The United States of Arugula (7 page)

The notion of “classic French cuisine” bears some explaining. Since the age of Taillevent,
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who was the cook to the first Valois kings in the fourteenth century and compiled his recipes into a book entitled
Le Viandier
, French cookery has been governed by two principles: that it is superior to all other
nations’ cookery, and that the current generation’s chefs are mavericks who are simplifying their forebears’ fussy, anachronistic methodologies and developing a new way forward, a “nouvelle cuisine.” (The mediagenic French chefs of the 1970s who moved away from butter- and flour-rich sauces—among them Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Alain Chapel, and Roger Vergé—are but the most famous in a long line of Frenchmen to unite under the banner of nouvelle-ness.) In the seventeenth century, the prevailing expert on French cuisine was François Pierre de la Varenne, a court chef during King Louis XIV’s reign, whose 1651 cookbook,
Le cuisinier françois
, presented an organized if not comprehensive set of recipes of what the French nobility ate; it was La Varenne who invented duxelles, the paste of chopped mushrooms, shallots, and melted butter that’s still omnipresent in French cookery, and is so named because the chef was working for the Marquis d’Uxelles when he created it.
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La Varenne was followed in the eighteenth century by Vincent La Chapelle, who pointedly called his 1735 cookbook
La cuisinier moderne
to set himself apart from his predecessors, and another chef, known simply as Menon, who is thought to have actually coined the phrase “nouvelle cuisine” when he used it as the title of the third volume of his epic 1739 treatise
Nouveau traité de cuisine
(New Culinary Processes).

But classic French cuisine as Franey and his ilk understood it was created by Antonin Carême (1784–1833) and Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935). Carême was a fervent nationalist who had no doubt, as he declaimed in his multivolume 1833 masterwork,
L’art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle
(The Art of Nineteenth-Century French Cuisine), that “nineteenth-century French cuisine will remain the model of the beautiful in the culinary
art.” He may have been a ringleted, vain pretty boy wholly immodest about his own culinary talents, but Carême proved to be a prophet.

Born a few years before the French Revolution of 1789, Carême came of age in a time when the aristocratic culinary traditions of the prerevolutionary ancien régime were still very much in evidence, yet the bourgeoisie, too, were taking an increased interest in eating well. Carême straddled these two worlds. He always worked for a wealthy patron—most notably for the French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand—but he also recognized that the future of cuisine depended on a wide audience, not just a bunch of wealthy, titled banqueters. (Carême was himself a self-made man who, he claimed, was born to a poor family of twenty-five children and abandoned in the streets of Paris at the age of eleven. He stumbled into a job as an apprentice in a pastry shop, thereby kicking off his illustrious career.) “My book is not written for great houses alone,” he wrote in the introduction of
L’art de la cuisine française.
“On the contrary, I want it to have a general utility … I would like every citizen in our beautiful France to eat delicious food.” Ambitious and prescient, Carême realized that publishing was his way to posterity, and, between the many books he wrote and his high-profile commissions for European nobility (in addition to Talleyrand, he also worked for Czar Alexander I of Russia, the Prince Regent of England, and Baron James de Rothschild), he became famous throughout Europe—truly, the first celebrity chef.

Carême’s books were the first to collect his nation’s traditions, methodologies, and usages of kitchen equipment into “French cuisine” as we think of it today, with exhaustively thorough chapters devoted to the preparation of various kinds of bouillons, soups, sauces, quenelles, breads, fish dishes, and meat dishes—some of the very same processes that Julia Child and her collaborators would painstakingly deconstruct and reconstruct for an American audience in the early 1960s. It was also Carême who popularized such terms as béchamel, velouté, and soufflé, ensuring that, as one of his biographers put it, “like ballet (another art formed in seventeenth-century France), cuisine would continue to speak in French.”

All that said, Carême’s most avid readers were not ordinary French citizens but the burgeoning ranks of restaurant chefs, the foremost of whom, Escoffier, streamlined Carême’s grand, fanciful visions into recipes and techniques that could be pragmatically applied in a professional kitchen. (Whereas Carême never worked in a restaurant—hardly any good ones existed in his heyday
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—Escoffier never worked for a private patron.) The Provence-born Escoffier was something of a boy wonder, establishing himself in the 1860s at Le Petit Moulin Rouge, Paris’s most popular restaurant of the time. By the 1880s, he was working at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, where he befriended César Ritz, a Swiss up-and-comer on the management side of the hotel. In 1890, Escoffier and Ritz were hired in tandem by the theater impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte
†
to run the restaurant and hotel operations, respectively, of his new luxury hotel in London, the Savoy. The Savoy gave Escoffier a platform from which to put his Carême-lite theories into practice: the repertoire would still be based on Carême’s principles as set forth in
L’art de la cuisine française
, but without the rococo presentations and cumbersome
service à la française
of Carême’s day, in which a profusion of dishes was laid out on the table all at once. Escoffier helped popularize
service à la russe
(Russian-style), in which courses were brought out in succession by waiters (with diners no longer obligated to pass their plates around to get a taste of this and
that), and he pioneered the practice of à la carte dining, wherein one guest could order a completely different set of courses from another.

Escoffier also devised the
chefs de partie
system of function-specific kitchen stations, eliminating the old jumble of redundant, overlapping departments, and furnished his kitchens with state-of-the-art iron ranges, making his operations more efficient than the hearth-based kitchens of Carême’s day. (Hearth cooking would remain a backward abomination in restaurants with serious intentions until Americans such as Alice Waters and Peter Hoffman invented urban-farmhouse chic in the 1980s.) Such was the success of the Ritz-Escoffier team that they soon went into business for themselves, with Ritz managing the eponymous Hotel Ritz in Paris and the Carlton in London, and Escoffier serving as these hotels’ head of restaurant services and acting in a similar capacity for the luxury cruise lines that sought his imprimatur.
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Escoffier’s 1903 book,
Le guide culinaire
, became the primer for all cooks seeking to understand the complete repertoire of proper French haute cuisine, its 5,012 recipes effectively standardizing the fancy French menu and giving us the hit parade of rich dishes that, until the final decades of the twentieth century, defined four-star dining: velouté of chicken soup, lobster
à l’américaine
, poached Dover sole in champagne sauce, filet mignon with bordelaise and béarnaise sauces, veal kidneys in mustard-cream sauce, crêpes suzette, etc.

HENRI SOULÉ AND
his charges were hardly the first people to offer fancy French food in the United States. Lorenzo Delmonico cemented his reputation as New York City’s greatest restaurateur of the nineteenth century by hiring the Frenchman Charles Ranhofer to run his kitchens in 1861, and, among
the wealthy families of the nineteenth century’s second half, it was a status symbol to employ a French chef at one’s Fifth Avenue mansion or Newport “cottage.”

But Soulé made his mark as haute cuisine’s great disseminator in America. Delmonico’s represented an old way, with menu items numbering in the hundreds and multicourse banquets that stretched on for hours—a Ranhofer meal typically progressed from oysters to soups (one clear, one stewlike) to hors d’oeuvres to fish to game to viands to terrines to salads to a variety of desserts, among them Baked Alaska, invented by the chef to honor Secretary of State William Seward’s 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia. It was Gilded Age gorge-athon eating for wealthy robber barons, probably fantastic to have experienced, but not as
raffiné
as the Escoffier-derived cookery and modern service that the French Pavilion offered fairgoers in 1939. (Soulé had actually waited on Escoffier several times in the 1920s, when the great chef was retired and lunched twice weekly at Soulé’s place of work, the Hôtel Mirabeau in Paris.)

Soulé’s timing was good, too. As the fair began in May, the U.S. restaurant industry was recovering not only from the Depression but from the effects of Prohibition. Though the Volstead Act of 1919 had been repealed in 1933, making booze and undiluted wine legal again, the alcohol ban had already exacted a devastating toll on the hospitality industry, wiping out the luxury pleasure palaces of the previous century, Delmonico’s included.
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For the Manhattan swells old enough to remember the good old days before Prohibition, the Restaurant Français at the French Pavilion was a gustatory reawakening. Crosby Gaige, Lucius Beebe, and their epicurean comrades from the International Wine and Food Society made a pilgrimage to Queens and were duly impressed, as was the still-unknown Jim Beard, who went as
a guest of the Society’s Jeanne Owen. For those traveling to the World’s Fair from other parts of the United States, the restaurant was an outright revelation, its capons in tarragon aspic and noisettes of lamb with stuffed artichokes unlike anything the folks were eatin’ back home in Wichita. Even with prices that were high for 1939—$1.60 for
Coq au Vin de Bordeaux
, $5.50 for a bottle of 1929 Cheval-Blanc—Soulé was doing overflow business, making room for customers on benches meant for his exhausted staff when all the regular tables were full.

The success of the Restaurant Français, which served upward of a hundred thousand meals over the two-summer run of the World’s Fair, stoked Soulé’s ambition. New York, he recognized, was essentially an untapped market, with only a handful of restaurants serving haute cuisine, such as the Colony and the Café Chambord, and even there not with his flair. Few in his homeland believed that a decent French restaurant could even exist in New York. The
New Yorker
writer and self-styled epicure Joseph Wechsberg, one of Soulé’s earliest boosters in America, recounted in print a conversation he’d had with the chef Fernand Point, whose restaurant just south of Lyons, La Pyramide, was widely thought to be France’s greatest in the first half of the twentieth century. “After all,” said Point, an intimidating man who stood six foot three and weighed upward of 300 pounds, “how French can
any
French restaurant be in America?” Though Soulé revered Point, he took umbrage at these words and set out to prove the big man wrong.

The ominous news reports issuing forth from the other side of the Atlantic made the idea of a permanent American venture even more appealing. As the first summer of the World’s Fair drew to a close, France had already entered into war with Germany. By the fair’s second summer, in 1940, Soulé was working with a drastically reduced staff, since most of his men had been conscripted into the army, and the crowds were noticeably thinner and less lively than the previous year. In mid-June, Paris fell to the Nazis, and the French signed a surrender agreement with Germany, leaving the country in the hands of the puppet Vichy government, and leaving the French Pavilion employees wondering what kind of life awaited them back home.

For Soulé, the die was cast when, shortly after the World’s Fair came to an end, the U.S. government decreed that French refugees could obtain permanent work visas provided that they had jobs lined up and that they ritually reentered the country. In 1941, after a few months of uncertainty, a contingent of the Restaurant Français staff that included Soulé, Franey, and even Jean Drouant himself traveled to the Canadian side of the Niagara River for the purpose of ceremonially crossing the Peace Bridge that connects Fort Erie, Ontario, to Buffalo, New York. In a remarkable stumble out of character, Soulé was the sole member of the group not to have his immigration papers in order; to his embarrassment, he had to stay in Canada for three weeks. Nevertheless, he made it back to New York, and when he did, he found himself completely in charge of the new restaurant he’d planned on opening with Drouant—though Drouant had arranged the financing for the new enterprise (reputedly by hitting up Joseph Kennedy, who in turn reeled in other investors), he decided at the eleventh hour that he missed France too much and returned home. With Drouant out of the picture, it was Soulé’s show.

The restaurant that he finally opened in October 1941 at 5 East Fifty-fifth Street, strategically situated opposite the plush St. Regis Hotel, was called Le Pavillon, in honor of its Flushing roots. On opening night, Soulé staged a bacchanal for an invitation-only guest list of Kennedys, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and the like, none of whom were charged. The menu included copious amounts of beluga caviar, a mousse of sole with lobster and champagne sauces, a roasted fillet of beef in truffle sauce, and magnums of Chateau Pétrus, the great Bordeaux, which had theretofore never been sipped by Americans on their own soil. “There were no concessions to ‘American taste,’” recalled Franey, who, clearly a favorite of the demanding Soulé, was brought aboard as the
chef poissonier
, a
commis
no longer. “The menu was in French, of course, and most of our educated and wealthy customers could work their way through it with at least some comprehension, but if they did not understand a particular term, I am certain they would hide the fact for fear of seeming gauche.”

Le Pavillon was a big step forward in American fine dining, the template
for the fine French restaurant with Escoffier-derived cuisine and exquisite, tiered service administered by a battalion of captains, headwaiters, and waiters. In the 1940s, much more was expected of the waitstaff than the mere delivery of plated appetizers, entrées, and desserts—the waiters did a great deal of tableside preparation themselves, carving roasts and birds, and portioning out servings of poached salmon and crabmeat omelet from the
buffet froid
, the prominently displayed cold buffet table that was another requisite flourish of the time. (Franey was granted plenty of latitude in preparing dishes for the
buffet froid
, and his prowess there is probably what convinced Soulé that he would one day be worthy of being Le Pavillon’s head chef.)