The Secret History of French Cooking: The Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern

The emergence of nouvelle cuisine in 1970s France heralded not only a shift in taste but also the rise of the celebrity chef and of cooking as a competitive cultural sport, according to this immersive account from food writer Barr (Ritz and Escoffier). Spurred by the creative freedom of New Wave cinema, early risk-takers like pastry chef Michel Guérard were eager to “cook in a way that made sense of the present.” Other chefs followed suit, leading to the establishment of L’Association de la Grande Cuisine Française, where culinary insurgents gathered to promote nouvelle cuisine and land lucrative sponsorships. The multipronged narrative also follows conservative Le Monde food critic Robert Courtine, who fought back against nouvelle cuisine by highlighting restaurants that offered more traditional menus (which, in an ironic feminist twist, were often helmed by women chefs, leading to women’s rising prominence in the French food world); as well as upstart press agent Yanou Collart, who, grasping that money could be made “at the nexus of press, glamour, and post-1960s French pop culture,” promoted nouvelle cuisine to America. Barr’s raucous account is peppered with food wars (the chefs frequently plagiarized one another’s dishes); dark pasts (Courtine was a Nazi collaborator); and dismal selling out (Collart paved the way for a mediocre French restaurant at Disney’s EPCOT theme park). The result is a savory recreation of a seminal food scene. (Mar.)