cooking.” In the hands of Carême and
Escoffier, that nouvelle cuisine was
augmented with a few new sauces and became
classic French cooking, the standard
throughout the western world for fine dining.
In time, the classic system became
increasingly rigid and predictable, with most
chefs essentially preparing the same standard
dishes from the same precooked sauce bases.
The 20th century brought a new nouvelle
cuisine, along with the New Novel and the
New Wave in cinema. In the 1960s a number
of well established French chefs, including
Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, the Troisgros
family, and Alain Chapel, led the way in
rethinking the French tradition. They asserted
the chef’s creative role and the virtues of
simplicity, economy, and freshness. Foods
were no longer to be distilled into their
essences, but were to be presented intact, as
themselves.
In 1976, the journalists Henri Gault and
barry
(Barry)
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