Innovation LOOKING BACK WARD, GOING FORWARD
T
he discovery of a new dish, according to BrillatSavarin’s best known and most quoted aphorism, does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star. That may be (perhaps in the days before radio telescopes and space probes the appearance of new stars was still cause for general excitement), but the question is, are there really any new dishes to be found? Many have thought not. “The art of cooking is still centred on the same dozen or so pitifully overworked recipes. The same dishes continue to make the rounds of our tables and are merely christened and rechristened time and time again with highsounding names we hope will disguise their mediocre uniformity. For three centuries now, no truly new dish has been presented to the world.” So wrote a young chef named Jules Maincave, shortly before World War One. The war claimed his life, and he never got the chance to disprove his own statement, as no doubt he intended to do. And we have seen that although
212
chefs and writers throughout history have made claims of a “new” cuisine, antecedents for these “new” dishes are easily found. Even the great Escoffier, whose published recipes alone number at least seven thousand, acknowledged that his cooking was firmly based on foundations that the great chefs of the past—Carême in particular—had laid. His genius was to adapt his works to the customs and tastes of the time.
LOBSTER WITH SAUCE Take, for example, the dish with which Escoffier first made his name: Homard à l’américaine, which is lobster cooked with a simple sauce of shallots, white wine, and tomatoes flavoured with little Armagnac, garlic and parsley or tarragon. Neither the name nor the dish itself were new, and many people have taken the credit for its invention. One was Pierre Fraisse, chefproprietor of a restaurant in Paris in the 1870s, who told the story of being faced with a group
GREAT, GR AND & FAMOUS CHEFS AND THEIR SIGNATURE DISHES