The basic principles of the movement known as nouvelle cuisine are different from what is often blathered about today, confusing a movement that proposed a critique and overcoming of classical French cuisine with a nebulous concept of creative cuisine, understood in a negative sense. But in some ways the manifesto of nouvelle cuisine comes close to our regional cuisine.
- “You will use fresh, quality products.”
- “You will lighten your menu.”
- “You will not be systematically modernist.”
- “You will, however, seek the contribution of new techniques.”
- “You will avoid marinating, mashing, fermentation, etc.”
- “You will eliminate rich sauces and gravies.”
- “You will not ignore dietetics.”
- “You will not make up the presentation of your dishes.”
- “You will be inventive.”
- “You won’t overcook.”
What you read above are the ten commandments of so-called nouvelle cuisine, a kind of manifesto devised by famous French food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau in 1972. Why do I remind you of them? Because it will have happened to you as it did to me a thousand times to hear someone, chef, gastronome, enthusiast, but also ordinary people, claim to be fiercely in favor of tradition and strongly opposed to nouvelle cuisine, making a big fuss and assimilating that name, French and therefore somehow “sophisticated” (another cliché evidently), as if it were a synonym for “creative cuisine.” It is a bit like us considering the Surrealist movement or Cubism as the only representatives of non-figurative art.
The Nouvelle Cuisine movement
This is because nouvelle cuisine was a definite movement, had a beginning, with the “commandments” of Gault and Millau. And it had an end, more or less in the late 1980s. , so not quite yesterday. It had some great protagonists, such as Michel Guerard, Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapelle, Freddy Girardet, from us probably Gualtiero Marchesi. It was certainly the basis of a theoretical and technical shift in international cuisine, but it was different from molecular cuisine or fusion, which are not assimilated to it therefore. However, in someone’s misoneist fury nouvelle cuisine is like absolute evil, it is against “true” tradition and therefore should be branded with infamy.
In fact, its inception was inspired by the need to go beyond the swampy classical French cuisine. That of Escoffier to be clear, which was based on long cooking, mother sauces used in abundance and a substantial undervaluation of the raw material sacrificed on the altar of elaborate cooking techniques that even had to hide it. If we read some of the “commandments” well, however, we find just the opposite of all this, and the first of them says precisely “you will use fresh and quality products,” somehow foreshadowing “zero kilometer” and a cuisine based on local market products.
Luigi Veronelli
Luigi Veronelli, to whom Gault and Millau were not very sympathetic. Often said that for the French it was a necessity to theorize nouvelle cuisine since their gastronomic tradition was based on the evolution of pre-Revolutionary aristocratic cuisine. While for Italy regional cuisine was already nouvelle cuisine because it was based on local raw materials and much more popular traditions. Then technology came to us as well, some exaggerations in “revisiting” sometimes without really understanding what, and we forgot the principles of what we now brand as something negative and which perhaps is not so negative.
