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The narrative apex of Disney’s film Ratatouille is a scene where chef Remy must create a dish to impress the most miserable critic in Paris. He chooses ratatouille, but in an almost unrecognisable form: a tiny stack of thin vegetable pucks and a swoosh of green sauce. The meal is so delicious that the critic has a come-to-Jesus moment. Even on learning that Remy is in fact a rat, he decides to risk his reputation on the “discovery and defence of the new”.
Michel Guérard, who died this week aged 91, is the chef to thank for this piece of cinema magic. The last living pioneer of nouvelle cuisine and the creator of its low-calorie spin-off, cuisine minceur, he published the recipe from which Remy’s ratatouille originated in his 1976 bestselling diet cookbook La Grande Cuisine Minceur. It is a useful demonstration of the principles that transformed French gastronomy in the 1970s: the dish is smaller, lighter and far more artistic than tradition would dictate; the vegetables aren’t drowned in sauce and haven’t been overcooked.
Guérard’s career traces a time when the rules of French fine dining went from being heavily codified, to broken, then codified anew. When he was born in 1933, the “roi des cuisiniers” Auguste Escoffier was still alive and the best restaurants were those that turned out technically perfect versions of classic dishes, most likely served in one of the five “mother sauces” that Escoffier had set out.
The young Guérard succeeded within this system. At 25 he was awarded the title “Meilleur Ouvrier de France”, an honour that has been awarded to about the same number of people as have won an Olympic gold medal. But “all patissiers dream of becoming chefs,” as he later told an interviewer. Guérard broke free of his specialisation and became a jobbing cook.
Aged 32, he left Paris, moving first to nearby Asnières, where he transformed a sandwich-slinging local into a first-class bistro and then to Eugénie-les-Bains, a commune known for its thermal waters. His wife, Christine Barthélémy, already owned properties there, which allowed the couple to open Les Prés d’Eugénie in 1974. The restaurant picked up a Michelin star per year for the next three years and never lost them.
In 1973, the year prior to his move, the newly influential restaurant critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau had set out 10 principles of nouvelle cuisine, inspired by evenings spent eating Guérard’s food in Asnières as well as a cohort that included Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel and Michel Troisgros. They styled their guide the “new testament” and swore to do away with “the old-fashioned image of the typical bon vivant” with “lips dripping veal stock”. “There are a million dishes to invent,” wrote Gault and Millau, and Guérard proved it. Among them, oysters in green coffee foam and beef in a squid-ink crust made to resemble charcoal.
In his introduction to La Grande Cuisine Minceur, Guérard claims that his diet regime was born from a personal quest to lose weight while remaining a “cuisinier gourmand”. A more likely story is that he found himself living in a commune populated by health-conscious holidaymakers, married to a wealthy spa owner and with an already-established reputation as a pioneer of a cuisine known for being small and light. Guérard used every culinary trick at his disposal to create three-course meals under 600 calories: mushroom purées to thicken sauces, fromage blanc in place of butter, sweeteners in desserts. The spa became famous, and “cuisine minceur” became a generic name used by many chefs and dozens of diet books around the world.
Most successful rule breakers live to see their innovations codified anew. And by the end of the 1970s anonymous chefs were complaining to The New York Times that they felt “tyrannised” by the new orthodoxy of nouvelle cuisine. Inexperienced cooks tried to ape its signifiers, and their failures, particularly with fruit in savoury dishes, led to ridicule. Even Guérard was sick of it. In 1981 he complained to the paper that he was being served raw and flavourless food overseas that waiters claimed was “French nouvelle cuisine”.
But Guérard’s own star never fell. And despite the existence of a diet menu, Les Prés d’Eugénie maintained a reputation as a great restaurant of many stripes. The St John chef Fergus Henderson, not known for his asceticism, described eating there as the most memorable and “unbelievably rich” meal of his life.
Asked once what his choice of a last meal would be, Guérard began his menu with “a piece of fresh bread, with good butter and a nice, thick layer of caviar”. He was a cuisinier gourmand after all.
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