Or, mourning music, movies, and fine fare
by Brooke Chilvers
I can’t complain. My niece, armed with a newborn, is under severe heat warnings in Jacksonville, Florida, while my Las Vegas brother for weeks has experienced temperatures exceeded only by those my professional-hunter husband endured guiding for western greater kudu in the arid reaches of northern Central African Republic, alongside baboons falling over dead in the heat of the day. Here, in Brittany, France, it’s hardly been in the 70s, although the cloudy days have stretched now into weeks. Like I said, no complaints.
But then, on July 18, news travelled that singer-songwriter Jerry Fuller (b. 1938) had died, and I sadly slow-danced my way around my yellow kitchen. His music had clutched my teenage heart, Young Girl performed by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and Ricky Nelson’s Travelin’ Man. Because I was that girl, and my first love was that man, dumping me to go off to college.
Then, on August 16, my (long-lost) youth took another hit. Maurice Williams (b. 1938) of the Doo-Wop group the Zodiacs, also said good-bye. The Jackson Browne version of his 1960s single, Stay, was on the radio when I pulled out of Charleston, South Carolina, the fading light turning the salt marsh gold as I drove over the scary old Cooper River Bridge one last time.
And then, on August 18, while I was still chasing down the song’s many other versions – by the Hollies, the Four Seasons, JB, Bruce Springsteen, and Cyndi Lauper’s great Caribbean-beat – French TV flashed the death of that peerless beauty, Alain Delon (b. 1935). I’ve stopped counting the number of times this week his wet, hot love scene with Romy Schneider from the 1969 film La Piscine has been replayed on different channels. They’re all gone now; even Jane Birkin (b. 1946) is dead.
Unreported in France, Phil Donahue’s death (b. 1935) the same day made it to the Guardian and BBC. When my own first marriage was breaking up despite all the couple-advice on his pioneering daytime talk show, his falling in forever love with our adored Marlo Thomas gave me hope that romance can last. It did for them, and it has for me since, too.
Nothing prepared me for the next morning’s punch: Beloved groundbreaking French chef Michel Guérard, one of the inventors of “nouvelle cuisine” with Paul Bocuse and the Frères Troisgros, also was dead. Like Julia Child, at age 91. Maybe his substituting pureed celery root, cauliflower, and vegetable bouillon for butter, cream, and potatoes was his secret to longevity (maybe Child’s “Upside-Down Martini” was hers). After all, his American equivalent, Daniel Bouley, died in February 2024 at a mere 70 years old.
As the guru of a colorful, slimmed-down French haute cuisine, what he called cuisine santé, in 1976 Guérard was the first French chef to make the cover of Time magazine. Born in 1933 into a family of butcher-farmers in the lovely town of Vétheuil along the Seine River where Monet also had a home, by seventeen he was apprenticed as a pastry chef. After military service, Guérard worked as a pastry chef, then a saucier at the five-star Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. Along the way, he earned the prestigious national trade award of Meilleur Ouvrier de France that launches careers.
His first “restaurant” was a snack bar in a wacky hair salon, then a bistro in an unlikely northwest suburb of Paris, where he earned his first Michelin star in 1967, and a second “macaron” in 1971. By 1974, he and his wife, Christine, moved to her family’s domain in the spa town Eugénie-les-Bain in southwest France where their establishment soon grew into their gorgeous “palace” hotel-restaurant, Les Près d’Eugénie; the name has everything to do in décor with the eponymous Empress, wife of Napoléon III. Together, they went on to raise one vineyard, two daughters, and three restaurants.
His dietetic twist to the finest dining brought a third Michelin star in 1977, when he also began publishing cookbooks. Guérard is one of the few chefs who never lost a star. In addition to Légion d’Honneur and other awards, he earned Toques d’Or from Gault et Millau and Tables & Auberges de France. In 1979, he was one of the first renowned international chefs to become associated with the food industry, developing frozen dishes for “le peuple” for Findus, a part of Nestlé.
In honor of music, movies, and fine dining, and since I will never get to taste Guérard’s 295 Euro ($330) fixed menu, much less the 335 Euro ($370) one – not including apéritif and wines – today I’ve made his (then) shockingly inventive 1968 salade gourmande, which made him famous for mating foie gras and vinegar for the first time.
The recipe is not included in my stained and yellowed copy of Minceur Essentielle, La Grande Cuisine Santé. I learned it from YouTube reruns of France’s first great TV show from the mid-1970s, which demonstrated the best in simple bourgeois cooking, La Grande Cocotte. (Google: Ina Les Recettes Vintage)
The salad consists of half-inch thick slices of foie gras on a bed of radicchio, topped with thin green beans and shallots, and asparagus tips. Before assembling, each ingredient is tossed in his vinaigrette:
1 teaspoon of fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons of sherry vinegar
4 teaspoons of peanut oil
4 teaspoons of olive oil
Salt and pepper, and snips of estragon and chervil
The kind and lovely Michel Guérard says that if you cannot find or cannot afford the usual 20 grams of sliced black truffles to top it off, you can substitute champignons de Paris well doused in lemon juice. In France, where asparagus is truly seasonal, he says, you can substitute with summer’s artichokes. Ditto for radicchio; red leaf lettuce will have to do. You can — but I won’t — replace his oils and acids with walnut oil and red wine vinegar.
If you enjoy wallowing in a past that can never be again, like Delon and Romy, who died aged 43, you can always YouTube “Les Prés d’Eugénie” and indulge virtually.
Santé – et plaisir!
And Adieu to you five.
French still life and portrait painter Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was one of only fourteen female artists before the French Revolution to be admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Her patron, Marie Antoinette, was a signer of her marriage license, which nearly cost her her life during the Reign of Terror.
