Books, Arts & Manners: Au Revoir, Nouvelle Cuisine

Thank heaven, Americans are now getting over their excessive interest in food novelties that cost a fortune in the so-called gourmet stores. I agree that nouvelle cuisine, especially American nouvelle cuisine, fulfilled its purpose of not only benefiting its advocates, but making the nation at large aware of the fact that our native ingredients are as good as any found in Europe, if and when they are really fresh. We have also learned to choose lighter foods, since we don’t need the amount of rich food that people did when they were living in cold houses, were inadequately dressed, and, above all, suffered from much poorer health. (Thank the Lord for modern medicine.)

But now trendy nouvelle cuisine is giving way to a revival of home cooking, tailored to today’s needs. I know this from the kind of cookbooks I see; from the abandoning of nouvelle cuisine by such bellwether restaurants as the Manhattan Market in New York City; from the fact that the august food editor of the New York Times recently featured good old American fish cakes rather than fancy French dishes in that newspaper’s Sunday magazine; from Julia Child, who has made a new myth of herself by going American—to mention just a few trendsetters in the food world.

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Nika Hazelton

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Thank heaven, Americans are now getting over their excessive interest in food novelties that cost a fortune in the so-called gourmet stores. I agree that nouvelle cuisine, especially American nouvelle cuisine, fulfilled its purpose of not only benefiting its advocates, but making the nation at large aware of the fact that our native ingredients are as good as any found in Europe, if and when they are really fresh. We have also learned to choose lighter foods, since we don’t need the amount of rich food that people did when they were living in cold houses, were inadequately dressed, and, above all, suffered from much poorer health. (Thank the Lord for modern medicine.)

But now trendy nouvelle cuisine is giving way to a revival of home cooking, tailored to today’s needs. I know this from the kind of cookbooks I see; from the abandoning of nouvelle cuisine by such bellwether restaurants as the Manhattan Market in New York City; from the fact that the august food editor of the New York Times recently featured good old American fish cakes rather than fancy French dishes in that newspaper’s Sunday magazine; from Julia Child, who has made a new myth of herself by going American—to mention just a few trendsetters in the food world.