The troisgros tradition
Carrying the name Troisgros means you have a lot to live up to - not least the challenge of interpreting the classic dish of saumon à l'oseille created a generation ago from the kitchens of the family restaurant, Troisgros, in Roanne, near Lyon, France.
However, when 37-year-old Michel Troisgros did a guest week in the kitchens of London's Les Saveurs restaurant last month, he showed he was determined to be his own man.
A glance at his CV shows exactly the kind of classical training one would expect of the son of three-Michelin-starred chef Pierre Troisgros: he has worked in kitchens of the gastronomic great and good, such as Alain Chapel, Frédy Girardet, Michel Guérard and Roger Vergé, as well as a spell with Michel Bourdin at London's Connaught.
But a closer look reveals less conventional experience, at Chez Panisse in California, and restaurants in Brazil, Tokyo and Bangkok, which account for a fascination with exotic spicing he shares with Les Saveurs' head chef Joâl Antunäs, once his sous chef in France.
Perhaps even more important is the influence of his Italian grandmother, the person with whom he spent most time while his father and mother were busy running the restaurant. She instilled in him a love of simple home cooking.
"Every Sunday she used to prepare potato gnocchi and I helped her. They were - and are - the best gnocchi I have ever eaten. Even with all my expertise, I can never do it as well as she does. If I get my technique from my father, I get my taste from her."
That Italian influence reveals itself in one of Troisgros's favourite entrées, entre-deux lasagnes, truffes noires et potimarrons, a simple but luxurious dish of a pillow of hand-made pasta stuffed with a purée of butternut squash and cream, perfumed with truffle oil and topped with slices of black truffle. The dish is finished with a beurre noisette.
So what have these influences led to in terms of "that dish" - Troisgros's saumon à l'oseille - which is so famous it is reputed the train station at Roanne was painted salmon pink as a tribute?
The version he served during his stint at Les Saveurs was the original recipe created by his father Pierre and his uncle Jean: the sauce, unctuously creamy yet still light, set off by the delicate sharpness of the sorrel.
The key to the dish relies on careful slicing of the salmon so it can be pan-fried for just 10 seconds on each side; the quick cooking of the sorrel leaves which are added to the sauce at the last minute; and the quality of the cream, which comes from the restaurant's own dairy. "We have to take it with us everywhere," says Troisgros. "The dish doesn't taste the same without it."
There are however other versions of it, one of which Troisgros cooked for Chef. Instead of pan-frying the fish, it is cut much thicker and steamed, placed on a bed of sorrel, and surrounded by a pool of Provenáale olive oil slicked with Dijon mustard. To finish, the salmon is sprinkled with fleur de sel and pepper and garnished with an oven-dried sorrel leaf.
This version was originally intended to be the first of a series of annual reinterpretations of the dish. But, despite the fact the dish is more in line with '90s-style eating and Troisgros's own thinking, he has reverted to offering the original on his restaurant menu.
"People told me it was not as good as the classic version," he says, a touch ruefully. "It is an institution. I cannot change it."
The experience is a measure of the constraint that still operates within the French culinary establishment. "We have always tried to keep our style distinctive and introduce changes gradually," says Troisgros.
"It's like a Rolls-Royce. If you buy one today, you're not driving the same car you would have done 30 years ago - you have air-conditioning and power steering - but it's still a Rolls-Royce. What we've done is to change a lot of the ingredients we use. We use more herbs than we used to, more spices too. We use flavoured oils rather than butter and cream."
Troisgros's dessert menu reflects this evolution. Two dishes on show at Les Saveurs as part of his five-course menu confiance were: opaline coco à la banane, crisp layers of wafer-thin caramel cleverly contrasting with a feather-light coconut-flavoured cream and soft banana slices which had been turned in butter, and la fleur de tournesol, where passionfruit seeds and pulp are used as the heart of a sunflower piped out in meringue.
Strikingly simple, they are the kind of dishes - like the salmon in sorrel sauce - that could be easily copied without attribution.
But Troisgros has strong views on the issue of plagiarism. "In France, people don't tend to pinch ideas. If they do then other chefs will ostracise them. I find it unacceptable that certain chefs in the UK give themselves the image of being originators of recipes when they copy dishes created by the great French chefs such as Joël Robuchon.
"They have even got the nerve to publish books and not to give the source of their inspiration. If you create something original you need to let people know as fast as possible that you did it. So many people wrote about saumon à l'oseille that everyone knows it was my father and uncle who invented it."
Interestingly it is game, rather than fish or pâtisserie, which is Troisgros's true passion. A 100-year-old dish, lievre à la royale, is his favourite. It involves cooking a whole hare, stuffed with a farce made from its liver and foie gras, in red wine, herbs and spices for five to six hours.
"At the end, the texture of the meat is so soft that you should be able to pass a piece of hay through it," Troisgros explains. The liquor is reduced, mixed with the hare's blood, reduced again and finished with crème fraîche. "It is an extraordinary spectacle," says Troisgros. "When customers who usually don't like hare taste it, they love it. And I cook it because I love to eat it."
