From: Gene McAloon 

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 12:12:49 -0400, "Frank Haber"
 wrote:

>I'm also not much of a fan of ferret brains in nut and plum sauce on a huge
>plate with dribbles.  I'll still take nouvelle over the over-rich
>Escoffier-in-decline stuff that joints with stars gave you before Bocuse.  I
>had the luck to be taken to Pavillion and Brussels in NYC before the Lutece
>era (relatives).  Too heavy.

Apparently a lot of people thought that. Or did they? My sense of it was
that Bocuse's junk caught on because he was French and it therefore became
trendy. Try telling that to people nowadays, but there was a time when
anything French was considered good, but that was the way it was.

In my opinion, the French began to go into decline when in direct
proportion to the increasing  trendyness of nouvelle cousine.
>
>Now that everyone knows freshness, and local ingredients, things are better
>and less artificial, IMHO.  Even if you have to settle for
>shrimp-from-a-farm-that-pollutes-all-of-Costa-Rica, or
>mesclun-picked-year-round-by-some-abused-migrant, you have a better standard
>of comparison in your head.

But freshness and using local ingredients were always the hallmark of
French cooking. That didn't begin with Bocuse. That was true of American
cooking as well until the advent of national distribution and supermarkets
replaced small local merchants selling mostly local goods.

We learned nothing from Bocuse but how not to cook.

Gene

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