Presentation NOUVELLE CUISINE & THE ART OF PL ATING FOOD
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magine a dish of filets de sole Brillat-Savarin, the creamy lobster mousse with its jacket of sliced truffles, the poached filets of sole on their puff-pastry croustades, the lobster tail scallop on top, placed just so. Truly a feast for the eye and the palate. Now imagine that the croustades had been made a week ago and the lobster was three days old. “In the big Paris restaurants where I worked,” Bocuse says, “the chef ordered provisions to fit the pre-established specialties already printed on the menu. Each morning the maître d’hôtel would come into the kitchen with a ritual question: ‘What should we push today?’ There was always food left over from the night before that they had to get rid of on a priority basis. Monsieur Point would have none of that. He made a fresh, clean start every morning. It was la cuisine du moment.” La cuisine du moment. Bocuse of course had his own version, as did Michel Guérard, and
these were the founding pillars of what became la nouvelle cuisine française. In England Anton Mosimann offered his cuisine naturelle to diners at The Dorchester, while Alice Waters brought California cuisine to the rest of America. The integrity of these chefs was never in question. Even so, this new cuisine—which simply followed Point in cooking according to the day’s market, cooking it at the last minute, individually for each guest, and cooking it perfectly—was not universally well-received. Some perceived it as merely an excuse to display delicate, even miserly, portions of food on oversized plates. Obviously, critics said, these chefs took themselves for artistes, with their insistence on pretty arrangements and ‘daring’ combinations of ingredients, with sauces that seemed to have been applied by a brush. It was never meant to be so, but some got carried away. Charles Barrier, the oldest chef featured in Great Chefs of France, said in 1977, “There is too much talk of presentation of food.
GREAT, GR AND & FAMOUS CHEFS AND THEIR SIGNATURE DISHES