Books: L’Esprit Chapel
Books
On the Path to Where We Are Now
By Robert Brown
L’Esprit Chapel by Suzanne Chapel and Laurent Feneau, with the collaboration of Alexandra Michot, 272 pages, Les Éditions de l’Épure, softcover, €35 (2020) — in French.
Writing about the lives of chefs is challenging because the reader can’t taste their creations, while other aspects of their lives aren’t usually very interesting. Yet L’Esprit Chapel, which means both “Chapel’s Mind” and “Chapel’s Spirit,” is a different kind of narrative, an overdue exposition that engagingly skips around the various aspects of the remarkable life of Alain Chapel, a gifted perfectionist of great intelligence with an artistic, nonconformist temperament. That did make for an interesting life. Because Chapel neither endorsed products nor aggressively sought the limelight, his three-star restaurant in the farming village of Mionnay, 15 miles north of Lyon, was not as well-known as those of, for instance, Georges Blanc, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, and Paul Bocuse. The last once said that the best meal he ever ate was at Chapel’s restaurant. Yet Chapel, along with the Troisgros brothers, formed more future great chefs than anyone in France at the time, notably Alain Ducasse, Michel Roux, Jr., and Michel Troisgros. Chapel was a chef’s chef.
Beyond his innate talent, L’Esprit Chapel tells of his good fortune in growing up in his parents’ restaurant, La Mère Charles, which he took over in 1967, and how during his early years he experienced the privileged gastronomic milieu of the Lyonnais with its mères lyonnaises chef-restaurateurs and exceptional raw materials, particularly fruits and vegetables, dairy products, and poultry. Chapel’s spiritual mentors were Auguste Escoffier and Fernand Point. His real-life ones were Jean Vignard, whose Chez Juliette was a revered Lyon restaurant, and Paul Mercier, who succeeded Fernand Point at Restaurant de la Pyramide in nearby Vienne. They gave Chapel a profound grounding in classical and bourgeoise cuisine, resulting in a rapid rise to a third Michelin star at age 35 in 1973. The following year, when my wife and I made our first visit, two of our three savory dishes were rooted in the past. The appetizer, and the dish most associated with Chapel, was gâteau de foies blonds de poularde de Bresse baigné d’une sauce aux queues d’écrevisses à la Lucien Tendret, a creation of the late-19th-century lawyer and gastronome. Chapel made the chicken-liver gâteau according to Tendret’s recipe, and as there were no instructions for the sauce, he made a hollandaise with écrevisses pattes rouges (the sought-after red-footed crayfish), sliced truffles, and beurre d’écrevisses with a whole crayfish placed on top. Our main course was the classic Lyon poulet fermier sauté au vinaigre from Jean Vignard. The preparation, with more than a dozen steps, is an example of Chapel’s meticulousness, including the creamy mustard and tomato sauce of the precise color (not too red), fricasséeing an entire chicken, and deglazing with red and white vinegar, which are added and reduced several times to caramelize them.
As Chapel’s career progressed, his creations became more personal and imaginative. Two of the best-known were bouillon de champignons comme un cappuccino, des écrevisses au cerfeuil (mushroom cappuccino) and petit pot d’asperge à l’essence de truffe, mouillette beurrée (asparagus flan with truffle essence). The bouillon dish is seen by some as a forerunner to the espumas of the Spanish avant-garde, while the “petit pot” with its texture inspired by the custardlike chawanmushi, shows Chapel’s knowledge and appreciation of Japanese cuisine.
What made the book project appealing to the publisher were the many documents and photographs belonging to Chapel’s widow, Suzanne. This material leaves only 70 pages of text out of 270 pages. But that text, by Alexandra Michot and Laurent Feneau, is highly informative, partly because it gathers the recollections of 40 or so employees, friends, family, clients, and winemakers. Chapel’s cooking was defined by, as much as anything else, his gathering of raw materials. Guy Gâteau, Chapel’s sous-chef from 1973 to 1980, called this focus “religious,” and Alain Ducasse said, “Chapel was a forerunner of the new movement [Nouvelle Cuisine] because… he was obsessed with the quality and freshness of the produce.” According to Phillipe Jousse, Chapel’s sous-chef from 1982 from 1989, 60 percent of the restaurant’s produce and 80 percent of the fruits and vegetables came from a small number of farmers (as opposed to the Lyon public markets), farmers Chapel implicitly trusted and acknowledged by name in his classic 1980 cookbook La Cuisine C’est Beaucoup Plus Que des Recettes (Cooking Is a Lot More Than Recipes).
Although the authors of the latest book don’t delve into Chapel’s technique, you gain an appreciation of it from the 34 recipes, written out by Philippe Jousse. These include the icons, such as the gâteau de foies blonds, bouillon de champignons comme un cappuccino, and poulette de Bresse en vessie (baby chicken cooked in a pig’s bladder), salade de homard breton, de truffes noires et de suprêmes de pigeonneaux (lobster salad with black truffles and squab breasts), and tarte aux pralines roses. The recipes are generally for professionals, as they require arduous mises-en-place, a lot of time and equipment, and certain hard-to-find ingredients (pig bladders, anyone?). Good amateur cooks, however, could make the bouillon de champignons comme un cappuccino, navets noirs confits et escalopes de foie gras (mushroom broth, black turnips in confit, and foie gras), the boulangère de Saint-Pierre au thym-citron (baked St. Pierre with lemon thyme), and the tarte poire chocolat meringuée de Jean Tournadre (pear and chocolate meringue tarte).
With a wine cellar being vital to a great restaurant, it’s surprising to learn that it wasn’t until the late 1960s that Chapel gave serious thought to the wine for La Mère Charles (which he renamed Restaurant Alain Chapel in 1977). Once he did, he became obsessed, befriending and buying from winemakers large and small in Burgundy, Beaujolais, the Rhône Valley, and the Jura, including innovators in vinification and makers of what we now call natural wines.
Culinary historians and lovers of restaurant memorabilia and documentation will delight in the “petits papiers,” such as pages from Chapel’s ever-present pocket notebooks, menu drafts, food orders and shopping lists, appreciative notes and postcards from winemakers and celebrities, particularly renowned performers from the world of classical music, and in the scores of photographs that show Chapel with his family, colleagues, suppliers, winemakers, accomplished artistic and intellectual friends, employees, as well as the blowout lunches for Champagne producer Rémi Krug’s 40th birthday and for his own 40th, which was attended by 68 noted French chefs.
The lunches and dinners for everyday clients were blowouts too. The complimentary foods served with apéritifs were appetizer-size. The à la carte menus in the 1980s offered 16 appetizers, 16 main courses, and eight original desserts. Beyond that were two cheese chariots, and, as an alternative to the à la carte desserts, a two-man silver tray offering seemingly every classic French dessert. If you still had room, a bowl of chocolate truffles, bugnes (Lyonnais beignets), and a plate of mignardises arrived with coffee.
What I found most surprising from the archive, and what typified Chapel’s thinking, were his recipe drawings, like happy accidents of conceptual art. He would make a drawing of an imagined new dish on its plate and then fill the sheet with lines, arrows, underlinings, and notes to himself about the ingredients and preparations. Jousse told me that Chapel began making the drawings in 1982 or 1983 and used them to instruct his brigade.
La Cuisine C’est Beaucoup Plus Que des Recettes is the most tangible part of Chapel’s legacy. The Lyon journalist Jean-Francois Abert provided 45 pages of insights, philosophy, criticism, and personal stories as preface to nearly 200 recipes written out by Guy Gâteau. For the new L’Esprit Chapel, the authors asked a dozen people who knew Chapel what the title of the cookbook meant to them. Jousse said: “The product first, the recipe after.” For Chapel’s bread-baker and friend Luc Mano it was: “You can give a recipe like rules of grammar, but at the bottom of it, it’s the gesture, the generosity, and the intuition that make a great dish.”
Evidence of Alain Chapel’s legacy and influence are continued sightings of his dishes and variations on them, while chefs he influenced firsthand are still active. L’Esprit Chapel shows new generations of chefs, gastronomes, and culinary historians a cook whose creativity, spirituality, and complete dedication to his livelihood made him one of the greatest chefs of the 20th century. ●
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