At the Crillon and at Home

Viva La France

At the Crillon and at Home shows French cooking is still among the best in the world. By Peter Veldsman.

Elizabeth David introduced the delights of Provençal cooking to the British public at a time when most of them were on a diet of canned snoek from South Africa. Her books formed the point of departure for my generation and lead the way to the cook book boom which emerged during the second half of the previous century.

At first it was the "foodies" recording mostly housewife and cookery school recipes, creating little themselves. These books were on the whole refl ective, seldom innovative, but excellent for novices.

During the '70s, books written by professional chefs emerged, particularly in France by personalities such as Fernand Point, Paul Bocuse and Raymond Oliver.

Others followed and at present there is one contemporary chef in Paris who embodies the best of French savoir-vivre and savoir-faire: Jean-François Piège, currently at the helm of Les Ambassadeurs, the 2 Michelin starred fine dining restaurant of the Hôtel de Crillon. He published his fi rst book At the Crillon and at Home in 2007 and the English translation appeared towards the end of last year.

What makes him so special? He is special to me because we have the same approach to cuisine and even our home cooking seems to correspond. Piège was born in the Hermitage and, as a child, loved gardening, which allowed him to taste true fresh produce. He built his career on solid training and worked with some of the greatest French chefs, including Alain Ducasse, before he moved to the Crillon.

Piège is a collector of books, particularly on food history, and he uses this knowledge as a starting point for his own inventiveness, excluding fashionable deconstruction and disharmonies.

Instead he continues along the traditional route following in the footsteps of his great predecessors. He combines tradition with inventiveness. Most contemporary chefs are besotted with technology and leave it to the machine to do something new. This kind of innovation is not creation. Instead Piège achieves harmony in an array of intriguing presentations forming the first part of his book.

Just look at his green presentation of the humble garden pea. He turns it into a palette of unctuous textures and of various tastes: creamed, à la royale, emulsion and in ice cream all on one plate, and then he adds a counterpoint of smoked bacon, pancetta and salad greens. His creations pay homage to vegetables such as leek, tomato, asparagus and Belgian endive.

Fresh sea scallops combined with chips prepared from scallops, contrasted by a scallop tartare and served with cauliflower broth; a cold and hot interpretation of spider crab; an ingenious way with sole; tuna cooked in the style of Rossini steak. So it continues, page after page.

The second part of the book is dedicated to home cooking. And this is just as informative as the haute cuisine of the first half. Even I learned something new: cooking, not boiling pasta. This alone makes the R780 I paid for the book more than worthwhile.

Some food critics no longer believe that France leads the gastronomic world and laud Adria of elBulli in Barcelona and Blumenthal of The Fat Duck in Berkshire. Having been around for long enough, I realise that real gourmets always travel the road of the true masters whose creations, like that of Escoffier, outlast fashion.

Such a master is Piège whose wonderful book proves that real ingredients rather than chemical creations can still be deeply satisfying.

Peter Veldsman, founder of long-lived Cape Town restaurant Emily's, particularly dislikes gustatory mismatches.