This past January a pastry chef named Gaston Lenôtre died in France at the age of 88. He never had a cooking show on the Food Network. His first foray in this country was a pastry shop that opened its doors in 1974 in New York and closed a year later. Chances are, most Americans have never heard of Lenôtre. (His cookbooks, particularly in English, are outdated and hard to find.) And yet, when it comes to desserts that lack heaviness and are made with the freshest ingredients, and pastries that more and more resemble works of art, we have him to thank.
Aside from his hundred-million-dollar pastry shop and catering empire, his presiding over fine restaurants like Le Pré Catalan, and his school for aspiring pâtissiers, Gaston Lenôtre also trained some of the world’s finest chefs, such as David Bouley, Alain Ducasse, and Michel Richard. They, in turn, are now passing down what they have learned to future generations. So what was it, exactly, about his pastries that made them so remarkable? Edward Schneider, writing on Mark Bittman’s food blog, describes a Lenôtre croissant as “salty enough . . . buttery without being greasy . . . baked all the way through, a simple thing that is too often neglected (think of all the otherwise nice croissants you’ve had with half-baked dough in the middle).”
All of which is true. But there is something else: The croissant is awfully small–about the length of the palm of your hand. Sitting in the kitchen of Citronelle, the multistar French restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, I sample a Lenôtre croissant, offered to me by Michel Richard. I devour it in three bites. (If I weren’t so polite, it would have been two.)
“See? It’s a small croissant,” says Richard. “We eat one croissant a week–not every day!”
But when it comes to excess, nothing seems to irk Richard more than the hit Food Network series Ace of Cakes. “They don’t make cakes,” insists the James Beard Award winner. “They build shortening and sponge cakes. I don’t call that being a pastry chef. I call that kids playing with sponge cake. Did you put strawberries inside? Did you make it good? They never talk about the cake. They just make a sponge. [Ace of Cakes star Duff Goldman] is good, he’s fun, but he’s not a pastry chef.”
Goldman did, however, study at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley and worked as a stagiaire under pastry chef Steven Durfee at the French Laundry in Yountville, California.
Adds Richard: “I think the problem is for a lot of chefs in this country, they are working very hard on special-looking desserts. I don’t think they have any interest in the taste of it.” On a recent episode of Ace of Cakes Goldman and his fellow Charm City bakers built a cake modeled impressively after the Millennium Falcon.
For the esteemed chef of Citronelle, the quality of the ingredients is as important as the appearance–a tenet he has kept sacred since he first worked for Gaston Lenôtre in 1970. Although he had been an apprentice chef since the age of 14, and cooked during his stint in the army, Richard was not happy and came close to switching professions.
“We were making croissants without butter [in the army],” he says. He would ask his superior, “Monsieur, le patron, how come there is no butter in the croissant?” To which he would get this reply: “What are you, stupid?”
Says Richard, “I was tired of it.” But then Richard, 19, attended a friend’s birthday party in Paris and discovered his first Lenôtre dessert.
“You opened the box–the cake was so gorgeous,” he says. “Very, very simple.” The next day he paid a visit to Lenôtre’s shop on 44 Rue d’Auteuil. “I was amazed at the beauty and the quality. It was so modern. I didn’t expect that because, in France, most of the desserts and most of the pastry shops had this old style. They used butter cream. And Lenôtre was very fresh.”
And when he interviewed for a job with the master pâtissier, Richard remembers being struck by his deep-blue eyes and his charm. After half an hour, Lenôtre asked when the eager apprentice could start: “‘Tell me when. You want me to start tomorrow?’ He said yes and the next day I was working for him. It was a most fabulous experience.”
Despite toiling 15 hours a day “like a slave,” Richard calls his time under Lenôtre an honor: “He was giving you the best ingredients. . . . He had the best butter. . . . With M. Lenôtre, it was a new kind of dessert. We were using a gelatin to make the mousse, less sugar; instead of sugar, we’re using honey.”
Richard reminds me that this was happening simultaneously with the rise of nouvelle cuisine–the movement that invoked a lighter, simpler approach to cooking with the freshest ingredients. “[Lenôtre] tried to re-create what Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, and others were creating with nouvelle cuisine. But Gaston was the only one who created a nouvelle pâtisserie.”
But just because a dessert was lighter and simpler did not mean it was any easier. Looking back, Richard considers Lenôtre’s signature Opéra cake to be one of the most complex: An almond bread layered with chocolate and coffee cream, no higher than an inch or two. (The fillings had a tendency to leak, prompting Richard to add gelatin. Lenôtre scolded him for making it too dry.) It is also his favorite of Lenôtre’s creations, along with Charlotte au Chocolat, ladyfingers with Bavarian cream and vanilla and chocolate mousse.
It was Richard whom Lenôtre sent to America to open his first store in 1974. “It was the dream of my life, going to New York City,” recalls the chef. “He asked me when I was 23 but by the time they found a location [on 59th Street] and we moved in, I was 26. The idea was to open more pastry shops in this country. We were thinking about New York, Chicago, San Francisco. And we open in New York and that was it–it was not successful.”
Richard sees a combination of factors causing its failure, including the price and the smallness of the pastries. He remembers sampling an American cake at the time: “It was made with shortening. And I had some shortening in my hands and it took me a long time with hot water to remove that because it was so greasy. Why do we need to use shortening so much? Everything looked so rustic and oversized.”
There were also too many colors, a problem he sees in France today. “We do the same thing with the macaroon. We have a ton of colors. We have green and red and very strange colors in the macaroons. I think we have to stop that.”
Despite the failure of his New York pastry shop, Lenôtre went on to make millions. He was the first chef to build a commissary in which the desserts were created before being sent by truck to his different shops. He was also one of the first pastry chefs to become a successful restaurateur–no small feat considering the commonly held view that pastry chefs are not the equals of chefs.
Richard asks:
That was then. “Lenôtre, he changed my life,” says Richard. “Before I met [him], I used to be embarrassed to say I was a pastry chef. And then after that I used to say I’m a pastry chef for M. Lenôtre. It was like having a Ph.D.”
Now, with Lenôtre gone, where does Richard see desserts heading?
As for Richard’s annoyance at our current obsession with building cake cars and cake spaceships, he should take heart that such culinary constructions have a long history, dating back at least to 17th-century France. Ian Kelly, author of Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carême, the First Celebrity Chef, recalls “the christening cake for the grandson of Louis XIV in 1682. Given by the governor of Guyenne, it was fashioned out of almond paste, pastry, and clockwork, and both depicted and animated the labour pains of La Dauphine and the baby Duke of Angoulême’s entry into the world via a marzipan vagina.”
Victorino Matus is the assistant managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
