Delving into Grandma’s cookbooks can also be a source of inspiration.
Is a chicken in every pot compatible with quality? Yes, say some.
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The
ark of taste
Noah saved
animals from the flood on his ark. In 1996, the Italian-based NGO Slow Food* created
the Ark of Taste to “protect the small purveyors of fine food from the deluge of
industrial standardization; to ensure the survival of endangered animal breeds, cheeses,
edible herbs, cereals and fruit; to spread the teaching of taste…” There are only
around 20 mora romagnola pigs left to make delicious hams; only a few hectares of
Sciacchetrà vines in Liguria that produce one of Italy’s finest sweet wines.
A rich, complex, non-industrial, unwritten heritage, fashioned over the centuries
by traditional know-how, is becoming extinct. It is infinitely fragile: if a single
element —either an ingredient or a technique— in the production cycle is missing,
the whole product disappears.
The Ark of Taste has a committee of journalists, teachers and researchers working
to revive, list and publicize these threatened treasures. The main purpose is not
to lock these riches up in some kind of museum, but to bring them back to life. “Praesidia”
have been set up to revive old trades, and to produce and market quality products.
The end goal: “to protect biodiversity and the right to taste.” Slow Food includes
92 such groups; the first one outside Italy rescued a species of Peruvian pig.
*Slow food,
whose motto is, “For the defence of and the right to pleasure,” has an Internet site:
www.slowfood.com
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“As children, we already knew something about cuisine.”
* Since
1978, Alain Senderens, 61, has been among the 20 or so great chefs that restaurant
guides rank in cooking’s elite. In 1985, he took over Lucas Carton’s restaurant on
the Place de la Madeleine in Paris, where he honed his specialty, “creative
cooking.” The business has 68 full-time employees, including 24 cooks, and serves
approximately 60 lunches and slightly more dinners every day, at a price that can
easily exceed 1,000 francs ($150) per person.
Alain Senderens has written many cookbooks, and he is also the author of Proust -
La cuisine retrouvée (“Proust, cuisine regained”), published by Chêne,
1991, a gourmet’s view of the French literary masterpiece. |
Alain
Senderens, one of France’s top chefs, creates dishes for a cosmopolitan elite, but
worries that the dwindling of true homemade cooking is slowly killing off our tastebuds
Is cuisine becoming globalized, like everything else?
It’s commonplace to say that we’re living in a multicultural society, in which
everything is interconnected. What’s more, the transportation revolution is a fact.
So globalizing currents are running through cuisine, just as they are through all
other sectors of every society. But cooking is not becoming globalized, if by globalization
you mean imposing a single model everywhere around the world.
In Antiquity, Pliny the Elder wrote that Greek gourmets travelled around the Mediterranean
basin to sample the freshest products at their prime, rather than have them shipped
to Greece. But of course those goods were already travelling. Today, we get perfectly
fresh produce from Japan and Australia. Another example: in New York’s Little Italy,
you can find better-quality Italian products than those that are widely available
in Italy itself. In the United States, pizza is the best-selling dish. In France,
it’s couscous.
So you’re opening your cuisine up to the world?
I draw tremendous inspiration from Asian cuisine. In 1978, I became the first
chef to introduce soy sauce into gourmet cooking, and, by the way, a food critic
ripped me to shreds. In 1978, I spent two months in China to study Chinese cuisine:
it has some very fine things but is still highly conservative. Thai cuisine, on the
other hand, inspires me a lot because it’s very hot and spicy. I’ve just put tempura,
a typically Japanese way of preparing fried foods, on my menu. I would never have
done that 10 or 20 years ago. But I’ve concocted my own version by adding in some
curry and serving it with Condrieu, a white wine from the Rhône valley.
Recently, a quarrel between some great French chefs pitted the advocates of openness
to the world against the defenders of tradition. You were firmly on the side of the
former.
At the time, I made a comparison with Picasso. Imagine seeing his works when
the debate over them was in full swing. Some people would have said, “he’s not a
great painter, he’s inspired by African art.” The argument in cooking is exactly
the same. They say all our products and recipes must remain French! It’s unbelievable!
But how far should cultural mixing go?
I specialize in creating dishes to marry with my favourite wines. Many vintners
outside France are willing to pay me to put their wine on the menu and invent a dish
to go with it. I haven’t done that yet for two reasons. First, I haven’t found any
outstanding wines, such as American ones for example. You might ask, what makes a
great wine? That’s a highly subjective notion. Wines from the New World are very
powerful, very concentrated, and a little heavy, whereas I like delicate, elegant
wines as feminine as lace, ones that make me want to have another glass. I wouldn’t
say there aren’t any great wines outside France, but they’re scarce and certainly
very expensive. Second, and this is essential, I’m faced with a dilemma: can a three-star
French restaurant get away with serving an American wine?
Aren’t the great chefs creating a cuisine that would satisfy “world taste”? Would
a Brazilian, an American, a Japanese, an African and a Frenchman appreciate your
dishes in the same way?
Yes and no. Let’s go back to painting. An enlightened—and wealthy
—art lover travels to all the art capitals, opening up to a host of styles. That’s
what my clientele is like. They are a tiny minority you meet in very few places.
I believe in gastronomic meridians. Paris, like New York, Los Angeles and perhaps
London, is exceptional because its cuisine is universal. Anyone can enjoy quality
dishes from their own culture. But everywhere else, including in major French cities,
a kind of regional protectionism lives on.
To answer your question, I’m convinced that there are some French dishes a Korean
or a Japanese person wouldn’t like. Classicism is omnipresent outside our very tiny
minority, because even when we travel, we yearn for our roots and want to return
to them. That’s why there’s no globalization of taste: it’ll take at least a hundred
years before that happens. It’s one of the things that changes the slowest. And please
don’t talk to me about the wave of McDonald’s: in a capital city like Paris, they
account for less than five percent of the restaurant trade and people go to them
mainly because that’s all they can afford.
And yet “traditional” cooking is dying out.
Yes, except for a few pockets of resistance, what’s called “bourgeois cuisine”
or “la cuisine du terroir” is giving up ground, quite simply because women’s roles
are changing in our societies. When they come home from work in the evening, they
don’t have time to prepare a veal stew for the family, so they buy ready-made dishes.
Sales of those kinds of products are soaring by about 45 percent a year at the supermarket
chain I work for. Far, very far from the cuisine of the great chefs, cuisine has
gone from the home realm to industry. That’s a serious problem.
Why?
In the years to come, I’m afraid there will be a loss of taste. Our generation
had a culinary history, a family cooking. As children, we already knew something
about cuisine. Today, the overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t have that
knowledge. They’re willing, or doomed, to eat anything.
If somebody earns the minimum wage, has one or two children in school, and has the
rent to pay, what’s left to buy food? They’re doomed to the bottom of the market,
to standardized, uniform products that marketing people have designed to be sold
in hundreds of millions of copies, packed with artificial flavours to bring down
the price. We’re entering a period of two-tiered cuisine: a minority—let’s say 10
percent of the population—can afford our restaurants or our creations sold in supermarkets,
and 90 percent can only afford mass-distributed industrial products.
Whereas some time ago, the chicken you served was the same as what we had for Sunday
dinner.
Earlier, products were not standardized —a lot was left up to chance. But it’s
also true that when people criticize hormone-fed chickens, they forget that in years
past, many families couldn’t afford chicken at all. And quantity isn’t always incompatible
with quality: if a champagne producer invests enough money, he can put 50 million
very good bottles on the market every year.
Nouvelle cuisine, which emphasized products in their own right, emerged in the 1970s,
right after the protest movements of the 1960s. Do you think there’s a connection
between the two?
I think the general social climate has an influence on all of us. I opened my
own restaurant on April 2, 1968. In 1968, I, like other chefs, didn’t want to do
traditional cuisine anymore, although we didn’t have any “political” ulterior motives.
Did nouvelle cuisine revolutionize the production of your ingredients?
For us, the simpler the cuisine, the more exceptional the quality of the ingredients
must be. In the 1970s, when nouvelle cuisine emerged, drawing so much criticism at
the time, we went to see farmers to ask them to supply us with exceptional products.
Thanks to us, pockets of high-quality production formed at a time when intensive
industrial production was becoming widespread. Well before the outbreak of mad cow
disease, the great chefs saved traditional products and launched what later came
to be known as organic produce. We were on the cutting-edge of ecology without knowing
it. The French researcher Claude Fishler1 said that with nouvelle cuisine, people
set out in search of paradise lost, while in traditional cuisine, they drowned products
in sauces that masked the taste because they thought they were mightier than nature.
Could nouvelle cuisine have come about without technological innovations?
They were also a decisive factor. They enable our products to arrive incredibly
fresh. And what can I say about the benefits of these advances on frozen food! Even
fire, with all its symbolism, has changed. For centuries, we cooked with charcoal,
and later, gas. Then electricity came along. The flame, the symbol of male sexuality,
fell out of use just when women were asserting sexual equality. That’s an extraordinary
phenomenon. And today’s vacuum packing could evoke voyages to the stars. It’s enough
to turn you into a philosopher.
Once it was said you could judge top chefs by how well they used leftovers. Today’s
great chefs take pride in keeping nothing from one meal to the next. Haven’t they
gone from economy to wastefulness?
We work mornings for lunch and afternoons for dinner. We do everything over twice
a day, including baking the bread. We do haute cuisine, like designers who do haute
couture, and God knows there’s plenty of waste in the latter… Our clientele expects
the best because we’re very expensive, so we go all out. But 100 years ago, the finest
products were for the best houses only, the average person didn’t eat the same things.
You can outlaw luxury and Rolls Royces and only make Minis, but is it democratic
to bring everybody down to the same level in society, without even leaving them the
chance to dream?
So nouvelle cuisine has become a luxury.
There are gastronomic moments, just as you don’t go to the opera or to a museum
every day, or read a literary masterpiece every night. In my view they’re more powerful
than all the others because haute cuisine includes all the other arts. A painting
appeals to the sense of sight, music to hearing, although the beat may sometimes
make you want to move. In gastronomy, first you eat with the eye, then comes the
sense of touch in your mouth, the sense of smell and, lastly the sense of taste.
The sensation is all-encompassing.
So cuisine has risen to the rank of the eighth art?
No, because it’s always brought down to a minor art. When I ask intellectuals
to explain why, they say that cuisine is ephemeral, the work is destroyed. But today
we have recipes so precise that ingredients are measured to the last gram. They can
be identically reproduced the same way as a piece of music on a record.
Another problem is that most people cannot intellectually analyze cooking the way
they would painting or literature. They don’t have the vocabulary to describe what
gives them pleasure or not. Instead, they just settle for saying “its good” or “it’s
not good.” From that moment, the product, the wine, the dish, dies a quiet death,
for nothing. There’s a lack of culinary culture.
You claim the status of an artist, even going so far as wanting to patent your recipes.
To me, everything that’s classic belongs in the public domain. But today manufacturers
make dishes based on my latest recipes. I don’t think that’s fair. As soon as a journalist
has an excellent meal at my restaurant, everybody tries to copy me without even knowing
how to, and consequently often do a bad job. Obtaining intellectual property rights
is the necessary condition for making sure the recipe is correctly repeated and the
dish keeps its originality.
But a painting or a film can be admired by millions of people, whereas your dishes
are accessible only to a tiny minority.
Yes and no, because I also carry out a social mission. The great chefs have their
ready-to-cook meals just as the great designers have their ready-to-wear lines. The
vacuum-packed meals that I make for a major distributor are an example. Of course,
they can’t be compared with what I do in my restaurant. But on the other hand, it
would be difficult for someone at home to produce such good value for money, because
they cost between 18 and 30 French francs ($2.50 and $4.50). I give the pleasure
of taste back to those who no longer have time to cook.
Do you agree with the saying “you are what you eat”?
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss is even more specific than Goethe,
who supposedly coined the phrase. He asserts that “a society’s cuisine subconsciously
translates its structure, unless, without knowing it, it is resigned to revealing
its contradictions.” My profession and my family culture make me a man of the past,
but I also try to be part of our times. We’re going through a transition period,
the birth of a new civilization and the end of the one that has ruled for 2,000 years.
Unfortunately, we only have words, ideas and our past culture, which are insufficient
for imagining the world of tomorrow. That contrast probably explains why, like many
people today, I’m in an awkward position, especially since, one or two years ago,
a customer told me, “Monsieur Senderens, when the Romans started erecting statues
of their cooks, everything started going downhill very fast for them…”
1. Claude Fischler,
researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, is the author of
L’Homnivore, 1990, Odile Jacob, Paris. |
