Hi everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks.
I'm here with aka PillPill Walter and we're going to talk today about probably the most
influential movement in Western culinary of the 20th century.
Like everything somehow evolved from that initial movement, which was the Nouvelle Cuisine.
What are your thoughts on Nouvelle Cuisine?
First of all, if I was going to be related to a sauce, I don't know whether PillPill
would be my first choice.
If you were a sauce, if you had to be a sauce, what sauce would you be?
Salza verde.
Basque salza verde.
Oh wow, that came out quick, like you thought of it already.
I feel like I would have to think of it for a little bit.
Nah, I have it pretty clear, it's my favorite sauce in the world.
Basque salza verde has nothing to do with Italian salza verde or Mexican salza verde.
It means green sauce, that's why they all share the same name.
It's just like an emulsion of parsley, garlic and the collagen of the fish.
With olive oil sometimes it has, well in fish stock, sometimes white wine is added, but
for me the most basic version is the best one.
That's very nice.
Yeah, so Novell Cuisine, I feel like Novell Cuisine gets a little bit overshadowed by
other culinary movements like the Spanish Avant-Garde and the New Nordic and stuff.
But what people don't understand is that all that was made possible by the Novell Cuisine
movement, which kind of was like a first breaking free from old cooking habits, where everything
was made a little bit lighter, a little bit fresher, maybe even a little bit more seasonal
wouldn't you say, because there was more of an emphasis on vegetables, less meat, less
fats, less sort of like old, you know, King's Court sort of banquet style feasting.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
The approach to fine dining up to that point was very aristocratic oriented.
Well, I mean, fine dining is always like some luxury.
But then it was very much about abundance, about having this lots of amounts of food
and food waste and table servings with heavy sauces that you would get served on the table.
And it was always too much and it was a table full of food and it would be pretty much like
that.
So they also like, I guess for business reasons, also for respect for produce, they started
like to standardize new methodologies for restaurants, things like plating a plate that
you get to your table, a plate that is pre-plated in the kitchen or that is part of a tasting
menu that and that all of this work as a larger composition that has a specific order, having
wine pairings, also business innovations like having wine by the glass.
But yeah, like philosophically is what you were just saying, things became lighter and
not so much heavy sauces.
And I would say also something very important is chefs became more audacious when it comes
to creativity, that they would make combinations that you wouldn't normally see like, I don't
know, like a black tea soba or using Chinese or Indian ingredients to put them in French
cooking in very subtle ways, not like in a fusion way, but just like little accents
of things from other cultures.
And there were also subcategories of New York cuisine.
For example, Michel Girard has this, I think it's pronounced Mansour, I don't know.
That is also like a lighter way of cooking a different approach to vegetables.
So and also working closer with producers asking for specific sizes of vegetables or
for these restaurants.
So it was quite groundbreaking.
And, and like you say, all of the other movements like the Nordic, the Spanish avant garde and
the new bus cuisine, just to name a few, derived from that original one for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, just by shifting the importance that you put to say, vegetables, right, which is
only an aspect of the nouvelle cuisine, it's kind of like, well, let's even if we just
change the ratio, because it used to be like very meat heavy, very sauce heavy, then carbs
and then maybe a little bit of vegetables.
But even just shifting the amount of importance that you put to vegetables then open the door
for you to say, well, if it's going to be a bigger part of my meal, then it should be
cared for more and should be thought out more and then it develops further and further and
further until people, you know, really dive into that.
For me also, that's already beyond nouvelle cuisine, I would say, you know, but like a
lot of people underestimate people, chefs like Michel Bras, with his influence on the
real sort of new avant-garde movement, where if you look at Michel Bras cooking, it evolved
from like a sort of like country style, Auvergne, French cooking style, where he would take
countryside dishes and put them into a context where they would fit the fine dining scenario.
Then refining and refining them really delving into his region and getting more into sort
of like the regional produce and refining that more and more and more.
And I mean, Ferran Adria was inspired by his so incredibly famous Gargouille, René Renzepi,
likewise, it was like this first step of a domino effect that rippled through gastronomy
and then just kept evolving it into a certain direction.
So the reason we decided to make this episode is because we found this deck a lot less that
I remember having read this when I was in culinary school, but I haven't seen this
list like in 20 years at least.
And to find it now again, it's very, very interesting.
This was written in 1973 by Gold and Millau, for people who don't know Gold and Millau,
or Gold Millau was the alternative or is still like an alternative guy to Michelin.
And especially in France, and especially during those years, they were equal rivals, Michelin
and Gold Millau.
Yeah.
Gold Millau works with points up to 20 points, 20 is the maximum, only few chefs have achieved
20 points.
If you have 19 points, it's already like having three Michelin stars.
And yeah, like the original culinary critics of this guide, they wrote this, the 10 commandments
of nouvelle cuisine, and we wanted to review them to see how they aged because they're
quite interesting.
And some of them apply still today.
Some didn't age so well.
So let's have a look at that.
Yeah.
I mean, like I, when you sent this through, I've never seen this at all, like ever.
Okay.
It was the first time and I thought it was so interesting because a lot of the points
still hold up pretty, really well.
All of the points I thought like were really kind of, some were funny and some I was like,
man, that's really, really true.
And yeah, yeah, Gourmet Eau was a big deal.
Now not so much anymore, no?
But like, I remember we used to always like check, what did Hoffman had?
He had like 16 or 17 in the Gourmet Eau or something, right?
I'm not sure.
By the way, dude, like just a few days ago, I gave a tour to a German couple and at the
end they asked me, yeah, where did you work in Germany?
And I said with Michel Hoffman, really?
That's my favorite chef.
Hey.
I wrote him a letter once asking for a recipe and he very kindly answered and explained
me how to do this and that.
He very kindly replied saying I couldn't have the recipe.
So let's start with this.
Rule number one, thou shalt not overcook.
Thou shalt not overcook.
I love how they wrote it, like it's some sort of Bible verse, like written in gravid stone
or something.
Thou shalt not overcook.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, well, this is something that also was introduced in professional cooking
in the West by this movement.
Up until then, you know, carrots would be cooked until they were puree and the green
vegetables until they were gray.
And this is again, something that I say that was taken borrowed from other cultures like
Chinese that they already knew how to quickly blanch vegetables.
And this was now, this is a standard in any professional restaurants, French oriented.
You will see that this is the way that vegetables are cooked.
Yeah, these vegetables.
Absolutely.
But also, for example, fish is also something you don't want to overcook or seafood in general,
you know, like anything.
Yeah.
Which used to happen a lot, which used to happen a lot.
I mean, like I just saw a video the other day.
I mean, have you seen the chef's table from about Trois Gros?
No, no, I haven't.
You should watch it.
It's really good.
And he shows.
By the way, the Trois Gros brothers were also key figures in the nouvelle cuisine movement.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So he talks about his salmon with sorrel sauce in the show, which is like a classic of the
Trois Gros.
Was it trout or salmon?
Did I say trout?
No, you said salmon.
Salmon.
It's salmon.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, I was out in because okay.
Yeah, I mean, interchangeable, I guess.
But yeah.
And so he shows the dish.
And I thought that when he shows it, it's very, it's a very interesting dish, the way
that he cooks it, the way that he explains it, and the way that he plays it.
It's very good.
It's very well executed.
And I saw it and I was like, it makes sense to me.
Also, it's an interesting way of cooking fish.
If you haven't seen the show, please go watch it.
Is it on Netflix?
Yeah, right.
It's on Netflix.
Yeah.
Okay.
But then I saw an old video of the two brothers cooking the dish and it looked nothing like
that dish because you see the fish is completely like manhandled and really cooked a lot for
further is the way that he shows it in the episode, which is his modern interpretation.
It's very clean, very carefully cooked.
So the center is still pink.
The fish is flaking apart.
It's cut in an interesting way.
It's well executed.
And when you see the old version, it's a little bit rough.
And you can definitely see that the fish is cooked a lot further than it would be now.
I recently interviewed for Basque Culinary Center.
I thought I'd ready from Elcano.
Yeah.
And we were talking about how have traditional ways of cooking evolved in the last decades?
Because as you say, you see dishes that are traditional, but these dishes are not the
same 50 years ago as they are today.
And in the case of fish, for example, the expression he uses is stripped away from unnecessary
things.
This, you know, this Donostia style of cooking fish where you have this hot oil with garlic
on top of the end of cooking.
He says that used to have like a lot of more things back in the days that like used to
to hide the bad quality of the fish.
But it was stripped until you end up only with garlic and something else.
But yeah, those fishes were overcooked.
Like pil pil, like if you see videos from the 50s of pil pil was something completely
different.
Like squid in black ink that was way more cooked just 20 years ago than it is today.
So the traditional recipes also evolved during time.
Yeah, it's very interesting to see this like progression evolve sort of like this in first
kind of step and then how it kind of like goes further and further and further.
It's really interesting to look at culinary history like that.
So rule number two, thou shalt use fresh quality products.
Yeah, well, super, super common sense, right?
Yeah, pretty self explanatory.
But I mean, like today it's common sense.
Maybe, you know, we're talking about this was a movement that started in the 60s and
this was written in 1973 to compile the philosophy and the school of thought of this movement.
Yeah, and I also think it's just a little bit of a, you know, it's, it's kind of an
emphasis and it shows that because this was written 13 years after the movement started,
that is one of the most important things is to produce.
And I mean, that is still something that is rippling through today, which, you know, it's
not the most important thing is not the meat and sauce, you know, because the meat, okay,
you can get into detail there, but the meat is seasonally changing also, but not as much
as vegetables and herbs and fruits and all that sort of stuff.
So that became much more important, right?
That all the vegetables are fresh and expression, you know, nature.
So rule number four, three, three, sorry.
Thou shalt lighten thy menu.
Yeah.
And that's also something, you know, that we see more and more and more, you know, that
was one of the main things now that they wanted to get away from all those like mega heavy
sauces and the super richness and that you feel absolutely crushed after eating a, a
multi-course meal.
Exactly.
I think that that's the key.
Like you as a chef, you have to measure the right amount of food you have to deliver.
And if people at the end of the meal, they ate their dessert and they're like, oh, I'm
too full, I ate too much.
You didn't did your job right.
In my opinion.
Yeah.
People should be like, yes, full, but good, you know, like not, not like feeling over
eaten, you know, a hundred percent.
Actually, I actually think that it's a really difficult skill to have as a chef.
If you, if you're designing a tasting menu, right.
It's um, if you, if you operate, if you operate an a la carte restaurant, that's, that's no
issue because people just order what they order.
That's it.
If you want to go full, you know, ham on it, then, you know, they might as well.
But if you're offering a tasting menu and it's like people get to the main course and
they're like, oh my God, I feel, you know, so crushed.
It's like too much fat, too much, uh, this too much that it's difficult.
I think that's something you learn even better if you work in service towards the diners.
I know this because the best way I started to get a feeling of this is giving food tours
where I, I'm just serving the food and seeing how much people are eating and I get a feeling
of when they're full because I see how much they leave on the plate.
Right.
So like, I have a good feeling of how much is enough and how much is too much.
Right.
Like that's also like an important thing.
That's why, like, like the way people make fun of New World cuisine is like, ah, this
French cuisine where you get this little dishes and each plate and they charge you like millions
of dollars for that.
Um, yeah, but those little dishes are part of a larger menu.
That's the whole thing.
I really don't understand how people don't get that honestly.
Like it's, and it just doesn't stop.
People are like, oh, such a small dish for so much money.
And you're like, you do understand.
It's not hard to understand that this is one of many dishes, right?
Yeah, but that's like a very common joke.
Yes.
So rule number four, thou shalt not be systematically modernist.
That is one of my favorite ones.
I love this one as well.
Yeah.
It's so good.
That's my, I think that's my favorite one of them.
Thou shalt not systematically be, be systematically modernist.
Try to be something for the sake of being something, you know?
Yeah.
But in anything, like when, when people say, uh, I think we talked about this in the last
episode when people said, let's add more technique to this dish.
And it's like, what's that supposed to mean?
You know, like, yeah, let's add more insecurity to this dish, you know?
Yeah.
That's, that's true, no?
Yeah, exactly.
Because then you can back up your dish by saying, yeah, we took the potatoes, we dehydrate
and then we rehydrate them.
Then we bake them.
Well, then we powdered it.
Then, well, then we caramelize.
And this is what is on top.
Yeah.
But if, if that's not, if that doesn't work with the dish as something edible and enjoyable,
it doesn't, it's not worth everything you did, all the technique you added.
Totally.
I think it's really lazy also, honestly, because if you, it's very easy to jump on a trend
and it's very easy to jump on a, on a bandwagon.
And certain, certain techniques have a trend, right?
There was a trend of molecular cuisine.
There was a trend of eunotic things.
There was a trend of fermentation.
I mean, there still is, you know, and all those things, they're great.
All those techniques, they're really great, but doing them just for the sake of the technique
is very, very lazy.
If you do a technique to achieve an end result that you have in mind, that it's not down
to the technique, you know, you're not eating the technique, you eat the food.
And it's really, really lazy because you don't, you don't want to put the effort in, or you
don't have the skill and you're not willing to achieve the skill that it takes to make
a composition that is, that is a great experience when you eat it.
So you think that you can tell somebody, Hey, this is a verification of blah, blah, blah.
And they're going to be like, Oh, amazing.
But lo and behold, the excitement quickly fades once they put it in their mouth.
And that is, I feel like the worst thing that you can have as a chef.
And I've had so much food that was like that, where you're like, Oh, that sounds quite interesting.
And like, you know, people making interesting combinations, right?
There's these chefs that are really skilled at making interesting combinations of ingredients.
For example, for me, one of those chefs is Claude Bossy from London.
And he often, he cooks quite classically.
And often he has like things that go together where I'm like, Oh, that sounds so interesting.
Right?
Like he had this like, like a, a lot of passar egg with like grilled sweet corn and coconut.
And I was like, Oh man, that sounds, that sounds quite interesting.
Or he cooked like a fillet of beef and arabica coffee beans.
Like just put the whole thing in like a big pot, covered it with coffee beans and roasted
it at a really high temperature and then scraped off the beans and cut the fillet.
And I was like, man, that's so cool.
That's so interesting.
Right?
But so many times you go to like a trendy new restaurant and you read the dish descriptions
and you're like, Oh, that sounds really cool.
Then you eat it and you're like, eh.
Like, this is something I've thought for a long time for many different things is your
speech or your claim should be the main thing.
You know, like if you see like a great artist, I don't know, Kendrick Lamar, for example,
why is he considered the greatest rapper at the moment?
It's not because he's the most skilled, the most skillful or because he has the best voice.
It's because he has the best claim, the best speech.
And you could say the same thing about, let's say Elcano or Echevarri, you know, like these
places, they're, they're have like a very solid character, a very solid speech and claim.
And also the technique, there is technique, of course, there is technique and it's difficult
what they do, but it's not systematically modernist.
You know, it's not like they're not adding phones.
I don't know, seaweed phone to the grilled fish to make it more modernist.
You know, like exactly the opposite they're doing.
They're stripping away from, from all the bullshit.
Yeah.
Which in itself is a show of real skill.
Absolutely.
Skill number five, never get high on your own supply.
Now that was a wrong, wrong decalogue.
Sorry.
Though, should nevertheless seek out what the new techniques can bring you.
Yeah.
Also, just as important as the other one, right?
You shouldn't do the technique for the technique sake, but you should never be close minded.
Absolutely.
I think you should always, always be open to new impressions.
I mean, and this was written in 73, back then understains cooking science was not a thing
at all.
I'm not even sure if science and cooking from all McGee was written back then.
Maybe it wasn't.
I'm not sure if it was.
I think it wasn't in 73.
So like that there were no foundations to understand what a, a myyaf reaction is today.
Any chef knows what a myyaf reaction is or I don't know, even many more things.
I like the right temperatures for each piece of protein or the minutes you should blanch
every vegetable.
Like many of these things are already standardized and these are things you should master.
You should know and understand and life will be easier if you do.
That's basically it, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
Rule number six, don't show, avoid pickles, cured, game meats, fermented foods, et cetera.
This is for me the funniest and most interesting one of them all.
Yeah, yeah.
I wonder where that came from, honestly.
Because I can imagine, I mean, these are Nouvelle Cuisine as its name says, it's against the
old guard, right?
Like in the old guard, I can imagine them using this, yeah, this heavy sauces with pickles
and sours things that they were stripping away from it.
I guess this has to do with, as I was saying earlier, like sauces to hide flavor of bad
produce and this is what they were doing.
Ah, that makes sense.
That makes sense.
It's pretty interesting how exactly these techniques, like three or four decades later
with the new Nordic, had an absolute renaissance, you know?
Like now it's a thing to do this, exactly these things, you know?
Yeah, totally.
It's super, super interesting.
It's really funny.
Rule number seven, though, shalt eliminate rich sauces.
Yeah.
Also, I mean, I wonder, you know what I think, like what I was wondering yesterday, how would
you say rich the sauces have to be before the Nouvelle cuisine?
Because I mean, like people still use rich sauces, but I think before that the sauces
had to be fucking heavy.
I can imagine them like this very thick gravy's, you know, like not like a demi-glace, and
demi-glace is heavy, but it's pure, you know, like it's pure, pure.
You could even consider it light, you know, like because it's not, it's not like full
of pureed vegetables inside of the sauce.
I think that's where it goes.
Am I in that?
And also like with some pickles to add even more umami and acidity, like that's what I
think, like something very maximalistic, very loaded with many, many components and elements.
At the end of the day, a demi-glace, it's like a rich stock that was reduced until it's
very thick.
That's it, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So that's number eight.
Those salt not ignored dietetics.
I mean, this is the sort of, I was wondering whether they mean like you should keep a health-conscious
approach which fits the nouvelle cuisine direction, right?
Or whether it was about being sort of like what?
You don't eat meat?
Fuck off.
No, no, no.
I guess this goes back about what I was saying.
I can imagine abundance and more is better was the way to go before this.
You know, like you would have this table full of food and you would eat until you couldn't
walk anymore.
And the image of the gourmet was this super fat guy eating snails and drinking cognac,
you know?
And that's over.
You know, that's well, kind of.
Just pitching myself eating snails and drinking cognac.
And I kind of like that idea right now.
Yeah, but like with 120 kilos overweight, you know, like it's a good way to go.
Rule number nine, though, so not doctor of diet presentations.
Also really good.
Really, really good.
Don't stop fiddling around with your with your tweezers.
It's also less is more, I think is basically the the essence of that quote.
Yeah, but I mean, if you see dishes from that time, the the way it were, they were plated.
It was very simple, you know, it was usually like a sauce on the bottom of the plate and
then something that was already prepared, put in the middle and maybe three leaves of
any herb around.
And these were not I think the fanciest you would find was like chevrolet, you know, like
not not super crazy herbs until Michel Bras, you know?
Yeah.
Which is also quite interesting, you know, like how fine dining was back then.
For example, this field, piquillo peppers that now you see in every pinch of our.
Yeah.
And this was introduced by Roteta was one of the chef of the new Basque cuisine movement
that happened like in the end of the 70s, 80s.
And he would serve that in a fine dining setting.
And today this is something you find in every pinch of our like an adaptation with with
cut fish, you know.
But that's also interesting how dishes were introduced in this fine dining settings and
went out of the fine dining restaurant and ended up being as bar food, you know, which
is also amazing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And rule number 10, Valchol be inventive.
Yeah.
I think that's key for any chef.
Like, I can just think of Giro's dreams of sushi, where he said that he would wake up
and the first thing in the morning he would dream of different ways of of making his his
nigiri.
And I think that that ultimate magic around cooking, you know, like being free and inventive
and expressing yourself and using your background and your history and your heritage and putting
it on a plate.
Totally.
And I really like that you make this example, because, you know, when I hear that quotes,
I'm immediately thinking like, oh, people could misinterpret it as being sort of like
or always be inventive.
But you, you know, being inventive can be doesn't mean that you have to strive to do
something new all the time.
But you can do the same thing again and again, you can be a very classical cook.
And still you can find small details that add a little bit of an extra touch to what
you're doing, you know, maybe you add a little bit of, you know, dried mushrooms to your
jus to give it a little bit more depth and awesome or you add a little bit of colatura
to this vinaigrette that you make, you know, just to give it a little bit more complexity.
And even if you're doing the same dishes again and again, you can be inventive while keeping
the same spirit.
It doesn't mean that you have to chase the new all the time.
I once read something and this was like in a film book, like filmmaking book.
And they said like, if you create something, it has to be all new or new old, because old
old or new new doesn't work.
You know, you need to have an anchor point in the new and the old and combine both things.
Because if it's new new, people won't get it.
It's not anchored anyway.
You're not really telling a story.
You're creating something out of nowhere.
For example, this is something that, you know, food pairing, this platform about flavor combinations
where you can and the methodology they apply, they claim that these combinations are made
by the chemical compounds of the molecular compounds of the ingredients that they create
flavor matchings.
But I believe if a flavor combination has zero cultural background to the eater, it
won't work.
If I give you coffee with the very coham and that has no context or it comes out of nowhere,
you won't get it.
You know, and you will ask yourself, why are you doing this?
You know, like, yeah, it's a it's a it's a really interesting point.
I like that.
I like that concept of has to be either new old or old new.
It's like you could I can see a lot of people kind of being upset about that.
Initially, they're being sort of like, no, but new, new, like sometimes you just have
to innovate.
I'm imagining these like young Spanish chefs, you know, being like, no, and it's like, well,
but if you think about it a little bit deeper, then you'll see that there's that there's
some truth in that.
If you if you think about this kind of thing deeper, you will see that everything is a
combination of things that already exist.
Like any great work of creativity.
If you if you break it apart, you will see that it is all new or new.
But new, new doesn't work.