Are We In a New Golden Age of Gastronomy?

[robert brown]

Guy Gateau and I go back 30 years, even though we only recently met. On about twenty occasions between 1974 and 1980, Guy and I were less than twenty feet away at times; I as a diner at the three-star Restaurant Alain Chapel and he as its chef de cuisine. In Chapel’s kitchen, Guy was in charge of making many of the most succulent and well-conceived dishes I have ever tasted. A few months ago I tracked him down and arranged to meet for lunch near Avignon. I quickly recognized that given Guy’s remarkably varied and wide-ranging career at the highest echelons of the culinary profession, the eGullet community could derive enormous benefit from his perspectives and experiences. The other three gourmands in the roundtable, as you can read in their thumbnail biographies are no slouches either.

To begin, I’ll ask the group if you think we are entering a new Golden Age of Gastronomy, with the previous one being (I strongly believe) from 1968 to 1990. Contemporary gastronomy is interesting, but I wouldn’t call it a golden age just yet. Perhaps I’ll elaborate later, but I defer to you fellows, and especially to our guest of honor.

[guygateau]

We are entering, no doubt, a new era in the gastronomic age. What was introduced to us by the earlier Golden Age that you refer to, is history because it was new at the time---but it is not "old news" because it refers to fundamental values.

The question could be: Was the new approach of cooking represented by the "nouvelle cuisine" and everything that followed, as important as the technical approach created by a better knowledge of matter, rules and contol of temperature that we have experienced in the last ten years?

Is the control of that knowledge and its mastery by the chefs in general, going to influence gastronomy and change our eating habits?

GG

[robert brown]

Guy, that frames the matter perfectly. I'll hang back because I know that the other discussants will want to take this on.

[vmilor]

Lets be clear about definitions and boundaries. When we say "new golden age" and a new era, what are we talking about? Haute cuisine? Creme de la creme? General eating habits of the populace? Restaurants in general? Quality and variety of ingredients and raw materials? What?

I was not aware that there is a sea change after 1990 if we are talking about the state of the art at the highest level. I think we should be very clear about our criteria when resorting to periodization.

Also the term "nouvelle cuisine" obfuscates more than it reveals IMO.

[jackal10]

Even Escoffier said "The hour is not too far distant...when a roux will not be made from flour but from a pure starch....This sauce will be clearer, more brilliant, and better than that of the old procesess.."

This raises two questions in my mind:

a) Will starch thickened sauces (Veloute, for example) ever make their return, or are we faced with an endless sucession of over-reduced glazes as a legacy of the nouvelle movement?

b) Does it matter if cooking becomes akin to an industrial or chemical process, not only for volume production but also for restaurants? The romantic notion is that the chef personally prepares the dish for the diner from raw primary ingredients. The practice is often different. There have been, for example, experiments by the Roux brothers with sous-vide meals prepared centrally and reheated. Industrially prepared pectin seems to be used a lot as a thickener currently. How do we draw the line? Should we require the majority of the ingredients be prepared from raw or fresh, a minute? Should we expect the Chef to personally be in the kitchen, cooking?

[robert brown]

The term "Golden Age" always refers to the best manifestations of whatever it may be, and certainly not for the purposes of this discussion the general eating habits of the populace or restaurants in general. Therefore I was talking about cuisine at the top. Whether one likes the term "Nouvelle Cuisine" as Guy used it, no doubt referring to "La Nouvelle Cuisine Francaise" since he was at the center of it for several years. Whether one likes the term or not, it signifies the many relevant chefs in France working in the 1960s through the 1980s. I think there has been a sea change, or we are in the midst of one, since 1990 due in a large degree to Adria, Gagnaire, Heston Blumenthal and others. I think, however, that part of this sea change is also taking place in other areas of what Guy refers to as eating habits. I know that Vedat, Jonathan and I have concerned ourselves (having engaged in some social scientific inquiry) with the economic, even fiscal, impact on institutions. These factors have infuenced gastronomy in ways that nearly all food writers turn a blind eye to. Maybe we should look at how a simple concept called le menu degustation has influenced contemporary dining. That to me is more widely influential than Adria or Molecular Gastronomy across a wide range of restaurants and chefs.

[Jonathan Day]

I agree with Vedat's point: have things changed at the very top of the field, or for diners in general? I've addressed this issue in a separate topic.

On Guy Gateau's important question: it seems to me that there has been a large advance in recent years owing to the new and more science-based understanding of temperatures and cooking methods. When I first learned to cook (late 1960s) there was a great deal of "lore" around, with little understanding of why a particular food was to be cooked in a certain way. Green beans had to be boiled in enormous amounts of heavily salted water -- and it worked, but probably not for the reasons people thought. Mushrooms could never be washed, only gently brushed.

The big step in the last 10 years, between experimenters like McGee and Hervé This and such chefs as Blumenthal, Gagnaire and Adrià is that these dogmas, these bits of "lore" are being challenged and subjected to experiment. Washing field mushrooms only adds minuscule amounts of water to them. Green beans can be boiled in smaller amounts of water, if the water has the right characteristics. We know how proteins react to temperature changes. We know not only how to produce pommes purées as Robuchon does, we know why his method works.

Are we at the start of a golden age? I'm not sure, but it is clear that a stronger understanding of food chemistry and physics has opened up new possibilities for chefs. At the very least, we have the potential for a golden age, if we can figure out how to realise it.

[vmilor]

OK. If we stick to the top end of cuisine I have a hard time seeing why it is that an era ended in 90 and a new one may be beginning now. My own experience does not bear this out. Actually quite the opposite: I consider the 90s a golden age and now we are witnessing some counterproductive developments driven by media hype and Adria/Gagnaire aspirants-ambitious chefs who probably know more about gastro techniques than an essential knowledge of ingrediens and the quality of the products.

I consider 90s a golden age because, compared to the 80s, we have witnessed the rise of so many top chefs and at the very top end one would have eaten extremely well. It would have been hard to believe that younger chefs would make their own statements after Robuchon and Girardet(both were in top form by the mid 80s) but they did. 90s witnessed the rise of the likes of Ducasse, Gagnaire, Pacaud, Roellinger, Bras, Passard, Barasetequi, Michel Troisgros, Rabaey, etc., among others. Add to this the fact that some "enfants terribles" of the nouvelle cuisine were still delivering(Pierre Troisgros, Guerard, Senderens, Blanc), the overall quality of the high end establishements was phenomenal in the 90s.

One word on menu degustation: I basically can not make a generalization on that. There are as many approaches to it as there are great chefs. Sometimes, such as in El Bulli, you can not even order a la carte and it is basically a procession of tapas. At the other extreme, Pacaud hates the idea and does not offer one at L'Ambroisie. I never order it at Gagnaire, but I trust Passard's outrageouly priced version.

[robert brown]

Vedat, I should correct myself a bit. There was good dining after 1990, but there's a romantic part of me that considers the beginning of the slide to when we lost Chapel in 1990. It put a large crimp in my dining enjoyment, but as many people know, I'm a Chapel nut. I think you have to add the emergence of the Herb Boys-Michel Bras, Regis Marcon and Marc Veyrat as three great chefs who caried the ball well intgo the 1990s. However, I mark the European recession that began in 1990 as something that put a crimp in the way we ate prior to that and which brought us to where we are today; an era that you and I find less appealing and rewarding ikn certain places.

I should probably start a seperate thread about degustation menus. You pointed out something along the lines that people overlook when you were talking about the French Laundry. But I'll write about it tonight or tomorrow.

[guygateau]

I must say, this is very exciting.

I think that at this point, it is difficult to separate the general populace and the top, “crème de la crème”. I think that things have changed in both worlds (or fields, if you prefer) For the general populace, it is a matter of industrial impact on food stuffs bought by consumers, and on that issue, I am ready to say that we are entering the same chain reaction as holds true for the tobacco industry.

For the top world of gastronomy, crème de la crème, we are faced with the “legacy of the nouvelle movement”, over reduced glazes for instance. And I am in total agreement with Jonathan Day on his remarks for understanding food chemistry and physics.

There is now a great deal of conversation about it because of the “disclosure” of Mr. Hervé This. What was confidential information for the curious and the tenacious has now become public. I was personally reading scientific reviews on the subject in the 70’s & 80’s. Reseach was conducted for the industry and it is a great thing that finally all this information is coming out. It will take a while for the chefs’ community to catch up with it. At my own level ,I try to do it in all my training courses. What will be the outcome of it, we have to wait a bit to see.

One of the reasons that the “Nouvelle Cuisine” movement of the 70’s ended was because of it’s flaws, like everything blended up into mousses and doing new things at all costs. For the trend we are seeing and focusing on (90’s to now) the fact that we now know best to extract “gelatin” from food ,because we master the cooking temperature of proteins, collagen and the , has given the idea that extracting these substances from food would permit to discover new taste, give more taste to a dish or complement (exhausting) the main ingredient. It doesn’t give off anything more, taste isn’t trapped by gelatin, it is just another “matter” or texture to experiment with in cooking.

Let’s say for the sake of argument, that in Vietnamese cooking they are familiar with this type of preparation using agar-agar, and already for some time…

Personally I think that one can still enjoy going to a great restaurant, creativity is there, some great chef can still surprise you. But for me it falls short somewhere. There is no message. There is NO excuse for any chef, no matter how great he may be (or thinks he is) to not be in the kitchen during the service.

Ducasse has been mentioned by another member of the group. His great commercial success cannot shadow the fact that he is a gifted cook he brought up in his first books all the quintessence of what Alain Chapel transmitted to us. Ducasse was able to carry on and “destructure” (term use by Adria) that message and translate it to other concepts but always keeping the fundamentals. We can elaborate later.

Now, on ROUX:

I am afraid to be a little on the edge of disagreement with Mr. Escoffier on this one, although I think that he might eventually agree with me. Yes, once again he was right in foreseeing the use of “pure” starch. But one can start to ask, raise questions when some of those starches (the best ones as far as culinary needs) are made from genetically modified corn. Particularly when the good all ROUX remains the best with its particular taste. The problem was and still is that very few chefs know how or take the time to make it well.

I’ll come back on that.

GG

[commander]

Mr. Gateau asks:

But one can start to ask, raise questions when some of those starches (the best ones as far as culinary needs) are made from genetically modified corn. Particularly when the good all ROUX remains the best with its particular taste. The problem was and still is that very few chefs know how or take the time to make it well.

Mr. Gateau's question is complex. The genetic manipulation of corn, being the result of a formula, results in a predictable starch that can be expected to perform consistently in the kitchen and produce uniform results. Suppose this product supplants all others in the trade,and if so, there will be a decline in uniquely flavored roux, the little variety of taste resulting from different starches and the application of art. Then, Mr. Gateau asserts that chefs don't do roux in the classical manner, that is, they decline to or neglect to practise the art. Therefore, I think Mr. Gateau is worried about the sedimentation of cuisine into a routine of standard tastes which translates into customers visiting many restaurants expecting a dish to taste the same way it was prepared elsewhere. Mr. Gateau has correctly narrowed in on roux as the point in his question because it is highly subject to the uniformity imposed by standardization and likely to be more or less "immune" to flaws in preparation.

When one eats, the instance of the made universe represented by the meal is conceptually transformed into a memory. A great meal isn't situate in the world like a building or a painting, but the experience of consuming it produces impressions that are remembered. Memories are the image of significations. When we remember a good meal, we don't retaste the food but we hold in memory an image of sensations. (I am using the word "image" in the special sense that we recollect the experience but do not experience it again. The "image" signifies the experience, i.e. it is a sign. Under the old system, the roux of one chef will not be identical to the roux of another chef even if the technique is correctly done, because of variation in the quality of the available starch. Under the new system that I think Chef Gateau is anticipating, there will be a kind of acquired expectation and uniformity in which, whether it is I or Chef who produces a roux, it will be the same. The next step will its conversion into a vender product which will eliminate the need for a kitchen to make a roux -- just dip it out of the bottle. And will the gastronome be able to distinguish it from Chef's art of roux making in the meal on the plate and if not being able to do so, does the gastronome become an accomplice in what Baudrillard called "the perfect crime" in which reality is effaced without a trace. Posts on this issue in another thread have considered the issue of time, namely the reduction of cooking to efficiency. Consider that a meal is really a sign signifying the art of a chef, but when reduced to a matter of efficiency, it no longer signifies the chef's art but "efficiency".

That's the bottom line here. When you run a restaurant, conventional wisdom dictates that that the dish you cook night after night be exactly the same, so that your patrons will return to your restaurant and be able to expect the dish to taste the same as it did on his or her first visit. The uniformity of the roux is a symbol of the diner's expectation that his or her repeat visit will be the same. The problem for the art of cooking is whether it can be creative in such an atmosphere. Evidently there is a conflict because the diner goes to sup at the table of a good chef to repeat the same experience he or she had last time but the chef is a person absorbing new knowledge and having ideas. What has been lost is the notion that we can go to a restaurant and have a good meal because the chef is a good cook. There is something fundamentally antithetical to cuisine when diners return to a restaurant expecting the same experience they had before. Consistency may be the hobgoblins of little minds but business success entails the cultivation of little minds.

[robert brown]

Commander, thank you so much for making your very first post so thoughtful and contributing it to this forum. Your comments reminded me of a story that you may want to comment on.

About eight years ago we took friends for their first visit to Eugenie-les-Bains to dine and stay a few nights at Michel Guerard’s spa-restaurant. Not knowing if Guerard’s famous scrambled eggs with caviar that he serves in the shell was on the menu, I asked in advance to have the kitchen make it. When we arrived, I asked if our order was going to be realized, to which the person replied that it would. The dish was, after all, on the menu, but the one they prepared was different. The eggs were a light green and had been infused with some herb. To my mind, and my wife’s as well, this was an inferior version lacking the differentiations and intensity of the original. This was clearly an example of what you discussed: the diner’s wish to have a dish meet prior expectations and experience (although in the same restaurant) and the creative need for a chef to try something new.

I always relished the opportunity to relive a dish I could never get out of my mind. One of the riffs my wife and I liked to play was, in anticipating going back to a great restaurant, was “Are you going to order (whatever dish) again.” And as you wrote, we always conjured up the memory of it (but, of course, not the intense taste of it) between visits. These days can we fault Michel Bras for always taking up a slot on his menu for the Gargoyle of Baby Vegetables (which, by the way, may well have changed since the last tine I had it in 1997) or Alain Passard for his lobster in yellow wine?

[vmilor]

Commander:

An exceptonial post. Well written and argued.

I am wondering whether a great meal is not "situate" in the world as a painting though. After all there is something called the recipe. Provided that(and this is a big IF) same quality ingredients are found you can recreate the same dish and this is why some dishes created by great chefs achieve immortal status just like a painting.

What do you think?

[guygateau]

Commander wrote

"Memories are the image of representation"

It is so true. 25 years ago we had a menu called "Image de Mionnay". Chapel & I would decide which dishes were going to stay on, dishes of inspiration that we loved ourselves, or some of our clients' favorites. It was painful to take them away to be replaced by others, because we were executing these dishes to perfection. It would sometimes take several months of training before achieving this level of perfection for a dish.

But some of them would never change, like the sublissime "Ragout de coquille St Jacques aux poireaux, truffes noires du Tricastin et huîtres plates de pleine mer" Every year it was coming back, and we were waiting for it as much as the clients were.

So it is the case, I suppose, for "La gargouille de jeunes légumes" de Michel Bras or Passart's "Homard au vin jaune".

The absolute truth of a dish is in making it with the perfect authenticity of the products, this is grand Art, striving everday to be better, or at least as good as the day before...

[commander]

Robert Brown asked:

"These days can we fault Michel Bras for always taking up a slot on his menu for the Gargoyle of Baby Vegetables (which, by the way, may well have changed since the last tine I had it in 1997) or Alain Passard for his lobster in yellow wine?"

Certainly not. These are great dishes. They endure on the menus because the chefs like to cook them. One of the things I believe we tend to neglect is how pleasurable cooking can be when you have good ingredients and the skill to make them into a great tasting dish. This neglect makes us think erroneously about cuisine, that is, when we forget the simple pleasure of putting a great meal together. One of the best restaurants in Santa Fe, in the bistro style, was one in which the rather limited menu consisted solely of what the chef liked to cook, and while the chef was not world class, the dishes were always very good. But the chef lost his lease and went to work for another restaurant, but his dishes there were no where near as good because he was at the direction of owners and managers, and it was clear that he did not enjoy cooking in this venue. So I would never fault a chef for putting a dish he enjoys cooking on the menu time after time.

VIMilor asked:

"I am wondering whether a great meal is not "situate" in the world as a painting though. After all there is something called the recipe. Provided that(and this is a big IF) same quality ingredients are found you can recreate the same dish and this is why some dishes created by great chefs achieve immortal status just like a painting.

What do you think?"

The ontic status of a recipe is that it is a form of communicating an experience that cannot be described directly. The recipe is situate in the made world but the dish is not. Every instance of the performance of the recipe will be unique because each person who attempts it has a unique culinary experience that will condition the performance of the recipe. We have great recipes out there but individual performances of it will be different.

Chef Gateau wrote:

"So it is the case, I suppose, for "La gargouille de jeunes légumes" de Michel Bras or Passart's "Homard au vin jaune" . The absolute truth of a dish is in making it with the perfect authenticity of the products, this is grand Art, striving everday to be better ,or at least as good as the day before..."

Yes, absolutely. Every ingredient is a voice with a role to play in the grand chorus that sings to the palate. The greatness of magnificient cuisine is its combination of composition and understanding, the evocation of the sublime (in the full Kantian sense of the word). Of course, you want to make it better, make the voices clearer. I wonder whether it is necessary or even desired to take advantage of processes and equipment that enable chefs to exert closer control of the performance of a recipe, that is, whether technology other than the labor-saving kind, sustains the art of cooking or reduces it to technique. This issue is what I had in mind when I replied to your question. I'm sure it is better to understand searing the beef for a braising as a Maillard reaction instead of browning, but I am not as sure whether such detailed understanding is very relevant to the dish on the table. I don't use the phrase "performance of a recipe" lightly because I compare cooking with conducting, letting the voices of the constituents of a dish articulate themselves while combining to make a great sound to the palate, which involves a compositional grasp of the whole and a little judgment to avoid standing in the way of some of those voices.

[Jonathan Day]

"Commander", let me join the chorus of welcome to eGullet. Rarely have two first posts been of that depth and quality. I hope we'll see many more from you!

Just to support your point about the status of recipes in the made world, I remember looking over the notebook of a French friend who is a pastry chef. The "recipes" were the sketchiest you could imagine in some cases, nothing more than a list of ingredients and perhaps a few ratios. And this was for pastry, the most precise form of cookery, one that my friend described as "chemistry" (la chimie) because of the need for precision in weighing and measuring things.

In this case -- and I would guess that this is true for most professionals -- the recipe is hardly an object, more a way of retrieving a set of memories of the physical experience of making Paris-Brest or Napoléons or whatever. The knowledge here is tacit, not explicit. The recipe is far less explicit than a music score, for example.

[phaelon56]

I think that at this point, it is difficult to separate the general populace and the top, “crème de la crème”. I think that things have changed in both worlds (or fields, if you prefer) For the general populace, it is a matter of industrial impact on food stuffs bought by consumers, and on that issue, I am ready to say that we are entering the same chain reaction as holds true for the tobacco industry.

Guy - can you please clarify this comment about industrial impact and a chain reaction similar to the tobacco industry? I'm not getting the connection here but am intrigued by the remark.

[robert brown]

This leads directly into a concept I have been contemplating for a few weeks. Wouldn't we be better off if all but the greatest chefs learned to make great dishes of the recent past rather than subjecting us to their ill-conceived, badly-made "original" dishes? I'm not talking about bistro cuisine, but 20th-century classics created by great chefs. In other words, if the most talented pianists are out there playing Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms, why can't great chefs learn how to make a great salmon with sorrel, lobster in Sauternes, or duckling with white and yellow peaches. I realize that there are intervening factors today such as labor intensity and access to, and costs of, the right produce. However, there are hundreds, if ot thousands, of recipes and disciples of these masters that chefs can learn from. It seems to me that there is a whole fertile ground out there that no one is attacking. Even if interpretations that don't score bullseyes are the final result, it has to better than eating a lot of the misguided food we are being subjected to today.

[balmagowry]

The big step in the last 10 years, between experimenters like McGee and Hervé This and such chefs as Blumenthal, Gagnaire and Adrià is that these dogmas, these bits of "lore" are being challenged and subjected to experiment. Washing field mushrooms only adds minuscule amounts of water to them. Green beans can be boiled in smaller amounts of water, if the water has the right characteristics.  We know how proteins react to temperature changes. We know not only how to produce pommes purées as Robuchon does, we know why his method works.

Does it matter if cooking becomes akin to an industrial or chemical process, not only for volume production but also for restaurants? The romantic notion is that the chef personally prepares the dish for the diner from raw primary ingredients.

What a funny feeling to see the questions posed this way. How the wheel comes full circle: everything old really is nouvelle again.

What you guys said in the above powerfully echoes the writing of Careme and his contemporaries nearly 200 years ago. Riding the crest of the Enlightenment, what they found both romantic and exciting was the newly-discovered relationship between chemistry and cuisine. Even the title of Brillat-Savarin's La Physiologie du gout - not to mention much of its content - reflects this fascination with the science of food. From our modern perspective they probably got a lot of it wrong - as wrong as your "lore" from the 60s - but they were headed in the right direction. (That, of course, is another constant progression; every generation triumphantly correcting the mistakes of the previous one, only to be corrected itself by the next.)

Chemistry was cool, it was hot, it was edgy, it was now - then. If you didn't explain the scientific principles behind even your most traditional recipes, you simply weren't au courant. Sound familiar? can you say McGee, Corriher, This, Brown?

Careme begins the first chapter of L'Art de la cuisine Francaise au XIXeme siecle with a disquisition on the chemical properties and composition of soup which would do any eminent scientist proud. And you can tell how proud he is of being able to do so. It's actually rather sweet. And this ...

We know how proteins react to temperature changes.

... could have come almost verbatim from that chapter!

Of course, speaking of everything old being new again - some of those new lore-debunkings aren't quite as new as they may appear.

Green beans can be boiled in smaller amounts of water, if the water has the right characteristics.

Indeed they can - and Apicius got there first, only a couple of millennia ago....

[guygateau]

I 'd like to answer "Phaelon 56".

Regarding my remark about the connection I made with the Tobacco Industry.

Taste is becoming on a large scale, standardized. We are entering "global" eating habits, finding the same food everywhere, and industrial processes are also becoming global, the same guy making the same thing but in a different box.

Aperitif biscuits, breads, cereals etc... But more important and more significant is the content of salt and sugar in any processed food. Volontarily or not, it could result in my opinion, in the "addiction" to sugar & salt--the same as we know holds true with nicotin. Add to this a great deal of marketing/promotion and for me the connection is quite clear.

[guygateau]

I 'd like to answer "Phaelon 56".

Regarding my remark about the connection I made with the Tobacco Industry.

Taste is becoming on a large scale, standardized. We are entering "global" eating habits, finding the same food everywhere, and industrial processes are also becoming global, the same guy making the same thing but in a different box.

Aperitif biscuits, breads, cereals etc... But more important and more significant is the content of salt and sugar in any processed food. Volontarily or not, it could result in my opinion, in the "addiction" to sugar & salt--the same as we know holds true with nicotin. Add to this a great deal of marketing/promotion and for me the connection is quite clear.

[phaelon56]

Guy - thanks so much for clarifying that point. I think the process, now that I understand which phenomenon you refer to, has long since been well established in the U.S.. It's indeed regrettable to see it being foisted on the rest of the world as globalization of consumer products including food continues its relentless march.

That said, there's evidence that at least in some segments of the population here in the US, admittedly mostly among better educated and more affluent consumers, a reverse trend is occurring. In the area where I'm presently living (central NY state), there are some excellent artisan bakeries now thriving and also a few restaurants who structure their menus around seasonally available local products whenever possible. We're also fortunate enough to have one major grocery chain (Wegman's), that has raised the bar on quality and selection of produce, meat and fish, a phenomenon that woudn't have previouslsy had enough consumer support to be successful in this region, even as recently as ten years ago. many peopel are eating better at home and elsewhere by choice, with processed and commercially prepared products becoming a smaller and smaller portion of their diets. I'm not naive enough to think that such folks are in a majority but the trend is encouraging and people who choose to shop and eat this way are no longer perceived as quirky, out of touch or inappropriately mired in tradition.

I'm well versed in issues related to drug and acohol recovery and addiction. Although I'm aware of excessive food consumption as a "lifestyle problem" for some people, my knowledge of that addiction has only been tangential and through what I've read in the media. The programs under which major tobacco companies manipulated nicotine content etc to further their perfection of the "nicotine delivery device" known as the cigarette has long been well known but I'de never considered the possibility that such a scheme might possibly be an agenda for the multinational food conglomerates.

Great observation on your part and something worthwhile for us all to consider but I'll leave any further discussion on my part to other threads.

[vmilor]

This leads directly into a concept I have been contemplating for a few weeks. Wouldn't we be better off if all but the greatest chefs learned to make great dishes of the recent past rather than subjecting us to their ill-conceived, badly-made "original" dishes? I'm not talking about bistro cuisine, but 20th-century classics created by great chefs. In other words, if the most talented pianists are out there playing Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms, why can't great chefs learn how to make a great salmon with sorrel, lobster in Sauternes, or duckling with white and yellow peaches. I realize that there are intervening factors today such as labor intensity and access to, and costs of, the right produce. However, there are hundreds, if ot thousands, of recipes and disciples of these masters that chefs can learn from. It seems to me that there is a whole fertile ground out there that no one is attacking. Even if interpretations that don't score bullseyes are the final result, it has to better than eating a lot of the misguided food we are being subjected to today.

The whole set of incentives facing chefs should change for this to happen.

Loufood has recently written in another forum that few chefs are interested in history, and geneology of dishes in their historical/cultural context. I guess two sides of the same coin.

I would be interested in hearing Jonathan's and jellybean's views on this.

[degusto]

This leads directly into a concept I have been contemplating for a few weeks. Wouldn't we be better off if all but the greatest chefs learned to make great dishes of the recent past rather than subjecting us to their ill-conceived, badly-made "original" dishes? I'm not talking about bistro cuisine, but 20th-century classics created by great chefs. In other words, if the most talented pianists are out there playing Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms, why can't great chefs learn how to make a great salmon with sorrel, lobster in Sauternes, or duckling with white and yellow peaches. I realize that there are intervening factors today such as labor intensity and access to, and costs of, the right produce. However, there are hundreds, if ot thousands, of recipes and disciples of these masters that chefs can learn from. It seems to me that there is a whole fertile ground out there that no one is attacking. Even if interpretations that don't score bullseyes are the final result, it has to better than eating a lot of the misguided food we are being subjected to today.

Robert,

I cannot agree more than I do in this respect. In fact I feel like you are reading my mind.

[robyn]

Now, on ROUX:

I am afraid to be a little on the edge of disagreement with Mr. Escoffier on this one, although I think that he might eventually agree with me.  Yes, once again he was right in foreseeing the use of “pure” starch.  But one can start to ask, raise questions when some of those starches (the best ones as far as culinary needs) are made from genetically modified corn.  Particularly when the good all ROUX remains the best with its particular taste.  The problem was and still is that very few chefs know how or take the time to make it well.

I’ll come back on that.

GG

Which starches are you talking about? I assume they're some kind of processed food - because most genetically modified corn in the US is used in processed foods.

I attended a lecture last weekend about genetically modified foods. It was very interesting. The professor who gave the lecture has an informative website that might be of interest to some people. Robyn