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This month's museum pick...
Musée de l’Art Culinaire
By Patrick Totty
The Musée de l’Art Culinaire in Villeneuve-Loubet, France, confers a double favor on traveling food lovers: It’s in the Maritime Alps, which provides an excellent excuse to visit the Cote d’Azur; and its location in the childhood home of France’s greatest late19th-and early 20th-century chef, Escoffier, makes for an inviting, sometimes eccentric, low-key museum whose objects haven’t been catalogued or analyzed to death.
The house became a museum in 1956, some 110 years after
Escoffier’s birth there. He grew up surrounded by the bounties of the
region, including marvelous wines, produce, herbs, spices poultry,
seafood and cheeses. His childhood interest in cooking led him to
apprentice with an uncle in Nice, then work his way up through kitchens
in Paris, Monte Carlo Lucerne and, finally, London.
In London, Escoffier became the head of the line at the Savoy
Hotel in 1890, bringing with him ideas for kitchen organization and
workflow that seemed revolutionary at the time. Before Escoffier, the
various parts of the kitchen worked autonomously, cranking out salads,
entrée, soups and desserts with no coordination. Escoffier imposed the
concept of sous chefs working to time their dishes according to the
order of the meal. He reinforced the need for cooperation by publishing
the first menus to be laid out according to the sequence of appetizers,
fish courses, meat courses, salads and desserts. He was also the first
chef to offer diners a la carte menus.
He was also a reformer when it came to food itself. Escoffier
hated the elaborate garnishes that accompanied many dishes of the Gilded
Age. He began eliminating them and using sauces in their stead. All dishes were based on the freshest
ingredients available, a practice that foreshadowed Americans’ late 20th
century preoccupation with freshness.
That isn’t to say that Escoffier was a premature Alice
Waters. Many of his recipes are larded with fat and laden with sugar in
amounts that would make most moderns wince. But in an era when people
had little concern for cholesterol or knowledge of the contribution of
sugar to diabetes, his recipes were hailed for their stunning depths of
flavor and blending of elements.
Escoffier’s influence over French haut cuisine, further
reinforced by his publication of three seminal works (Le
Guide Culinaire,
Le Livre des Menus and Ma Cuisine), lasted for decades. It
wasn’t until the 1970s, with the arrival of cusine minceur, that the grand master’s
influence began to wane. Even then, new chefs who were trying lighter
styles of cooking used Escoffier’s recipes as a starting point for
their dishes.
Before going to the Savoy, Escoffier had met Cesar Ritz, the
man whose name later would epitomize the highest levels of hotel service
and luxury. Both men, determined to reform what they saw as the stodgy
practices of their professions, remained friends over the years. In
1898, when Ritz opened the Carlton Hotel in London, he invited Escoffier
to become Chef de Cuisine. It was there that Escoffier began his 22-year
reign as the pre-eminent chef of Europe.
The museum is almost Victorian in its inclusiveness, counting
Escoffier family heirlooms, photos and furnishings along with its
treasury of menus, recipes, place settings, cookware, utensils, letters,
awards and food-related publications. One of the eight exhibit rooms is
a reconstruction of a 19th-century Provencal kitchen, the
type where Escoffier first learned to cook.
The Musée de l'Art Culinaire, also referred to as the Musée Escoffier, is open during the summer, Tuesday through Sunday, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Address:
Villeneuve-Loubet, France