one April 1 when he telephoned the fire brigade to insist that this time there really was a fire in his staff cloakroom, they simply laughed. His genius with food, then, was maybe just a reflection of his belief in living well. His greatest pleasure of all was champagne, which was always left open on ice for at least a minute before being poured, and it is said that in the company of his friend and cellarman, Pierre Chauvon, they could get through seven or eight bottles in a day. But the war troubled him. He was essentially a man of peace and kindness, and war revolted him possibly more than it did other people. Still, he was willing to defy the occupiers if that was what it took to get black market butter. He worked with the Resistance, often hiding escaped Allied soldiers and airmen in the attics while Germans dined downstairs. Those five years were an intolerable misery which undoubtedly contributed to his early death. After the war he and his wife were decorated by the British. But for Point, things could never be the same. The grand style which he enjoyed and at which he excelled, was finished.
THE DUTY OF CHEFS It was perhaps in the last ten years of his life that Point contributed most to cuisine. He always said that it was the duty of chefs to teach and to train the young, and it was in Vienne under Point that Paul Bocuse and a band of brothers learned the sophisticated simplicity that was to become the guiding principle of modern cooking. He was a superb teacher, knowing exactly how to encourage enthusiasm whilst instilling the benefits of experience. He loved maxims and aphorisms, and never tired of telling his pupils that it is the simplest dishes that are the hardest to master. “Take a béarnaise … what is it? A yolk of egg, a shallot, some tarragon. But, believe me, it takes years of practice before the result is perfect. Let your eyes wander for a moment and the sauce is unusable.” To this end, he devised an infallible test for any who entertained the idea of perhaps coming to work for him: he asked them to fry an egg.
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Faced with the invariable failure, Point would cry “Stop, unhappy man—you are making a dog’s breakfast of it!” And then he would proceed to demonstrate the only right way to treat an egg: Place a lump of fresh butter in a pan or egg dish and let it melt—that is, just enough for it to spread, never to crackle or spit. Open a very fresh egg onto a small plate or saucer and slide it carefully into the pan. Cook it on heat so low that the white barely turns creamy, and the yolk becomes hot but remains liquid. In a separate saucepan, melt another lump of fresh butter. Remove the egg onto a lightly heated serving plate. Salt it and pepper it, then very gently pour this fresh, warm butter over it. Serve.
COAGULATED SUNSHINE Perhaps it was because Point was first and foremost a saucier that his enthusiasm for butter was so great, for all you need do is melt it and, voila, you have a sauce. Heat it a little further and you have beurre noisette or beurre noir. Less heat but a few small additions—shallots, herbs, vinegar—gives you beurre blanc, which is of course a béarnaise without the eggs. Take away the herbs and add lemon juice instead of the vinegar and now you have hollandaise. These are the tip of the iceberg. Without butter, this ‘coagulated sunshine’ as the poet Seamus Heaney called it, the glories of French cuisine are all but inconceivable. Nor would we have Point’s signature gratin de queues d’ecrevisse, a dish that has endured for more than seventy years. Though it may nowadays seem excessive—the crayfish cooked in butter, the sauce thickened with butter and enriched with hollandaise—the dish still conforms to Point’s fundamental philosophy: good quality food enhanced by careful cooking and meticulous preparation. One of Point’s own maxims put it another way: “A good meal must be as harmonious as a symphony and as well-constructed as a Norman cathedral.” Fernand Point, the greatest chef of the twentieth century, died in 1955. He had already given birth to modern cooking, and each and every chef that follows owes to him a debt.
GREAT, GR AND & FAMOUS CHEFS AND THEIR SIGNATURE DISHES