Jemison Cycling Tours

02/22/2025

11/04/2024

I voted Today by dropping off my Ballot.
Go Vote

11/02/2024

11/02/2024

I flew back from Europe to Vote

10/12/2024

Hanging out with Steida and his wife Sam

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBB7wHbO2Z0/?igsh=aHR6NXp4aDl3YnI2

10/01/2024

https://youtu.be/paBjXXowqGY?si=rYqLqK9W_yIlks2U

Rode over the Col de Murs today. This time with Jemison Cycling Tours

1998 Tour de France - Stage 13 into Carpentras where Marty sprints for 5th place

09/11/2024

What do you see?
What’s that saying?
Something about details??

09/09/2024

Heading to Burgundy, France tomorrow.
Guys trio - Jemison Cycling Tours

Provence, France comes after Burgundy.

09/03/2024

Revolu­tion­ary who shook up 1970s French gast­ro­nomy

Har­riet Fitch Little
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Michel Guérard

Chef 1933-2024

The nar­rat­ive apex of Dis­ney’s film Rata­touille is a scene where chef Remy must cre­ate a dish to impress the most miser­able critic in Paris. He chooses rata­touille, but in an almost unre­cog­nis­able form: a tiny stack of thin veget­able pucks and a swoosh of green sauce. The meal is so deli­cious that the critic has a come-to-Jesus moment. Even on learn­ing that Remy is in fact a rat, he decides to risk his repu­ta­tion on the “dis­cov­ery and defence of the new”.

Michel Guérard, who died this week aged 91, is the chef to thank for this piece of cinema magic. The last liv­ing pion­eer of nou­velle cuisine and the cre­ator of its low-cal­orie spin-off, cuisine minceur, he pub­lished the recipe from which Remy’s rata­touille ori­gin­ated in his 1976 best­selling diet cook­book La Grande Cuisine Minceur. It is a use­ful demon­stra­tion of the prin­ciples that trans­formed French gast­ro­nomy in the 1970s: the dish is smal­ler, lighter and far more artistic than tra­di­tion would dic­tate; the veget­ables aren’t drowned in sauce and haven’t been over­cooked.

Guérard’s career traces a time when the rules of French fine din­ing went from being heav­ily codi­fied, to broken, then codi­fied anew. When he was born in 1933, the “roi des cuisin­iers” Auguste Escof­fier was still alive and the best res­taur­ants were those that served tech­nic­ally per­fect ver­sions of clas­sic dishes, most likely served in one of five “mother sauces” that Escof­fier had set out.

The young Guérard suc­ceeded within this sys­tem. At 25 he was awar­ded the title “Meil­leur Ouv­rier de France”, an hon­our that has been awar­ded to about the same num­ber of people as have won an Olympic gold medal. But “all patis­siers dream of becom­ing chefs,” as he later told an inter­viewer. Guérard broke free of his spe­cial­isa­tion and became a job­bing cook.

Aged 32, he left Paris, mov­ing first to nearby Asnières, where he trans­formed a sand­wich-sling­ing local into a first­class bis­tro and then to Eugénieles-Bains, a com­mune known for its thermal waters. His wife, Christine Barthélémy, already owned prop­er­ties there, which allowed the couple to open Les Prés d’Eugénie in 1974. The res­taur­ant picked up a Mich­elin star per year for the next three years and never lost them.

In 1973, the year prior to his move, the newly influ­en­tial res­taur­ant crit­ics Henri Gault and Chris­tian Mil­lau had set out 10 prin­ciples of nou­velle cuisine, inspired by even­ings spent eat­ing Guérard’s food in Asnières as well as a cohort that included Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel and Michel Trois­gros. They styled their guide the “new test­a­ment” and swore to do away with “the old-fash­ioned image of the typ­ical bon vivant” with “lips drip­ping veal stock”. “There are a mil­lion dishes to invent,” wrote Gault and Mil­lau, and Guérard proved it. Among them, oysters in green cof­fee foam and beef in a squid-ink crust made to resemble char­coal.

In his intro­duc­tion to La Grande Cuisine Minceur, Guérard claims that his diet regime was born from a per­sonal quest to lose weight while remain­ing a“cuisin­ier gour­mand”. A more likely story is that he found him­self liv­ing in a com­mune pop­u­lated by health­con­scious hol­i­day­makers, mar­ried to a wealthy spa owner and with an already-estab­lished repu­ta­tion as a pion­eer of a cuisine known for being small and light. Guérard used every culin­ary trick at his dis­posal to cre­ate three-course meals under 600 cal­or­ies: mush­room purées to thicken sauces, fro­mage blanc in place of but­ter, sweeten­ers in desserts. The spa became fam­ous, and “cuisine minceur” became a gen­eric name used by many chefs and dozens of diet books around the world.

Most suc­cess­ful rule break­ers live to see their innov­a­tions codi­fied anew. And by the end of the 1970s anonym­ous chefs were com­plain­ing to The New York Times that they felt “tyr­an­nised” by the new ortho­doxy of nou­velle cuisine. Inex­per­i­enced cooks tried to ape its sig­ni­fi­ers, and their fail­ures, par­tic­u­larly with fruit in savoury dishes, led to ridicule. Even Guérard was sick of it. In 1981 he com­plained to the paper that he was being served raw and fla­vour­less food over­seas that waiters claimed was “French nou­velle cuisine”.

But Guérard’s own star never fell. And des­pite the exist­ence of a diet menu, Les Prés d’Eugénie main­tained a repu­ta­tion as a great res­taur­ant of many stripes. The St John chef Fer­gus Hende­r­son, not known for his asceti­cism, described eat­ing there as the most mem­or­able and “unbe­liev­ably rich” meal of his life.

Asked once what his choice of a last meal would be, Guérard began his menu with “a piece of fresh bread, with good but­ter and a nice, thick layer of caviar”. He was a cuisin­ier gour­mand after all.