Talk:Nouvelle Cuisine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Food Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Food and drink, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of food and drink articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
High This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.

First paragraph notes that "Nouvelle Cuisine has been largely abandoned" which is a tenable statement. Second paragraph, however, seems to be written by someone who took offense at the aforementioned statement and attempts to defend their belief that Nouvelle Cuisine is not "dead" per se. And that defense is not from a neutral point of view; nor, for that matter, well written.
- User:CurdledMeowMix 21:03 EST


Nouvelle Cuisine is not as prominent as it once was and therefore could be seen as abandoned. I feel this topic has been justified on both accounts, with boith a negative and a positive making this neutral --Eldowardo 20:06, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

This article is ridiculous. If Nouvelle Cuisine is not as prominent as it once was, it is because the style has largely been assimilated into the mainstream of cooking. Some aspects of it, such as the overreliance on using butter to thicken sauces, have diminished as people become more health conscious, but the basic tenets laid the groundwork for almost all subsequent culinary explorations, including "California cuisine" and the postmodern cuisine of Adrià. –Joke 17:16, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, one of Nouvelle Cuisine's more important aspects was lighter sauces, not more heavy ones. This was part of the Nouvelle Cuisine revolution. It started in France, not in the USA as someone wrote, and it started in the 70s. At least this is when the term was coined. It is said that the father of the style was Fernand Point, but his students where instrumental. --Qwerty qwerty 22:37, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree that it emphasized the use of lighter, simpler and thinner sauces. But in, for example, James Peterson's Sauces:
Of the technical innovations of the 1960s and 1970s, none were more profound or long-lasting than those in the area of sauce making. Chefs began to eliminate flour from their sauces (used in one way or another since the Middle Ages) and to thicken their sauces with cream, butter and egg yolks. Sauces were served in smaller quantitites and were usually lighter textured. (p. 16)
The point that I was trying to make is that the sauces were lighter in texture, but no less rich (in fact, substituting any of those ingredients for flour as a thickener tends to make a richer sauce). –Joke 00:41, 5 July 2006 (UTC)


Did anybody actually use the term nouvelle cuisine with a straight face? I am only familiar with it being used in a derogatory sense. What did cooks call this style? -Ashley Pomeroy 14:50, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Uh, they called it nouvelle cuisine and their faces were perfectly straight. –Joke 15:08, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Sigh. Wikipedia at its worst is when a no doubt well intentioned editor completely reverses the meaning of something, particularly without consulting the talk page. Nouvelle cuisine rejected flour as a thickener, not egg yolks, butter and cream. See the quote above. Also, they rejected overcooked vegetables – and they percieved that many of the vegetables in cuisine classique were overcooked – not slow cooked vegetables. –Joke 00:31, 14 September 2006 (UTC)


I question the basic premise that nouvelle cuisine was about "lighter" sauces. It gained popularity in part because of this perception, but in fact it introduced much richer sauces than were ever present in classical french cuisine. Moving away from flour (as in roux) as a thickener meant the increased reliance on reduced cream and butter. The texture was often a bit lighter; the richness and caloric content were anything but.

Many of these innovations came about as economizing measures. A traditional roux-thickened demiglace was made with copious amounts of meat, and had to to be simmered and skimmed for a whole day. Nouvelle cuisine replaced this preparation with glace de viande, a thicker, gelatinous reduction made entirely from stock made from bones. Bones are cheaper than meat, and the lack of roux eliminates hours and hours of skimming. The resulting sauces would have a sticky, gelatinous texture if they were not cut with cream and/or butter.

Another actual innovation of nouvelle cuisine was the opening up of classically trained chefs to some of the traditions of regional french cooking (previously seen as the domain of housewives). Beurre Blanc sauce, now thought of as classic, is an example of both of the phenomena that I mention: it's all about butter, and it originated in the home kitchens of north eastern france, not in the rigid centralized systems of careme and escoffier. --Paul R

Everyone herre seems to fall over the lightness of the sauces, which is remarkable. Nouvelle cuisine was a true (r)evolution, changing much more than only the food. Conceptualizing, it both transformed culinary place AND space. Since the main arguments pointed forward here are about place-related processes, I'll stick to those. Considering the change in institutional logic and identity roles, deriving from Rao, Monin and Durand (2003), the discussion about the lightness of sauces quickly vanishes. I would suggest to read the article. Moreover, why using Mennell as most cited author for the article. His approach is clearly not suitable to research the changes that Nouvelle Cuisine brought. The developmentalists/structuralist point of view does raise some interesting points, but is not acceptable in the explanatory parts to my opinion. Although it is a nice book to read, it has to a large degree the same flaws as the neo-classical approaches for the explanation of spatial processes. I'd suggest any interesting in Nouvelle Cuisine should read the following article to have a little insight on the backgrounds of cuisine in the 1960s and 1970s:

Rao, H, P Monin & R Durand (2003): Institutional Change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy. American journal of sociology, Vol 108 Iss 4. p795-744

It is a very understandable article, if you do not want to read it as a whole, I suggest that at least you take a look at the figures on pages 801 and 807. That explains a lot. Hopefully, the mentioned aspects will be included in this wikipedia article as well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.83.11.74 (talk) 14:13, 23 October 2007 (UTC)