nouvelle cuisine, (French: “new cuisine”) eclectic style in international cuisine, originating in France during the 1960s and ’70s, that stressed freshness, lightness, and clarity of flavour and inspired new movements in world cuisine. In reaction to some of the richer and more-calorie-laden extravagances of classic French grande cuisine, nouvelle cuisine sought to emphasize the natural flavours, textures, and colours of foodstuffs. Citing the unhealthiness of a diet heavy in fats, sugars, refined starches, and salt, it minimized the use of those ingredients. Nouvelle cuisine was also influenced by the Japanese style of food presentation.
In the United States one of nouvelle cuisine’s chief critics was celebrity chef Julia Child, author of the best-selling Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) . Child saw the new movement as an affront to the logic and grandeur of French haute cuisine.
Point’s former students began to experiment and abandon tradition, creating lighter menus, introducing lower-fat sauces and vegetable purees, borrowing ingredients from non-French cuisines, and plating dishes in the kitchen instead of at the table. Although those changes were controversial, by 1972 the innovations had been christened nouvelle cuisine.
Early influential figures in the nouvelle movement included Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and the food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau of Le Nouveau Guide. Gault and Millau, with their friend André Gayot, had founded the publication in 1969 to protest the Michelin guide, which they criticized as “a stubborn bastion of conservatism” that ignored “the new generation of French chefs who had guts.” The inaugural issue of Le Nouveau Guide featured a cover story on Bocuse, Guérard, Louis Outhier, Alain Senderens, and 44 other chefs under the headline “Michelin: Don’t Forget These 48 Stars!” Senderens, in fact, would famously “give back” the stars that Michelin had awarded his famed restaurant, Lucas Carton (now named Senderens), proclaiming, “I want to simplify my cooking, allow myself more liberty and reduce the average check.”
Many of the chefs championed by Gault and Millau quickly garnered respect and Michelin stars, but the new style drew fire from established French food critics, particularly La Reynière (also known as Robert Courtine), the prominent critic at the well-respected Paris daily newspaper Le Monde.
By the 1960s a few young French chefs had started to take issue with the system. Many of them had trained with Fernand Point, a brilliant chef whose career began in the age of Escoffier but then took a different turn. Point developed his own experimental cuisine, anticipating the changes that his protégés would perfect. Ultimately, his role as a mentor for the next generation of chefs was more important than his own direct contributions.
It was a highly regimented repertoire. Chefs could, and did , invent new dishes, but there was much reverence for the past and its rules for and techniques of food preparation. Indeed, the veneration of the past was so strong that younger chefs began to feel that their creativity was constrained.
Recent Examples on the Web One of nouvelle cuisine’s most divisive gastronomes would soon have thousands upon thousands of kitchens operating as her laboratory. — Rebecca Alter, Vulture, 16 Aug.
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In contrast to cuisine classique, an older form of haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine is characterized by lighter, more delicate dishes and an increased emphasis on presentation. It was popularized in the 1960s by the food critic Henri Gault, who invented the phrase, and his colleagues André Gayot and Christian Millau in a new restaurant guide, the Gault-Millau, or Le Nouveau Guide .
The modern usage is variously attributed to authors Henri Gault, Christian Millau, and André Gayot, who used nouvelle cuisine to describe the cooking of Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé, and Raymond Oliver, many of whom were once students of Fernand Point. Paul Bocuse claimed that Gault first used the term to describe food prepared by Bocuse and other top chefs for the maiden flight of the Concorde airliner in 1969.
Regional dishes replaced cuisine classique as a source of inspiration.
It has been speculated that the outbreak of World War II was a significant contributor to nouvelle cuisine's creation—the short supply of animal protein during the German occupation made it a natural development.
Large menus were abandoned in f avour of shorter menus.
Cooking times for most fish, seafood, game birds, veal, green vegetables, and pâtés were greatly reduced in an attempt to preserve their natural flavours. Steaming was an important trend from this characteristic.
The term "nouvelle cuisine" has been used several times in the history of French cuisine, to mark a clean break with the past. In the 1730s and 1740s, several French writers emphasized their break with tradition, calling their cooking "modern" or "new".