NOUVELLE CUISINE INFORMATION

NOUVELLE CUISINE

   Nouvelle cuisine The expression "nouvelle cuisine" has been used several times in the course of the history of cooking, particularly in France in the middle of the eighteenth century. 
   It was introduced to subordinate the practice of cooking to principles of chemistry that were to be established by Lavoisier later on. People had mixed feelings about it: for instance, Voltaire wrote "I must say that my stomach does not at all agree with the 'nouvelle cuisine. 
   Nouvelle cuisine (French, "new cuisine") is an approach to cooking and food presentation in French cuisine. In contrast to cuisine classique, an older form of haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine is characterized by lighter, more delicate dishes and an increased emphasis on presentation. 
   It was popularized in the 1960s by the food critics Henri Gault, who invented the phrase, and his colleagues André Gayot and Christian Millau in a new restaurant guide, the Gault-Millau, or Le Nouveau Guide.
   Nouvelle cuisine eclectic style in international cuisine, originating in France during the 1960s and ’70s, that stressed freshness, lightness, and clarity of flavour and inspired new movements in world cuisine. 
   In reaction to some of the richer and more-calorie-laden extravagances of classic French grande cuisine, nouvelle cuisine sought to emphasize the natural flavours, textures, and colours of foodstuffs. 
   Citing the unhealthiness of a diet heavy in fats, sugars, refined starches, and salt, it minimized the use of those ingredients. Nouvelle cuisine was also influenced by the Japanese style of food presentation.
 

Characteristics of Nouvelle Cuisine

   Nouvelle cuisine has several characteristics. Most important were the quality and the freshness of the products chefs used. They went shopping to the market every morning and looked for the best products, and never used any preservatives, deep-frozen food, or any product that was not absolutely fresh. 
   They did not offer a menu card with a long list of dishes that never changed, the reason being that such a long list required having a great quantity of products available. As a result the leftovers would necessarily lose their freshness and thus could not be used. 
   Instead, they offered a reduced number of recipes that kept changing every day according to their market shopping. At the time, in Paris, this was made easier thanks to Les Halles, a huge market right in the heart of the city, within walking distance of every restaurant. 
   Because they were looking for quality, the chefs became more and more attracted by unusual, exotic products. Foreign influences prevailed, particularly those of North Africa (Morocco, especially), Italy, China, and Japan. 

   In 1960 Shizuo Tsujui opened the first school of French cuisine in Japan, which multiplied the cultural exchanges between the two countries. So much so that in 2000, Alain Senderens remarked "the nouvelle cuisine is now Japanese."
   In the new style of preparations, there were no fonds de sauces used in the dishes any more. Sometimes, short juices, quickly made, were turned into a small quantity of sauce, which was to be served on fresh, only lightly cooked products.

   The spices banished from the French cuisine since the seventeenth century were now back in use; contrary to the Middle Ages, they were no longer used in large quantities, but in small touches and only to rouse the flavors that would blend with those of the products. 
   The effect they aimed at was to enhance the quintessence of the product, that is to say that sauces or spices were only used to bring out the product's taste and qualities, not as a substitute for them.
   The approach was similar to that of previous cuisine movements. The new chefs stressed the importance of nutrition and its consequence for people's health. They wanted to change the image of an obese gastronome into that of the slim, smart dilettante so much in vogue in the magazines of the 1960s. 
   For their female clients, always anxious to watch their figures, the chefs felt urged to contrive new recipes that could be delightful without being rich. Indeed, it is significant to note that the first book written in 1976 by Michel Guerard was La cuisine minceur.
   As a result, less food was served; of course what each dish lacked in quantity had to be replaced by better quality and a better esthetic presentation.

   It is true that the grande cuisine had always included an element of display and ceremony: As the dishes were prepared for all the guests present, the dinners were organized as a ceremony for the whole party, to such an extent that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Antonin Carême defined the patisserie (pastry cooking) as a branch of architecture. 
   Instead, the new chefs replaced the presentation of entire dishes with that of individual plates; what was considered beautiful and attractive was not the whole chicken, the whole pate en croute, or baba, but the layout of the food on each plate that the guest was about to eat. 
   To serve the dishes, the chefs no longer enacted their ritual at the pedestal tables on which they used to carve the meat or flambé the basses. They brought each guest their own plates, with the food previously prepared. 
   Sometimes, it was hidden under shining dish covers the waiter would take off as a surprise, once the plate was set in front of the guest. Then the guests would appraise the esthetic aspect of the layout and enjoy the all-pervading fragrances of the food.

   The chefs were always in search of new products and new aromas. Similarly they also kept looking for new techniques. 
   As they were the best technicians of their generation, they began using all the new tools available: cutter blenders, food processors, nonstick materials, and so forth. 
   The relationship between food and fire had become a central problem, so they started experimenting with new methods such as cooking under vacuum, microwave ovens, and steam ovens. Yet this did not mean that they ignored some of the old methods; in fact quite a number of them were brought back into fashion, for instance, the cuisson en croute de sel and steam cooking.
   Moreover the fact that they had learned how to control the use of refrigeration enabled them to use new ways of preparing the food or carving the meats, which otherwise would not have been possible.

   Gault and Millau "discovered the formula" contained in ten characteristics of this new style of cooking. The ten characteristics identified were:

• A rejection of excessive complication in cooking.
• Cooking times for most fish, seafood, game birds, veal, green vegetables and pâtés were greatly reduced in an attempt to preserve the natural flavors. Steaming was an important trend from this characteristic.
• The cuisine was made with the freshest possible ingredients.
• Large menus were abandoned in favor of shorter menus.
• Strong marinades for meat and game ceased to be used.
• They stopped using heavy sauces such as espagnole and béchamel in favor of seasoning their dishes with fresh herbs, high-quality butter, lemon juice, and vinegar.
• They used regional dishes for inspiration instead of cuisine classique dishes.
• New techniques were embraced and modern equipment was often used; Bocuse even used microwave ovens.
• The chefs paid close attention to the dietary needs of their guests through their dishes.
• The chefs were extremely inventive and created new combinations and pairings  

   The term "nouvelle cuisine" has been used several times in the history of French cuisine, to mark a clean break with the past.
In the 1730s and 1740s, several French writers emphasized their break with tradition, calling their cooking "modern" or "new". Vincent La Chapelle's published his Cuisinier moderne in 1733–1735. 
   The first volumes of Menon's Nouveau traité de la cuisine came out in 1739. And it was in 1742 that Menon introduced the term nouvelle cuisine as the title of the third volume of his Nouveau traité. François Marin worked in the same tradition.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the cooking of Georges Auguste Escoffier was sometimes described with the term.

   The modern usage is variously attributed to authors Henri Gault, Christian Millau, and André Gayot,who used nouvelle cuisine to describe the cooking of Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé, and Raymond Oliver, many of whom were once students of Fernand Point.
   Paul Bocuse claimed that Gault first used the term to describe food prepared by Bocuse and other top chefs for the maiden flight of the Concorde airliner in 1969.

   The style Gault and Millau wrote about was a reaction to the French cuisine classique placed into "orthodoxy" by Escoffier. Calling for greater simplicity and elegance in creating dishes, nouvelle cuisine is not cuisine minceur ("thin cooking"), which was created by Michel Guérard as spa food. 
   It has been speculated that the outbreak of World War II was a significant contributor to nouvelle cuisine's creation—the short supply of animal protein during the German occupation made it a natural development.

origin
 day nouvelle cuisine refers to a trend of opinion that appeared in France in the 1960s. At the time, it caught on rapidly and was a great international success. 
   Yet, as it got tangled up in its contradiction, it stopped being fashionable, and nowadays it has a negative connotation. In spite of that, it was an innovative and quite important movement, which brought about a revolution within the "grande cuisine" whose lessons are still present in the grand chefs' minds.

   In the early 21st century, it was difficult to appreciate just how rigid the grande cuisine system of French chefs Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier had become by the mid-20th century. It was a highly regimented repertoire. 

   Chefs could, and did, invent new dishes, but there was much reverence for the past and its rules for and techniques of food preparation. Indeed, the veneration of the past was so strong that younger chefs began to feel that their creativity was constrained.

   By the 1960s a few young French chefs had started to take issue with the system. Many of them had trained with Fernand Point, a brilliant chef whose career began in the age of Escoffier but then took a different turn. 

   Point developed his own experimental cuisine, anticipating the changes that his protégés would perfect. Ultimately, his role as a mentor for the next generation of chefs was more important than his own direct contributions.

   Point’s former students began to experiment and abandon tradition, creating lighter menus, introducing lower-fat sauces and vegetable purees, borrowing ingredients from non-French cuisines, and plating dishes in the kitchen instead of at the table. 

   Although those changes were controversial, by 1972 the innovations had been christened nouvelle cuisine.

   Gault and Millau, with their friend André Gayot, had founded the publication in 1969 to protest the Michelin guide, which they criticized as “a stubborn bastion of conservatism” that ignored “the new generation of French chefs who had guts.” 

   The inaugural issue of Le Nouveau Guide featured a cover story on Bocuse, Guérard, Louis Outhier, Alain Senderens, and 44 other chefs under the headline “Michelin: Don’t Forget These 48 Stars!” Senderens, in fact, would famously “give back” the stars that Michelin had awarded his famed restaurant, Lucas Carton (now named Senderens), proclaiming, “I want to simplify my cooking, allow myself more liberty and reduce the average check.”

   In 1973, in number fifty-four of their guide, Gaut and Millau published the ten commandants of nouvelle cuisine, among which they advocated that one should reduce cooking time, use best-quality products and products fresh from the market, offer a shorter menu, limit the use of modern technical tools, while keeping open to new developments, do away with marinades and game hanging, cook sauces that were less rich, respect dietary rules, use a simple estheticism, and be creative. To these commandments, they added another one: friendship.

   From then on, nouvelle cuisine became quite fashionable. It was everywhere, on television, on the radio, in the newspapers; people talked about it and held controversial discussions. The chefs who had become real stars were rich enough to purchase their own restaurants and become their own masters. 

   The economic boom of the 1960s and the 1970s boosted the careers of the chefs, providing them with much money, which of course incited other less-gifted chefs to follow suit.
   Unfortunately for several of them, what ought to have been simple, original, or healthy food became approximate, ridiculous, meager food. 
   The journalists who had praised the best chefs, now did the same with drudges, and gave the seal of quality to poor, ridiculous, and botched dishes. As a result, the movement was quite discredited though the greatest chefs were never criticized by those who blamed their imitators. 

   By the 1980s, nouvelle cuisine had lost its appeal and today it is no longer used; it even has turned into a pejorative connotation.
   The concepts used by the chefs who inspired them predominate within today's grande cuisine, not only in France, but the world over. Products must be selected with a ruthless eye on quality, wines and dishes matched with flair, cooking times short and accurate, and sauces lighter. 
   Judicious blending of foreign trends and customs is a major element. An attractive plate is served, the food displayed simply and esthetically. An open mindedness and a concern for nutrition and diet are the essential ingredients binding the whole approach. 
   Today, there cannot be a grand chef in the world who has not in some way or other been influenced by the nouvelle cuisine ethos.

   In 1973 Gault published “The Ten Commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine giving the movement a set of precepts that helped nouvelle cuisine reach a wider audience. 

The 10 commandments were:

1. Thou shalt not overcook.
2. Thou shalt use fresh, quality products.
3. Thou shalt lighten thy menu.
4. Thou shalt not be systematically modernist.
5. Thou shalt nevertheless seek out what the new techniques can bring you.
6. Thou shalt avoid pickles, cured game meats, fermented foods, etc.
7. Thou shalt eliminate rich sauces.
8. Thou shalt not ignore dietetics.
9. Thou shalt not doctor up thy presentations.
10. Thou shalt be inventive.

   First and foremost, the nouvelle cuisine was a genuine revolution accomplished by the chefs themselves, more precisely the best of them. However, the newspapers and other media played an important part in the overall outcome. 
   Raymond Oliver was the first to appear on a weekly TV show, which lasted for fourteen years and made him a star. Other chefs also became stars, which was seldom the case before that.

   The expression "nouvelle cuisine" owes a great part of its success to two journalists, Henri Gault and Christian Millau (who for the first time in 1969 published the Nouveau Guide, followed in 1971 by the Guide Gault et Millau, a monthly magazine which soon became popular and had a great influence on the chefs as well as on their clients). 
   Besides, at the time, the expression itself fitted nicely into a whole set of new trends of thought, of things or events which had appeared after World War II, for instance la nouvelle critique litteraire (the new literacy criticism), le nouveau roman (the new novel, with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon), and la nouvelle vague (the new wave) in the cinema with Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. 

   Traditional guides, the Michelin in particular, had already acknowledged the worthy chefs by giving them one to three stars: for example, Paul Bocuse was awarded three stars in 1965, Haberlin, in 1967, and Troigros and Barrier, in 1968. 
   The new Gault et Millau Guide quite cleverly introduced a new distinction between the nouvelle cuisine chefs and the traditional ones. 
   Later on the distinction was noted by a printed symbol, the former having a red one and the latter a black one

   Despite such criticism, the nouvelle movement took hold of the culinary landscape in France and spurred new trends in world cuisine. The extent of nouvelle cuisine’s impact is evident in a longitudinal study that followed roughly 600 elite French chefs(those with one or more Michelin stars) from 1970 through 1997.

    Northwestern University sociologist Hayagreeva Rao and his colleagues analyzed each chef’s top three signature dishes and found that, in 1970, 36 percent of the chefs had just one nouvelle-cuisine signature dish and 48 percent had none. 

   By 1997 only 6 percent had none, and 70 percent were predominantly nouvelle cuisine (with two or more signature dishes in the nouvelle style). The study, published in 2003, concluded that nouvelle cuisine was a true social movement, not a mere culinary trend.

   Nouvelle cuisine was clearly a successful revolution; it succeeded so well that by the early 21st century French cuisine was largely seen through its lens. High-end chefs made great dishes born in the prenouvelle years, but usually that work was a self-conscious throwback to an earlier age. 

   Many long-cherished aspects of Escoffier’s grande cuisine, such as sauces made with meat extracts and thickened with flour-based roux, were discarded outright.

   The nouvelle movement also fundamentally changed restaurants. Escoffier had championed service à la Francaise, in which empty plates were set before each diner and waiters served and carved food at the table. 

   Nouvelle cuisine featured plated dishes, assembled in the kitchen by chefs. The waiter simply set the prepared plate in front of the diner.

   Yet in another sense, nouvelle cuisine was a rather limited revolution, because it was all about techniques and ingredients. The famous 10 principles of nouvelle cuisine championed by Gault and Millau all had to do with rather technical aspects of cooking—important to chefs and food critics who had been steeped in the traditions of la grande cuisine—that seemed quite ordinary in the 21st century. High-end food was, ultimately, still high-end food, just with a slightly different set of techniques.

   Outside France, nouvelle cuisine had an enormous impact in some places and barely any in others, depending on the country and its local gastronomic culture. In the United States, nouvelle cuisine was deeply influential, helping to inspire “New American” cuisine. 

   American chefs borrowed techniques from nouvelle cuisine, but more important than any single technique or principle was the idea of revolution itself. American chefs had not been steeped in la grande cuisine, so instead they rebelled against mass-produced uninspired food. 

   Those chefs, including the likes of Alice Waters and Charlie Trotter, created a distinctive New American cuisine based on regional ingredients and food traditions but with a clear nod to nouvelle techniques.

   The same effect occurred in the United Kingdom, where a generation of “New British” chefs emerged, adamant that British food was not synonymous with bad food. Chefs such as Nico Lad enis, Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, and Fergus Henderson took principles of nouvelle cuisine and applied them in their own characteristic ways. 

   With the help of a number of French expatriates—such as Albert and Michel Roux, Raymond Blanc, and Pierre Koffmann—those chefs took French nouvelle cuisine directly to British diners. As in the United States, that helped lead a movement toward higher-quality food and dining.

   In Spain, the effect of nouvelle cuisine was much more limited. It was clearly an inspiration for Spanish Basque chef Juan Mari Arzak, who created his own distinctive style that would later inspire other Spanish chefs. 

   But throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Spanish food was largely unaffected by the developments in France.

   Italy had even less of a reaction to the nouvelle revolution. In part, that was so because Italian cuisine had always been highly regional and did not have centralized standards.

    There was no set of oppressive grande cuisine rules to rebel against. 

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Http://www.encyclopedia.com/sports-and-everyday-life/food-and-drink/food-and-cooking/nouvelle-cuisine

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