French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [6]
Before long other innovatory ideas were aired. There was to be a veto on flour-thickened sauces. These were duly replaced either by syrupy reductions or glazes given a medieval sweet-sour treatment with the addition of cherry, blackberry, rosehip or bilberry vinegar. Alternatively the reductions could be given fragile substance with an admixture of fromage frais or a light purée of chervil or watercress. Cream and butter were evidently to be retained in plenty (this was not cuisine minceur), pools of beurres blancs and hollandaises would compensate for the banished béchamel and mornay sauces. Startling combinations and novel juxtapositions, such as sautéed parsnips with fresh foie gras or a wing of skate lightly laid on a mattress of rhubarb roulade, a spoonful of currants plumped in sherry scattered with exquisitely studied carelessness all around were the kind of impishly original ideas which a couple of months after launching became restaurant clichés. Soon the nest of pommes paille and the little bunch of watercress, for about fifty years the obligatory garnish of every roast chicken in France, but spurned by the new regime in favour of more diverting decoration such as sliced pawpaw with oak-leaf lettuce and candied cardomum seeds, began once more to exert a certain allure. An old-fashioned pate de campagne, rich and coarse and for a while superseded by genteel little slices of terrine de petits légumes with rows of peas embedded in a mousseline of spinach and courgettes is—speaking for myself—already a welcome retrogression from those airy little nothings accompanied by their trois sauces served in dolls’ house swimming pools round one side of the plate.
To be sure, it is easy enough to make fun of nouvelle cuisine affectation. Everyone who has experienced it in restaurants where it is practised, whether in France, England, elsewhere in Europe (in Holland and Italy I have had some quite bizarre nouvelle cuisine meals set before me), or in the United States, has his or her own story of the five green beans sitting lonely on one side of a huge white plate, three tepid chicken livers avec ses quelques feuilles de salade nine inches distant on the opposite edge. The ineffably precious style of plate presentation developed by the current generation of chefs and restaurateurs is of course—and this is something which neither its admirers not its critics have so far as I know pointed out —nothing at all to do with cuisine but everything to do with portion control. Take away those huge and inappropriate plates with their finicky and often inept arrangements, put the cooked food back where it belongs in serving dishes to be offered to or set in front of the customers, and French restaurant cooking would, I think, very quickly regain its faltering status, and with it its diminished spirit of generosity.
The enticement of the wonderful smells of fine cooking, now diffused and muddled by the obligatory plate service, the intense visual stimulus once inseparable from a meal in a good French country restaurant but now destroyed by misguided imitation of Japanese-style presentation, could quite easily be restored to us. In other words it is not so much the cooking that is wrong, except in the most blatantly arrogant establishments, as a certain coldness and ungenerosity of spirit, an indifference to the customer, now manifest in establishments operated on nouvelle cuisine principles. ‘It is to the real gastronomes and gourmets that even the greatest chefs