La Cuisine Gourmande

"The pictures were very different from the usual pictures in French books, which were very dark and brown – everything with brown sauce. In this book they have a lot of veg and herbs, and a very clean plate with not too much ingredients. What I’d just learned at school – 30 years back – was all the basics of French cooking: the cream, the velouté, all the meat covered with dark sauce, maybe with bread or celery on the side, something like that; cooking with all the technical base, but not the excitement that I’m feeling when I open this book. So it was a massive shock, and it was really so exciting that it gave me the ambition to learn more about this kind of food, and the drive for many years to try to make things better and more exciting – with lighter sauces and more colourful etcetera. “My food has always been described as something very gutsy with a lot of direct and strong flavour and I think that’s the terroir.” When I started to read, I very quickly understood that all the words were singing to me, like petit gâteau de carotte de cerfeuil – you know, little cake of carrots with a very light chervil sauce. For me that was like: wow! Compared to what I just learned at my school, which was heavy and not so colourful. And the way he used to call the food as well – ‘little cushion of mushrooms’, things like that – even the words he used in the recipes were like music to me. It was the creativity, the different approach, the appearance – he was the start of that: instead of having lots of things on the plate he had maybe three, four ingredients and they really matched each other and married each other. It looks beautiful: very clean and appetising. And it was quite simple – you had all the ingredients and then underneath is the recipe step by step – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So very clear as well, written in a very simple way. Yes, he still has his restaurant in Eugénie-les-Bains, three Michelin stars and still one of the best in France. I’m sure he’s not in the kitchen any more – he’s too old. But he still runs it."