Nadine Williams

Toque Blanche at Le Cordon Bleu

Chef Philippe Clergue is 47, and is among a handful of Parisian tutors who train the  next generation of students from France and the world who fly to Paris to graduate from Cordon Bleu headquarters.

He became a  “professeur’’ at Cordon Bleu Paris in 2006 after 15 years as an eminent one-star Michelin chef in his own high profile restaurant, L”Auberge de la Toison d’Or in Beaune, France.  He is now jointly responsible for Cordon Bleu Paris’s superior cuisine program, the food and wine pairing classes and its new Sommelier program.

Here  in Adelaide he has 18 guest students – six of whom won a local radio competition – and we spend the next two hours creating  his own unique three-course menus  in one of Cordon Bleu’s big teaching kitchens.

“We teach traditional French cuisine and this is a recipe from  Paris,’’ begins  Chef Clergue  handling out recipe sheets written in French (and English) for filets de rougets en ecailles de pommes de terre croustillantes or Red mullet fillets with crispy potato scales (recipe at end of article). His speech is laced with a French accent as sharp as the knife he now demonstrates.

“It is necessary for students to learn both cooking and presentation styles,’’ says Philippe, on his second visit to Australia. He visited here last November aboard a  cruise ship.

“I said “yes’ and “yes’ quickly to return,’’ he laughs.

The session has been a well organised clatter of knives chopping and slicing and every stove has been “manned’’ for stirring, sauteing and simmering with Chef Clergue supervising, ably assisted by Adelaide consultant chef Simon Bryant.

He ran cooking schools both in his restaurant and in private homes for many years and his students glean wisdom from each sentence, as spiced with know-how as the fish dish now beginning to look like an art form.

Time races by and soon each plate is adorned with a steaming fish fillet
”scaled” with crispy, fine small slices of  potatoes. It all sits in an orange jus reduit a glace  with broccoli flan.

All too soon the throng is gathered in the lecture theatre – with entrees lined up on the front table for us to devour with matching Australian and French wines. Three rows of  neat white plates piled with the entrée are lined up on the lecture bench –  petit tian de crabe a la Coriandre, crème d’avocat a l’amande grille, cnhips de banana plantain (basically crab entree with avocado and almond cream).

Students have learnt how to prepare both superior French dishes and contemporary presentations and now Cordon Bleu sommelier, award winning Trevor Maskell lectures us on the aesthetics of  food and wine by matching  food with fine wine – a French Chablis Premier Cru, Fourchaume William Fevre 2006 Chablis (a Chardonnay)  and a 2008 Freycinet Vineyards Chardonnay from East Tasmania.

Afterwards, he changes from his chef’s garb and a quiet, unassuming French man joins me in the quiet café at Cordon Bleu to discuss the status of French cuisine in the world of “nouriture’’.

 “For me  South Australia is very interesting,’’ he says. “ I am surprised because you have such good organic products. On Sunday morning I went to the Farmers’ Market at Wayville and everything is organic. Mushrooms, for instance and plenty of venison and honey.’’

He is modest about his role at the pinnacle of power to train the world’s next generation of chefs in the perfect combination of wine and food.

A quietly spoken man who has none of the usual eccentricities afforded French chefs, he wants to talk more about Cordon Bleu and its legacy to the world of chefs.

“We are extending the Cordon Bleu classroom from Paris out to the French vineyards to develop students’ palates as well as their cuisine skills,’’ he says of the Sommelier program he has established in Paris.

“They taste the vineyards of France and also wines from the world and I am in charge of pairing food and wine.’’

He is not fazed at the seeming slip from grace of French cuisine in the kitchens of the world.

 “I support the French traditional cuisine… when people visited France, it was not surprising that they adopt this blending of flavours with their own regional cuisine.’’

“For many years now international chefs have come to France to learn and after they return to their own countries, they cook a new cuisine and that’s the result of the cooking they have explored around the world,’’ he says.

He sees nouvelle cuisine as a “new technique and a new vision”..

“It is important to keep the classic haute cuisine, food presented in an art form. But now we have an evolution with new machines, new techniques, molecular cuisine.

“Today in the school in Paris, I present two different dishes with the same ingredients…the traditional plate and the contemporary plate…

“Because you eat with the smell, and the delight of sight, it is important for students to compare the two plates.

He says French food culture has had an enormous influence on the world food stage because international students attending Cordon Blue in Paris come from around the world and many “do not share the same sensibilities’’ surrounding food. But they leave imbued with a sound understanding of French haute cuisine and nouvelle cuisine. 

“We teach the techniques of French cuisine, the “efficace’’…how to bone a duck, the pigeon, gutting the fillet of fish; how to use ingredients,  creativity with food.’’

He admits, however, that outside the classroom and in the banlieue (suburbs) of Paris slowly French people are changing their rigid eating habits.

“Slowly it is changing, maybe in Paris quicker because people do not have the time, but in Francefamilies still cook on the wekeends.

“We have many fresh vegetable markets in all cities in France and people go there and shop.’’

“ Maybe the changement is at les anniversaires (birthdays) when there are fewer courses than the five, now only four, perhaps, and the lunch is one plate only,” he says.

“In France it is a smaller plate (than elsewhere), but quality is always more important  than quantity.

His love of food is rooted in the premier food region ofCastelnaudary where the classic French dish, Cassoulet originated.

The gifted chef has had a distinguished career and in 1984 he worked as “maitre d’hotel’’ at the Elysee Palace (The Presidency of the French republic) for one year before he moved to St Tropez to Lei Mouscardins’’ a one-star Michelin restaurant. He then moved to Burgundy to become sous-Chef at the “Relais de Saulx’’- also a one-star Michelin restaurant in Beaune in 1987 where he stayed for15 years.

Pages: 1 2 3