2002 | No. 60

Why Escoffier?
Surtout, Faites Simple

By James MacGuire

It is now 40 years since the Paris critics Gault and Millau announced the arrival of a Nouvelle Cuisine — lighter, fresher, more spontaneous — to replace a style of cooking that for decades had been ostentatious, absolute, and downright stodgy. That exhausted style was indissolubly linked to Georges Auguste Escoffier, who had died in 1935. His enduring monument, the turn-of-the-century Guide culinaire, still so dominated French cooking that Gault or Millau, never at a loss for words, compared it to Chairman Mao’s little red book. Nouvelle Cuisine, said the chef Michel Guérard, famous for his cuisine minceur, was born out of years and years of frustration. How was it that Escoffier, whose best-known saying was “Above all, make it simple,” became so damned?

Classical French cooking reached its height in European grand hotels before the First World War. It was, by necessity, a cuisine of pomp and ceremony in which dishes were named after favored customers or their mistresses and the ground rules required showy presentation and conspicuously expensive ingredients.

The great classically influenced kitchens, where Nouvelle Cuisine chefs such as Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers learned the trade, remained stiflingly rigid. Things could be done only one way, and underlings were required to prepare superfluous decoration with perfect fastidiousness. Commis and apprentices spent hours fluting mushrooms and turning vegetables into uniform “olives” or seven-sided shapes like a long garlic clove or dicing vegetables into cubes 2 millimeters on a side for brunoise. Hands were never, ever idle. Cooks worked standing, conversation was discouraged, and singing, whistling, and laughing were prohibited. Staffs were so large and the hierarchy so regimented that first-year apprentices might never approach a stove. The chefs de partie (heads of stations) were well into their forties, and even the most talented sous-chef (the second in command) might well retire before ever finding a post as chef de cuisine. Pay was low, hours were long, and underlings suffered brutal abuse. Things were done so much by the book that arguments could arise (I witnessed some myself in the 1970s) as to whether or not blanquette de veau should be sprinkled with parsley before being served (according to Escoffier, the answer is yes). Knowledge of the written rules didn’t suffice because unwritten conventions were equally inviolable.

Dishes like Escoffier’s saddle of veal Orloff — braised, sliced, reassembled with truffles and onion sauce between the slices, and then glazed with cheese-laden Mornay sauce — may represent the worst of classical haute cuisine. As time passed, besides suffering from an intrinsic richness and heaviness, quality was further damaged by cost-cutting in response to the economic effects of two world wars with a depression in between.

Escoffier was born in 1846 in the Provençal village of Villeneuve-Loubet, in the hills between Grasse and Nice. His father was a blacksmith who made locks and all the implements for the farms around. As a child, Escoffier showed an artistic bent and wanted to become a sculptor, but at 14 his parents apprenticed him to his Uncle François, who owned Le Restaurant Français in Nice.

It wasn’t Escoffier’s choice to become a chef, but he must have worked hard and extremely well, because he made quick progress. Soon after his three-year apprenticeship ended, he was appointed chef de cuisine at another fine Nice restaurant. There he had a bit of luck; a visiting Paris restaurateur noticed him and recommended him to Le Petit Moulin Rouge in Paris — not the cabaret but a fashionable restaurant. He was hired as commis-rôtisseur, then elevated to chef saucier, and four years later he was chef de cuisine. That was in 1873, when Escoffier was just 27 years old.

A few years after that, the chef at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, working under the legendary Swiss hotelier César Ritz, was stolen by the competing Hôtel de Paris. Before the chef left, he told Ritz about a possible replacement named Escoffier whom he’d known at Le Petit Moulin Rouge. Ritz met Escoffier and promptly hired him. For six years, Escoffier worked under Ritz during the summer season at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo and during the winter at the National in Lucerne. And when Ritz was hired to run the Savoy Hotel after it opened in London in 1889, he asked Escoffier to take over the kitchen. It was a wonderful collaboration. Ritz was brilliant at his work; he knew the front of the house to the last detail, for instance, keeping women in mind when he studied designs for lighting and grand staircases. Escoffier knew the kitchen, which could make or break a hotel. A kitchen brigade might number 60 to 80 cooks, and the smooth running of such a place was daunting, with everything from purchasing to composing menus to organizing huge banquets under the ægis of the chef. Inventive, artistic cooking was mandatory, within the narrow possibilities of the classical style.

Escoffier was at his height at the Savoy. He realized, as all great hotel chefs do, that logistics are as important as the cooking. He insisted that customers be served hot food quickly. He streamlined and made sweeping changes. He pared down menus to a degree; he simplified presentations, eliminating borders of noodle dough and other uneaten embellishments. Above all, he made the kitchen a cohesive unit. Until then, each station had been autonomous, producing everything necessary to a dish in its charge. Under Escoffier, to eliminate duplication and save time, each station provided its specialty to the rest of the kitchen. The garde manger butchered and portioned all the meats and fish, the sauciers provided all the sauces, etc.

And Escoffier made other changes. He banned the drinking of alcohol in the kitchen, substituting a refreshing malt-based beverage devised by a doctor. Cooks were entreated to wear jackets and ties on the way to and from work. Swearing was prohibited and so was screaming. According to one of his biographers, Eugène Herbodeau, Escoffier would say, “The rush hour is not the signal for a rush of words.” And sometimes he would say, “I can feel myself getting angry,” and he would leave the kitchen for a time.

But in the midst of their success, Ritz and Escoffier left the Savoy. Alan Davidson wrote in The Oxford Companion to Food, “They were dismissed together in 1897, in circumstances distressing for Escoffier, who was aware that the owners had built up a dossier of evidence that he took an illegal ‘cut’ of 5 percent on supplies for the kitchen.” No charges were brought, however, and the partners moved to the Carlton Hotel that same year and continued other projects. (Five years later, Ritz, the younger man, appears to have burned out entirely; he never worked again. Escoffier retired only in 1920 at the age of 73.)

Whatever he may have done to the shareholders of the Savoy, Escoffier had a strong social conscience. In 1910, in a pamphlet on the suppression of poverty, he wrote, “The majority of socialist theories, even the most exaggerated, rest on an undeniably just basis.” And: “A country which assigns more than one thousand million pounds annually to its military and naval forces should logically be able to provide a tranquil and carefree old age for all its people.” Escoffier participated in setting up a retirement home for chefs, helped to collect funds for the families of cooks who died in the First World War, and, more personally, saw to it that Ulysses Rohan, who had been his mentor in Paris at Le Petit Moulin Rouge and later fell on hard times, was cared for at the end of his life. Escoffier always wore a full mustache and always dressed elegantly. When he crossed the street in London as he set out on his daily walk, he tipped the policeman who stopped the traffic. (He was short enough that he wore elevator shoes, originally to distance his face from the heat of the stoves.) He attended the theater and opera assiduously, and he was friendly with Sarah Bernhardt and Nellie Melba. He was the first chef to receive the French Légion d’Honneur.

The original edition of Escoffier’s Guide culinaire appeared in 1903. Chefs in France today, including some of Escoffier’s harshest critics, use the Guide from time to time to look up a specific recipe. None consider it the complete treatise on practice that it once was. Salmon Coulibiac and other horrors are all there, and it is easy, now, to lift one’s eyebrow at the amount of flour or egg yolks in sauces and other preparations. But those who take time to read the Guide, especially the opening chapters on basic operations, are rewarded with a much more positive impression. The formal language includes the odd well-turned phrase. (That may have been the work of either Philéas Gilbert or Émile Fétu, Escoffier’s two principal co-authors in the Guide.) There is much good sense. Escoffier denounced the cynical expression “La sauce fait passer le poisson,” which means that good sauce will save a doubtful fish. He called for craftsmanship on the highest level: “The workman mindful of success, therefore, will naturally direct his attention to the faultless preparation of his stock, and in order to achieve this result, he will find it necessary not merely to make use of the freshest and finest goods, but also to exercise the most scrupulous care in their preparation, for, in cooking, care is half the battle.”

Many principles and techniques are explained with sensitivity. The egg section quotes the writer Monselet, who called eggs the Proteus of the kitchen because of their chameleonlike versatility. An omelette is described as “scrambled eggs in a coat composed of coagulated egg.” The roux-thickened basic brown sauce Espagnole and classic panade-bound force meats appear, of course, but Escoffier predicted a shift toward more delicate veal jus lié and flourless farce mousseline. For roasts, he advocates simply deglazing the pan, even if with just water. That contrasts with later views that adding any liquid but wine or stock was a mortal sin. Escoffier shows much more concern for flavors and textures than did the terse 19th-century author-chefs Jules Gouffé and Urbain Dubois, who wrote similarly comprehensive books. Nowhere is Escoffier more modern than in his discussion of gelatin. He is adamant that aspic should not be a rubbery nightmare, but it should be as melting as possible, ideally sent to the table half-set in a sauce boat.

Escoffier was writing in London, and a number of English recipes appear in the Guide. His introduction politely thanks English gastronomes for their kind reception of his cooking, but he shows contempt for English eating habits. He called savories “heresy” and wanted to eliminate them. It is telling that his wife and children lived in France throughout the 30 years that his work kept him almost entirely in London. The Guide contains peppery comments on the English upper classes: “It is an increasingly common mania among people of inordinate wealth to exact incessantly new or so-called new dishes. Sometimes the demand comes from a host whose luxurious table has exhausted all the resources of the modern cook’s repertory, and who, having partaken of every delicacy, and often too much of good things, anxiously seeks new sensations for his blasé palate.”

Escoffier, despite his elegant clothes and demeanor, seems never to have forgotten his origins. A few rustic dishes, such as cassoulet, appear in the Guide, and one curiosity is a short section devoted to seven Provençal soups, which don’t appear in English editions. They are traditional, rustic, water-based — completely outside the classical tradition.

It seems ironic during the latter half of the 20th century Escoffier gained a reputation for dismal recipes, and the cause may be one of two modest professional handbooks. Years before he produced the Guide, Escoffier began a compendium of the classical repertory, written in culinary shorthand, to be used by cooks and waiters as a reminder of the thousands of recipes then in use. He abandoned the project, which was taken up and finished by a maître d’hôtel named Pierre Dagouret, and for years “le petit Dagouret” was used by dining room personnel. Then in 1914, two chefs named Gringoire and Saulnier published a similar work. Called Le Répertoire de la cuisine, it was dedicated to Escoffier, and this manual quickly became indispensable to professional cooks. Its authors were well aware of their book’s limitations, and they admonished their readers not to abandon the Guide. But that’s exactly what occurred. When I passed briefly through French kitchens 35 years ago, I often heard Gringoire and Saulnier’s Le Répertoire de la cuisine referred to as “L’Escoffier.”

That was not a good thing. The abbreviated form of the Répertoire made classical cooking appear all the more rigid, a system with interchangeable parts like some kind of limited Lego set. The recipe for sole Bercy reads: “Poach with shallots and chopped parsley. Drain. Reduce cooking liquid. Finish with butter. Nap and glaze.” The entry for sole Boistelle says: “Like Bercy with raw sliced mushrooms.” Bonne Femme is: “Like Boistelle with a potato border.” Bréval is: “Bonne Femme with chopped tomatoes.” The Répertoire, which is still in print, froze classical cuisine in the moment before the First World War. The book’s brevity left no room for nuance, and it followed through with none of the master’s predictions. Above all, it lacked the explanations of tastes and textures found in the Guide. Thus a professional manual, ubiquitous within the trade and nearly unknown outside it, may have ruined Escoffier’s reputation and much French cooking along with it.

The Guide culinaire was really intended to be, as it was first titled in English, “a guide to modern cookery.” Escoffier said in his memoir that in an age “when everything changes from within and is transformed from without, it would be absurd to pretend to fix the future of an art that reacts to fashion in so many ways and is as unstable as it is.” Sadly and inexplicably, although Escoffier lived another 35 years, he changed little in the Guide that mattered. But he would surely have been astonished to learn that his book helped to keep serious food in a rut for 70 years and that he would be held personally responsible. At the time the Guide was published, London was a center of French grande cuisine that drew important chefs from France. By the 1960s, French cooks arriving at the Savoy or the Connaught found a level of classicism that was no longer seen in France, a stagnation surely connected with England’s lack of a national cuisine. What counted were respect for tradition and dogged adherence to the rules. (I felt the strength of this in 1977 when I met Silvino Trompetto, the Savoy’s chef. He was incredulous that I was going to Lyon to learn the trade rather than stay in London, and he tried to convince me not to go.)

In France, meanwhile, things had evolved. Regional food was never disdained. Early 20th-century chefs such as Fernand Point and Alexandre Dumaine learned classical principles, then returned to their home regions to apply them to local specialties. The Nouvelle Cuisine chefs, too, had learned all the classics. Just as a jazz musician doesn’t regret the many hours spent as a youth learning classical pieces, these chefs, as they discarded things or built on them, always profited. Much good awareness and energy came with Nouvelle Cuisine, but the situation was never as simple as old versus new. Gault and Millau and the bande à Bocuse exaggerated the radicalism of the new style to draw attention to themselves. In 1980, I saw Jean Delaveyne, one of the fathers of Nouvelle Cuisine — mentor to Michel Guérard and later Joël Robuchon — delight in an apprentice who prepared bœuf à la mode exactly as indicated in the Guide. ●


From issue 60

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