A father of nouvelle cuisine
In the 1960s, Roger Vergé, along with chefs such as Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers and Michel Guérard, sought a new way of cooking. They blazed the trail for nouvelle cuisine, a pared-down internationalized version of French cooking that placed a premium on fresh ingredients prepared in a lighter style and presented artistically on the plate.
Vergé brought to Provençal cuisine many of the flavours and ingredients that he had encountered on his extensive culinary travels, which took him from Africa and Jamaica to Mougins, France. While cooking in North Africa, for example, he developed a fondness for fruit in savory dishes, reflected in one of the signature appetizers at his renowned restaurant Le Moulin de Mougins near Cannes, France: hot oysters on the half shell with orange sections and orange butter.
Unlike many of the nouvelle cuisine chefs who came after him, Vergé steered clear of trickery and sensation-seeking. The key to his culinary style, he often liked to say, could be found in the simple but artfully prepared dishes — the “happy cuisine,” as he put it — served by his mother and his Aunt Célestine, to whom he dedicated several of his cookbooks.
“The ‘cuisine heureuse’ is the antithesis of cooking to impress — rich and pretentious,” he wrote in the preface to his first cookbook, Cuisine of the Sun. “It is a lighthearted, healthy and natural way of cooking which combines the products of the earth like a bouquet of wild flowers from the garden.”
Vergé died recently at his home in Mougins. He was 85. The cause was complications of diabetes, his daughter Cordelia Vergé said.
Audacity was part of Vergé’s repertoire. Without hesitation, he offered diners humble ingredients previously unthinkable in a three-star restaurant. “He had the guts to take a pig’s foot and raise it to a level that made people drive from all over to taste it,” said Hubert Keller, who started out as a saucier at the Moulin de Mougins in the 1970s and later helped Verge open restaurants in Brazil and San Francisco.
Like many of the pioneers of nouvelle cuisine, Verge, who retired in 2003, deplored the excesses of the movement. “It is a joke,” he told Nation’s Restaurant News in 1985. “It is nothing serious. Now it looks Japanese: large dishes, small portions, no taste, but very expensive.”
His remarks touched off a furor in the restaurant world, and in a later interview with the magazine he tried to clarify his remarks. “We experimented with lighter sauces, new vegetables, fruit and meat combinations,” he said, speaking of the early days of nouvelle cuisine. “But we already understood the basics. We had learned early. Our palates had already been conditioned.”