—the way we eat today.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

LUKE BARR is the author of Provence, 1970 (about his great-aunt M. F. K. Fisher) and Ritz & Escoffier. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, architect Yumi Moriwaki, and their two daughters.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

1

1965

Crossing the Champs-Élysées in the late afternoon, dusk coming on, the night ahead of him, Michel Guérard could feel all the pent-up energy of a changing city. He was going to work. Le Lido, at number 78, just down the street from the iconic red awnings of Fouquet's brasserie, was a pillar of Paris nightlife, and Guérard was the pastry chef there. The club served six hundred dinner customers a night, but the food wasn't the reason people came. They came for the show-to see the Bluebell Girls.

The cabaret was a confection of titillating silliness-a chorus line of extravagantly costumed, high-kicking can-can dancers, innocent stripteases, and big band numbers interspersed with the occasional mime or topless snake handler. The tables were covered in white linen, set too close together and filled with dark-suited men smoking cigarettes and bejeweled women in evening gowns. There were celebrities, socialites, and a lot of tourists. Americans and Brits. Le Lido was owned by the Clerico brothers, Joseph and Louis. They'd bought the club in 1946, and had more recently also purchased the Moulin Rouge in the seedier, red-light Pigalle neighborhood. The Clericos-former glass manufacturers made wealthy during the war-were now the princes of the Paris cabaret world. They'd installed vast kitchens and inaugurated elaborate dinner shows-guests eating and drinking and talking as they watched the performances.

The food was mostly unremarkable and always expensive, but it didn't matter. There was something magical-or was it just libidinal?-about the place, and Guérard loved it. The rush of the dinner crowd. The throngs of half-dressed women backstage, laughing. They towered over him in their heels. He was relatively short, and the dancers were required to be at least five foot eight. Many were former ballerinas deemed too tall for ballet; many were Russian or Australian.

Guérard was thirty-two and single. He'd grown up in the countryside of Normandy, the son of a butcher, and had been working in kitchens since he was seventeen. He'd trained at the Crillon Hotel and won the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) award in 1958 as a pastry chef. He'd also spent a few years working at top Paris restaurants, including Maxim's and Lucas Carton.

Now, at the Lido of all places, he'd had an epiphany. He had seen the future, and he had the old man, his boss Joseph Clerico, to thank.

Clerico was in his sixties and semiretired, having put his two sons in charge a few years earlier, in 1962-Jacki Clerico at the Moulin Rouge and Christian Clerico at the Lido. Joseph, meanwhile, hosted weekend dinner parties at the Château des Gondi in Villepreux, close to the palace of Versailles, a half hour west of Paris. This was the Clerico family's grand estate, a formal, nineteenth-century castle with sprawling gardens, parkland, fountains, tennis courts, and horse stables. Joseph invited an eclectic group to his dinners, a cross section of Parisian high society and various creative types-artists, dancers, painters, and actors. And he'd recently asked Guérard to come to the château for the weekend and cook for his guests.

Guérard was an exceedingly charming man-maybe that's what had caught the elder Clerico's attention. He was, moreover, a perfectly trained chef, winner of the MOF award, and it was known to all that he aspired to be more than a pastry chef. Guérard said yes immediately.

There was no set menu, or any direction given at all about the food. Cook what you like, Clerico said to Guérard-anything at all. A glamorously casual, bohemian, modern, mid-'60s dinner party in a château outside Paris had no use for classical, old-fashioned cooking. Make something new, Clerico said. Guérard had free rein.

It was, for Guérard, a revelation, what he'd been craving: to break free of familiar haute cuisine formulas and rich sauces. To cook in a way that made sense of the present. This was the moment: the first inkling of the alchemy that would transform his cooking, and everything else.

He cooked quickly and simply-small chicken breasts, gently sautéed with slices of small cucumbers and sugar. A bit of cream, a bit of Noilly Prat vermouth. This was not a preparation found in any cookbook, or in Escoffier's teachings, or anywhere in the annals of French cuisine. The dish was light, unexpected, improvised, and that was the point.

The guests loved what he cooked. The energy of the city, of the time, had found its way onto their plates, it seemed. The food was intoxicating-not because it was outlandish or exotic but because it was original, and delicious. The sense of liberation Guérard felt went beyond the kitchen; it was connected to the experimentation all around, in art, in music, in film. There was a new energy in the air, formality and artifice giving way to something looser, sexier. You could see it in the films of the New Wave, in Godard's Bande à Part the previous year; you could hear it in "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" from the Rolling Stones, who'd just played three sold-out nights at the Olympia music hall in Paris. The Beatles had played twenty back-to-back shows at the Olympia in 1964, and Beatlemania had gone international. Teen starlet France Gall still dominated the radio with faux-innocent pop songs like "Sacré Charlemagne," but things were changing in fits and starts. In the middle of the 1960s, the world had turned from black and white to Technicolor. Or that's how it felt, anyway.

For the past few years Guérard had been living on a houseboat on the Seine, permanently docked near the Pont de la Concorde. The flat-bottomed barge-a péniche-belonged to a friend, a sculptor, and together they presided over a stream of friends and friends of friends who came to eat and drink and talk late into the night, records playing on the hi-fi.

Was there a disconnect between his life and his work? Between his classical training and his individuality, his creativity? Back at work in the kitchen at Le Lido the following week, Guérard, no doubt thinking of his dinner party triumph as well, came to the realization that he needed to open his own restaurant. Le Lido was fun, but it was a relic of the past-of late nineteenth-century cabaret entertainment, and of the Rat Pack 1950s too. (Indeed, Le Lido had exported its show to the Stardust casino when it opened in Las Vegas in 1958.) Guérard was full of ideas, and ambition. Here he was working in a cabaret kitchen, putting out spectacular, multitiered desserts for Elizabeth Taylor and other celebrity guests, but it was the simple, idiosyncratic chicken breasts sautéed with cucumbers and cream that inspired him.

Yes, one way or another-and despite the fact that he had almost no money at all-he was going to open a restaurant of his own.

###


Just a few blocks away from the Lido cabaret, Robert Courtine was eating dinner at Restaurant Lasserre, one of the best in the city, he thought. There were a handful of such places, lauded by both the Michelin and Kléber-Colombes guides, icons of French sophistication-the “grand tables” of Paris: Maxim’s. Le Grand Véfour. La Tour d’Argent. Lapérouse. These were the city’s historic three-star restaurants, most of them dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the palaces of French haute cuisine. Lasserre was a relative newcomer, opened in 1942. It occupied an elegant two-story building on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, directly across the street from the imposing columns of the vast Grand Palais exhibition hall. The dining room was on the second floor, set under its famous retractable roof. During nice weather, one ate under the stars at Lasserre, all the cigarette and cigar smoke released into the night air every so often as the mechanical roof slid open.

Courtine looked around the room, his alert, intelligent gaze taking in the scene. The quiet murmuring of wealthy Parisians and the international beau monde at dinnertime, the calm, unhurried purposefulness of the waiters and captains. The decor was extravagant: off-white and gold fabrics on the walls with jewel-toned highlights; brocaded cut velvet lining the elevator; the ceiling painted by Louis Touchagues with dancing art deco-style women and winged horses; a profusion of white orchids everywhere; sparkling antique chandeliers, mirrors, candelabras, and Chinese porcelain-everything gilded, or crystal, or silver. It was almost too much.

Courtine loved it. On special occasions, the restaurant released caged white doves into the dining room. It was that kind of place.

He raised a finger to summon the waiter, who'd been lurking nearby obsequiously. Courtine was a VIP at Lasserre, and at every restaurant in France for that matter. He was the formidable, all-powerful, fiercely opinionated restaurant critic for Le Monde, the most important newspaper in the country. A word from Courtine could spell success or disaster for a restaurant, and he knew it. Lasserre was one of his long-time favorites; Courtine had been coming here since 1952, when he joined Le Monde, and he was treated as an old friend by René Lasserre, the proprietor. Courtine was never presented with a bill.

The waiter took his order for a glass of whiskey-"un malt," he called it-his drink of choice.

The food at Lasserre was traditional and conspicuously "de luxe." Truffles, foie gras, oysters, and caviar; steak, lobster, duck, and quail. Noble ingredients, rich sauces, and classical preparations. Lasserre was perhaps the ultimate expression of postwar Parisian sophistication. For Courtine, the menu represented the glory of haute cuisine, the glory of France.

Courtine was a chauvinist. He believed in tradition. His views of restaurants and cooking were deeply intertwined with his view of France itself, and the primacy of French culture. The terroir. The land. The soil. Every ingredient was a reflection of its source.

He felt France in his bones. He was as passionate about an authentic boeuf à la ficelle-boiled beef and vegetables-at a loud working man's bistro, served with a large pot of Dijon mustard and no other garnish at all, as he was about the delicately stuffed poussin viroflay he planned to order for dinner tonight at Lasserre.

He welcomed all styles and varieties of French cuisine. What he demanded was quality, and respect for history. What he abhorred was fast food in all its permutations. The "Americanization" of taste, the recent proliferation of vast "hypermarché" supermarkets, the ubiquity of frozen fish-even at gourmet restaurants. Courtine was steadfast in his contempt for all such trends, for shortcuts and "convenience," for all the cheap abundance of the postwar economic boom.

He waved for the waiter, ready to order.

Courtine was a slim man with a high, domed head, mostly bald, and extravagantly long sideburns; he was fifty-five years old. He wrote his weekly column in Le Monde under a pen name-La Reynière. He'd chosen the name in honor of the eighteenth-century aristocrat and gourmet Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, famous in Napoleon's time for his lavish dinner parties and for writing the Almanach des Gourmands, a restaurant guide to Paris published between 1803 and 1812. Courtine liked the mystique the alias evoked-the power of the definite article and single name. It wasn't a question of anonymity, really; all the restaurateurs who mattered knew who he was and treated him royally. But the pen name was a cloak, obscuring his identity to the broader public. The single-name alias was also in the tradition of Curnonsky, the great food writer of the first half of twentieth-century France, whose real name had been Maurice Edmond Sailland. Curnonsky-widely referred to as the "Prince des Gastronomes"-had died nine years earlier, in 1956, and Courtine, a.k.a. La Reynière, had taken up the mantle.

For Courtine, the poussin viroflay epitomized the cooking at Lasserre: elegant, complicated, and opulent. A small spring chicken, deboned and stuffed with finely chopped spinach and flecks of ham, roasted and served with a truffle sauce. It was one of the restaurant's signature dishes, a version of Escoffier's classic poularde princesse Hélène, a recipe dating back to the late nineteenth century. The plate arrived at Courtine's table with a garnish of an artichoke heart crowned with an array of tiny mushrooms. "The perfection of details" was the key, Courtine thought as he ate-the secret to great French cooking. At Lasserre, the plates were decorated as carefully as the room itself. His dessert was a similarly flawless confection, the timbale Élysée, a sweet round cake served with ice cream and glazed fresh fruit and topped with a delicate spun sugar dome, an edible objet d'art.

It was the ideal meal. If he was forced to choose, Courtine would have to say that Lasserre deserved its three Michelin stars a bit more than any other restaurant in Paris. He admired most of all Lasserre's notably "few concessions to fashion," as he put it in his column later that week. Lasserre was of the old school, a classic. Of course, Courtine had his quibbles: the appearance of farmed quail on the menu, for example, which he considered "not worthy of the name." (Quail was increasingly popular, and customers apparently didn't care whether it was wild.) This was his job: to criticize even his favorite restaurants, to keep them in line. He would make disapproving note of the farmed quail in his column that week, too, even as he sang the restaurant's praises.

He smiled. Here was the defender of tradition at the height of his power, in his element in the glittering dining room at Lasserre, maintaining-singlehandedly, he sometimes felt-the unassailable grandeur of French haute cuisine.

###


Her sister had bought a castle.

It was like something out of a fairy tale: small and solid, stone walls rising three stories beneath a steep black roof, two towers rising higher still, one of them topped with a medieval, crenelated parapet, the other with an elegant conical spire. The Château du Mayet-d'École was in the countryside near Vichy-central France, west of Lyon-and dated back centuries. The previous owners had operated a small hotel and restaurant in the castle, and her sister would do the same. They called it the Hostellerie de la Reine Jeanne, and this was where Simone Lemaire was now working.

The château was set on a national highway-not the famous "Nationale 7," memorialized in the Charles Trenet song from 1959, a celebration of driving south to the Mediterranean, vacation-bound. No, the Reine Jeanne was on the number 9, not far away, but there was still plenty of traffic on the two-way road through the countryside. The restaurant had been open a few weeks and was doing well.

Lemaire worked wherever she was needed-helping in the kitchen and the dining room. They had hired a chef to run the kitchen, and the sisters did everything else. Lemaire did all the shopping, keeping track of provisions and inventory, and it was she who first noticed the disappearance of various items: cuts of meat, boxes of truffles, and other ingredients. Who could it be but their newly hired chef? They decided to confront him.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Dutton
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1524744735
• ISBN 13: 9781524744731
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Dutton; https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/; ; Im Mittelfeld 25; K?ln; Deutschland; 51105; Allemagne