Is Escoffier Relevant Today?

[robert brown]

NickN proposed and wrote this topic:

When the Symposium first made its appearance with a request for topics, my first thought was, "Is Escoffier relevant today? What remains of his work that influences chefs today?"

It was only a few years ago when reading Michael Ruhlman’s, "The Making of a Chef", that I became aware of Escoffier. It was also though reading Making of a Chef that my cooking horizons really began to expand and soon I bought a copy of "The Professional Chef" from the CIA.

Here again I came across Escoffier; as the Pro Chef noted, "Escoffier’s influence on the food service industry cannot be overemphasized." As well as, "Ferdinand Point took Escoffier’s message of simplification even further and laid the groundwork for the next upheaval in restaurant cooking styles."…… And from Point’s work, other chefs were influenced such as Bocuse, Chapel, Bise, and Jean and Pierre Troisgros. The work of the two Troisgros (as well as their father) became the launching pad for Judy Rodgers ("The Zuni Café Cookbook") when she arrived in their kitchen at the age of sixteen.

So, I’m throwing out the questions - Is Escoffier relevant today? What remains of his work that influences chefs today? And will add, do you think his work influences your own cooking?

For a great biography on Escoffier click here.

Footnote: Let your mind follow the other trails that this might suggest – such as the influence of the CIA or French cooking in general. As I’ve written this, all sorts of things have come to mind and I can see all kinds of possibilities.

Nick

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[Lady T]

As well ask whether the items on display in an art museum are relevant to an artist working in the here-and-now: to me, the answer is yes. The history of the art form influences what the artist will do -- without dictating it entirely, of course -- and the techniques employed to produce the museum pieces may very well be the precisely same ones the contemporary artist will use to produce his/her own output.

Compare, then, what a kitchen brigade was asked to do in Escoffier's time and what might be required from them currently. There are differences there, to be sure: government-mandated sanitation procedures and suchlike. Inquire HOW they will do it, though -- the same departments, assembling different elements of diners' meals sequentially, in about the same amounts of time (assuming that cutting shallots into brunoise by hand is about as time intensive now as in Escoffier's day!) -- and not a whole lot has changed. True?

Therefore: my answer is in the affirmative. I look forward to further enlightenment.

[Really Nice!]

“Is Escoffier relevant today? What remains of his work that influences chefs today?”

Absolutely! He took grande cuisine to a new level that is still prevelant in kitchens worldwide. The kitchen brigrade is his idea. He introduced the idea of serving meals one dish at a time. The categorizing and simplifying of sauces and bringing them together in five manageable 'mother' sauces is his. There are many more things that I can't recall without referencing books at home.

You don't earn the title, "Emperor of the world's kitchens," and "the King of Chefs' and Chef of the Kings'," without carrying significant influence to the following generations.

[lizziee]

Using Great Chefs of France by Blake and Crewe as a reference, Escoffier's kitchen is the model used today. Before Escoffier, there was a disorganized, confused and often slow division of labor in the kitchen. "Often, one chef would do all work on a particular dish, even including jobs which would plainly have been more easily done by another partie. The rotisseur, for instance, had to make pastry for a boeuf-en-croute, rather than the patissier." What Escoffier did was think through the operations in a kitchen and allow several parties to contribute to one dish at the same time.

I can't imagine what the modern day restaurant kitchen would be like without the genius of Escoffier.

Further, Escoffier denounced the two traditional sauces of French cuisine, espagnole and allemande and substituted the lighter and "more fragrant fumets, the concentrated natural juices of meat, fish and vegetables in water, broth, butter, olive oil or another cooking medium."

Again, imagine a chef or even a home cook today who doesn't constantly use the fumet process.

Further, according to Blake and Crewe, Escoffier's genius is evidenced in his Le Guide Culinaire in that he codified "almost everything to do with cooking, explaining it in scrupulous detail and bringing up to date much that was old-fashioned. He distilled the experience of a century and added to it his own extraordinary flair." It was Escoffier who "brought cuisine to is peak and spread the gospel of French cooking."

Charles Barrier describes Escoffier as a "visionary." Not only did he greatly influence the world of cuisine but he set out to reform not only working conditions but society as a whole. He had "schemes for a welfare state complete with old-age pensions, unemployment benefit and graduated income tax."

In a word, then, Escoffier's imprint on the kitchens of today is immense.

Edited January 10, 2003 by lizziee (log)

[Wilfrid]

I concur with the points already made, especially the introduction of service Russe. While a dinner today is likely to have fewer courses than even the simplified dinners proposed by Escoffier, the structure of an upscale meal in the French tradition is essentially the same.

Reading an article about the creation of Chez Panisse a while back, I was intrigued to learn that - in the early days of the restaurant - Towers reached for Escoffier and tried to recreate Escoffier-style menus. The Francophile influence of Richard Olney on Chez Panisse is quite well known, but I'm struck to find Escoffier present in spirit at the birth of what is presented as a distinctly American dining tradition.

[stefanyb]

Reading an article about the creation of Chez Panisse a while back, I was intrigued to learn that - in the early days of the restaurant - Towers reached for Escoffier and tried to recreate Escoffier-style menus.

Wilfrid, you do mean Waters, don't you?

[Nick]

Thanks for the good posts. This has gotten me fired up to the point that I just ordered a couple of books from Amazon. They have a package deal on these two right now.

The Escoffier Cook Book: A Guide to the Fine Art of Cookery by Auguste Escoffier. I thumbed through this book at Barnes & Noble a few months ago and one thing that struck me was that he was cooking with wood fires. I've been cooking on wood-fired ranges since 1968, and that alone made me interested in his work. It was also interesting to see in his biography (link in first post) that, "Cesar and Escoffier opened the Hotel Ritz in Paris, which was the most modern of the time.... However at their instance the ovens were fired by coke or wood." I realize that I'm probably in a minority of one when it comes to using a wood-fired range top and oven these days, but there are some of us who believe that the fuel source has an effect on the cooking.

The other book I ordered is Auguste Escoffier : Memories of My Life. This has been translated by his great granddaughter-in-law. From the customer reviews, "What a great happening when German Emperor was told that the chef of your upcoming meal is none other than a former war prisoner from France who wants to poison you. When asked about this by one of Emperor's officers inspecting the kitchen, Escoffier replies" "You may dine in peace. If, one day, your country once again seeks war with France, and I am still able, I will do my duty. But for the time being, you may relax and not let anything trouble your digestion." As well as, "....Ho Chi Minh was working in Escoffier's kitchen preparing vegetables in 1914." This book should be really interesting reading. Amazon noted that they had only three copies of this in stock and since I just bought one of these, get your order in soon if you want one.

(Note: The links to the books above will get egullet 15% if you buy directly from the links.)

[Steve Klc]

The "structure" of an upscale meal in the French tradition may be the same.

But I wonder whether Escoffier’s influence and imprint can still be felt immensely? Tough to deny that in a mechanical and organizational sense. However, there is a dark side and a dulled palate to unbridled rose-colored Escoffier-worship--there are reasons why we moved beyond the static Escoffier, reasons why Point sought to go in another more dynamic direction relatively quickly after Escoffier on the culinary timeline.

Let’s consider some areas Escoffier seems to me less relevant or no longer relevant:

1) There's no chance of one chef ever being so dominant, so feared, so powerful ever again, nor one book carried or consulted by chefs so often because we've transcended that possibility. In fact, I defy anyone to recount the last time they sought advice from one of his books on other than a curious historical whim?

2) Escoffier stood for orchestrated sameness, blind unthinking repetitiveness of dishes, categorization and standardization of names, ingredients, proportions. These weren’t guidelines these were marching orders, a religion if you will--a religion organized around the principle that there is one correct, one authentic, one best way to do things determined by one person. Valuable at the time, quaint notion today. Fortunately for me, there's no culinary equivalent of the Pope. If so, I'd be excommunicated or exorcised;

3) Presentation has evolved dramatically, even if considered solely within high end French cuisine;

4) Service has evolved dramatically, even considered solely within high end French cuisine; outside the remnants of French formal, below which most restaurant meals are taken these days, restaurant service is, shall we say, distinctly less Escoffier-like. The entire service profession has regressed to the point where if you happen to receive excellent service--it is perceived as an exception;

5) There's probably a debate whether high-end French cuisine can even be defined anymore--and if it is even relevant anymore when considered on a global scale;

6) There's certainly much more spontanaeity and personality expressed by chefs--the Escoffier model was to suppress this celebrity, spontaneity and personality of chefs, all except for himself, of course;

7) Escoffier championed the professionalsim of chefs--argued for establishing guidelines and standards a la the ACF and factories like the CIA. Too bad the CIA and other schools like it have little positive impact on the fine dining scene that most of us speak of when we speak of the best restaurants or chefs in this country or the world. Their influence is more felt in "the foodservice industry." Also too bad (for Escoffier's relevance) that today chefs can become wealthy celebrities, food personalities, authors and culinary authorities without having demonstrable skills in the kitchen. Sort of turns Escoffier on his head;

8) Menu-writing has evolved; menus themselves, the number of options, how courses are arranged or selected in so many different possibilities--all augur against Escoffier's relevance. We're at the point where tapas and mezze and first courses often make up the entire meal. Entree? It won't ever disappear but it's only lessened in importance as tasting menus, grazing and dining styles become distinctly less Escoffier-like;

9) Inventiveness on a technical and technological level has dramatically advanced--how much one can legitimately trace that back to Escoffier and how much of a debt the profession owes him is arguable and certainly worth discussing;

10) How ingredients are sourced and shopped for, how relationships are pursued locally, the emphasis on freshness of ingredients, that food should taste of itself, even the notion of cooking of a place as unique to that place--all run counter to Escoffier and possibly the most damning indictment against him.

Perhaps Escoffier is not as relevant as you might think. And we haven't even gotten into how food is actually cooked these days versus in his day.

I would also add that “bringing up to date what was old fashioned” has happened a few times since as well, beginning with Point who overthrew the tenets and practices of Escoffier--is that remaining relevant? Perhaps the whole "reform working conditions and society as a whole" may be overblown, since arguably pay and working conditions have not continued to improve, both skilled and unskilled labor still goes unrewarded, unfulfilled and unrecognized. In that sense Escoffier does remain hugely influential--the celebrity chef can attract wealth, fame and fortune--largely at the expense of the grunts and underlings doing the real day to day work in the kitchen.

To be considered with all respect, but in partial opposition to the tenor of this thread.

[Bux]

Lady T, you may escape the analogy police on this one. I see a validity in the comparison and it doesn't even depend on the acceptance of cooking as an art form. Every field of endeavor is shaped by its history. I'd like to clearly split this question into two rather distinct topics as I feel they deserve to be distinct.

Has Escoffier had a lasting influence on the way restaurant kitchens operate, the way chefs operate and the way we think about food?

Does a young cook have to consciously familiarize himself with Escoffier, his philosophies, his techniques, his writings and his recipes?

I think the answer to the first question is a resounding "yes." As I write this, the first posters all seem to agree. The only cooks who could avoid the Escoffier's influences are those who do not engage in formal study of the craft and who do not work in any sort of highly organized restaurant in the western world.

The answer to the second question is not so clear. I am sure we will have differences of opinion expressed on this issue. I'm inclined to say it's not an absolute necessity just as it's not an absolute necessity for a contemporary visual artist to be familiar with the art history that came before him. There are naive artists who are self trained and neither aware nor influenced by those who preceded them. Some manage to display talent. There are also artists of varying degrees of talent and acceptance whose interests and influences only go back so far and who's education in art history is rather weak. I don't imply that a great knowledge of what came before you is a barrier although that's a theory held by some. I just mean to say that some people can be successfully creative with just a limited influence as well as limited means. The argument that a young cook can hardly avoid the influences of Escoffier is not something I mean to deny, but I think it can be separated out as I tried to do in my first question and its answer.

[Wilfrid]

No Stefany, I meant Jeremiah Tower when he was in the kitchen at Chez Panisse.

[Nick]

Every field of endeavor is shaped by its history.

These are words worth considering. To digress for a moment... When I began my "career" in steelworking, I started with a forge and anvil. I was lucky enough, as I began, to one day find myself at the forge of Niles LaCoss who himself had started at the forge many years before and was then in charge of maintaining the locomotives for the cog-railway on Mt. Washington and had himself built the last new locomotive from scratch.

While I still have a forge and anvil in my shop; I rarely use them now. But, they are there as well as the lessons I learned from Niles one winter day at his forge. His lessons remain indelibly imprinted in my mind and my steelworking today is a result of the attitude toward my work that I learned from him and others, and from those who are now long gone, but took the time to write down their thoughts and methods.

As in steelworking, cooks (and artists) can make a go of it without appreciating what has gone before them - but they will lack the steadying influence that can be gained from knowledge of the masters that preceded them.

[Jonathan Day]

My understanding (though this is based on very superficial research, and I hope other members will correct mistakes here) is that Escoffier pioneered two important innovations.

The first was so-called service à la Russe, Russian style, in which dishes arrived in sequence, rather than being placed on the table all at once. In this way, the dishes arrived hot and freshly cooked, rather than sitting on a buffet table either getting cold or being held over heat while sauces turned to glue. This required a novel "industrialisation" of the hotel kitchen, rather as Toyota created so-called "lean" or "just-in-time" manufacturing and hence enabled customers a far wider range of choices in car colours and options.

In this sense he could be said to have "invented" the tasting menu, though it was more the invention of a service style.

The second was enabling customers to order à la carte. And this, I believe, did not just mean that you could order a starter, a main and a dessert from a carte-- that had been possible for many years, and there are examples of such cartes, predating Mr E by many years, in the Escoffier museum in Villeneuve-Loubet. It meant that the restaurant patron could order a full, multi-course, Escoffier-sized meal by choosing from a list of options, "composing" the menu on the spot. In this sense, the restaurant customer was better off than the wealthy patron who could order her chef to provide a multi-course menu, because this had to be done in advance of shopping, i.e. no later than the morning of the dinner. Again, the industrialisation of the hotel kitchen must have been critical.

Note that this second Escoffier innovation is, for the most part and for most people, no longer available in today's restaurants. You can order a set tasting menu, you can ask the chef to compose a tasting menu for you (though this often reduces to the set menu with variations). But for the most part you can't walk into a restaurant and ask for a sequence of 15 or so dishes, even if they are on the carte.

Further research would be valuable here. For example, would Escoffier's customers have been required to order the same menu for the entire table? My guess is that they would not have been. If this is right, then once again today's restaurants offer less flexibility.

[lizziee]

"Escoffier stood for orchestrated sameness, blind unthinking repetitiveness of dishes, categorization and standardization of names, ingredients, proportions. These weren’t guidelines these were marching orders, a religion if you will--a religion organized around the principle that there is one correct, one authentic, one best way to do things determined by one person. Valuable at the time, quaint notion today."

"the Escoffier model was to suppress this celebrity, spontaneity and personality of chefs, all except for himself, of course;"

Steve, I disagree that Escoffier set out to stifle French cuisine. Again using Blake and Crewe's Great Chefs of France as a resource; "Escoffier, in his Le Guide Culinaire, could not have been more explicit about the ever-changing nature of cuisine: 'It would be absurd to pretend to fix the destiny of an art which is enhanced by so many aspects of fashion and is equally as inconstant.'"

Blake and Crewe suggest that although Escoffier loved codifying everything to do with cooking, he never intended to put French cuisine in a straight-jacket. It was other chefs who "tended to substitute the writ of Escoffier for their own imaginations," who took his writings as "inviolable dogma" and who stagnated cooking by performing by rote. They are not denying that the influence of Escoffier had moved cuisine into a rut, but they suggest that it was unwittingly.

[Fat Guy]

To say that Escoffier pioneered service a la Russe overlooks the very name of that style of service: Russe, as in Russia. It isn't something Escoffier invented. It's something he imported. While he deserves credit for that, it is hardly creation.

Likewise, the brigade system seems to me the rational application in a kitchen context of the theories of mass-production and the assembly line. If indeed Escoffier was the first to sort it all out, he deserves credit for it. But I find it hard to believe that it would have taken very long, at the dawn of the 20th Century, for someone else to say, "Hey, this is how they're organizing factories now that we have this Industrial Revolution thing going on. Hmm, a kitchen is kind of like a factory, isn't it? Let's organize our kitchen like an assembly line!"

[Jonathan Day]

FG is right: Escoffier certainly didn't invent service à la russe. Prince Alexander Borisovitch Kourakine, the tsar's ambassador to Paris in the Second Empire, introduced this style of service at the Russian embassy, from whence it spread to Parisian high society.

The idea was to move away from the formality of service à la française (see tasting menus thread for more on this) to a mode where dishes arrived hot at table. The guests were divided into groups of 8, 10 or 12; each was served by a maître d'hôtel who was told, in advance, which guest to serve first. The overriding imperative was to serve dishes hot and fresh.

The cook and author Urbain Dubois (1818-1901) popularised this style of service in middle-class homes, following his service in Russia under Prince Orloff.

What we don't know is the extent to which this service appeared in restaurants, where guests arrived at different times and ordered different menus. That, I would guess, is where Escoffier's innovation may have taken place.

I would hesitate to trivialise Escoffier's "industrialising" of restaurant and hotel kitchens. Although there were many innovations in kitchen design and management (e.g. those of Alexis Soyer, 1810-1858, at the Reform Club in London), Escoffier's changes seem like a major step forward, a discontinuity. And this is usually how industrial innovations take place. Toyota's "just-in-time" system seems incredibly simple once you see it in action, and you start to wonder why another firm failed to come up with the idea. Similarly for Dell's approach to computer manufacture, with its zero or negative working capital. Yet (1) nobody did it that way before; (2) almost nobody else does it that way today.

[Fat Guy]

Jonathan, we can of course never know what might have been, but we can make an educated guess. Examples in science and mathematics abound where several teams of researchers or individual theoreticians were racing towards a discovery or proof. The first one to cross a certain threshold of viability in research or theory wins, gets to name the phenomenon, gets the Nobel prize, whatever. But most in the business realize that the two, three, or a hundred others working on the same problem would have solved it within the year. Moreover, I don't see the analogy as being to Toyota's or Airbus's manufacturing processes -- those represent logistical/conceptual innovations above and beyond the assembly line, based on years of analysis of mass-production in practice. The kitchen brigade system, however, is a straightforward application of the one-person-one-task organizational scheme common to most any factory environment at the turn of the (19th-20th) Century.

[Jonathan Day]

We are clearly in the fact-free zone here and can only surmise just how radical Escoffier's innovations were.

That said, what Escoffier did has all the signs of a discontinuous or "disruptive" innovation. It changed not only the production process but also the product, the customer offer, allowing more choice, on-the-spot creation of a service à la Russe menu, etc. It almost instantly became the standard for organising kitchen production, in a way that persists today. It even created the negative "lock-in" that Steve Klc's post refers to.

Changes in industrial practice of this sort don't come quickly or easily. There is a lot of "stickiness" or inertia in most production systems, whether kitchens or factories.

I suspect, by the way, that co-ordination rather than specialisation was at the heart of Escoffier's "big idea" -- the role of the expediter.

[ngatti]

Can we rightly divorce a discussion of Escoffier and his relevancy from Cesar Ritz?

Nick

[Jonathan Day]

Nick, a great question. If you are keen to discuss it, there is a new "role of the restaurateur" thread on Symposium. Ritz would be a great (historical) case in point.

[Nick]

Just to add a note to Nickg's post above for those unfamiliar with this. From the Escoffier bio link I gave at the beginning -

"It was here (the Hotel National in Lucerne, in 1884) that Escoffier met Cesar Ritz who came from a small village in the Swiss Valais. Ritz started as a hotel groom and rapidly worked his way up to head waiter and into Hotel Management. The mutual understanding and teamwork between [Escoffier] and Ritz was to bring about the most significant changes and modern development in the hotel industry."

[Nick]

I don't have the experience or historical knowledge to answer this, but perhaps some members here more well-versed than I could make a go of it.

Had Escoffier (and Ritz) not come along, what direction would cooking, menus, and the running of a restaurant have taken?

[ngatti]

With all due respect to everyone here; it has occurred to me that dismissing Auguste Escoffier as irrelevant to modern cuisine is akin to dismissing Sir Isaac Newton as irrelevant to modern physics. Certainly, within this particular context, a case can be made.

I have consulted Le Guide Culinaire and continue to do so. Claudia Fleming's book contains a recipe for Apple Blini. Whether or not she developed her blini recipe independently of Escoffier, the fact remains that hers is almost identical to the one presented in the Guide which was published in 1903. A minor tweak here and there to adjust for ingredient differences (the milk of 1903 is not the milk of today) is all that is necessary.

In all fields there are great shoulders which we stand upon in order to look a little farther. We should acknowledge the strength of those shoulders and be thankful for the height which allows us to see the new horizon, for that will give us the strength to support the next generation which will stand on our own shoulders.

Nick

[Nick]

I think Nickg has summed up things as well as anyone can.

Time for the fridge for this topic?

[Jonathan Day]

That's where it's going, at least for now. The thread can always be brought back if members have more to add on Escoffier.