soupnancy

Bernard Loiseau

by Nancy Hinton (Food writing 2005)

I didn’t know Bernard Loiseau personally. I do know that he was a great chef. Like everyone, I was horrified that he killed himself. But am I shocked? No.

He epitomized the real haute cuisine chef: passionate, driven, a perfectionist, confident and wise-cracking with a sizable ego, someone to admire, yet racked with self doubt, and a selfless desire to please. The kind of person that is drawn to and succeeds in this profession is all these things, and often in conflict by nature. Given this and the difficult nature of the business, I find cracking easy enough to understand.

Ok, maybe he was bipolar, which implies a huge struggle in life no matter.  But, my hunch is that many chefs are. I know the prototype and can see the potential consequences.  He thrived on the satisfaction of meeting high standards and pleasing, but was torn by the pressures, both internal and external. So utterly seduced and driven by the ride to the height of French gastronomy, to be ultimately destroyed by it.. I can see it.

Mental illness aside (there is a huge grey area between sane and crazy anyway), I think that it is the dichonomy of a big ego and enormous self doubt that is the source of much strange behavior on the part of chefs. Add to that all the demands on a chef, and voilà, cocktail bomb. The arduous work, relentless pressure, attention to detail day in, day out, as well as the compassion, generous nature and people skills required, all exasperating the situation, eventually making an innately unstable person crack. It takes much introspection, self discipline and self help, not to mention a solid entourage to stay sane. It takes love from close ones who see straight, to help make the huge efforts necessary to keep it all in balance. And maybe some yoga; I hear it works wonders.

I have never been in the shoes of a Michelin star chef, but I can only imagine. The life of a wound up chef as myself, taken to the extreme. It can only lead to the brink of madness. Even if this life of hard work and intense pressure is partly self imposed, it's the name of the game, with always so much to do and improve, again and again. And so full of criticism, you can’t please everybody, and that’s difficult enough to accept for a chef. Then, in a moment of weakness, you let go for a minute, a less than snuff product makes it in the door, a plate goes out overcooked, and your pride is shot, a Michelin star is lost. A chef is only as good as his last dish. It shouldn’t mean a life, but in a world out of whack, it’s not surprising . Think of how many lives go into a Michelin star, which can be taken away in a heartbeat.

God bless his soul; well, you know what I mean. And bring on the yoga.

Have we really outgrown our inferiority complex?

Nancy Hinton, (Food writing 2005)

Not so long ago in Quebec, all our chefs came from France. The only fine food was French, the most luxurious of foodstuffs imported. If it came from abroad, it was guaranteed some kind of status, much nobler than anything to be found here.

Perhaps then, it was largely true. We’ve come a long way, with a new breed of homegrown chefs, great local products, fine cheese, and even drinkable wine. Local and terroir have become catch phrases.

Yet, there is still a reticense, an unwillingness to pay top dollar for something from here. It takes much more marketing, convincing, support from celebrities etc. to make a local product fly.

In some cases, the product is indeed a work in progress, like many Quebec cheeses, that should be encouraged, but still lack the fine-tuning and expertise to command the highest price. Then again, often, the quality is there, has always been, it just needs to be discovered, or rediscovered and endorsed. A good example in nature is our wild mushrooms, or many wild plants for that matter. Some of them, the natives used and taught us Québecois to eat, but subsequently somehow, this knowledge got lost through the generations. Funny enough, fiddleheads held on. Many people (even chefs) still don’t believe that porcini or chanterelles grow here. Most mushrooms on Montreal menus come from abroad. We have crisp, tender sea asparagus on the shores of the St-Lawrence that is juicier, less woody, with the perfect level of saltiness, but still most people import it cooked and frozen from France if they know about it at all. Many excellent traditional recipes and preserves are made in Québec and sold in the countryside, but when you go into an épicerie fine in the city, you will not find them hidden among the majority of little jars from afar. There are top-notch artisanal products made in Québec, but they have a hard time selling them for the what they are worth. (Granted, there is alot of crap too. I have heard the complaint often that some hacks have ruined it for the others, indicating the need for some kind of quality control system like in Europe. Another story altogether, I digress.)

We obviously don’t value our homegrown industry much if we are so neglectful of our farmers and artisans, and so easily seduced by the easy, accessible, cheaper imports. You’d think it should be the opposite, that you would want to pay more for something local, that you can know everything about, to support your neighbor, and save the cost of transport on the environment. The global marketplace and our individualistic lives must have led us away from our social values. Or so I thought. It turns out the Quebecois have always had this inferiority complex, commonly turning up our nose on what was from here as too ordinary. On the contrary, the French and Italians for instance, always think that the closer to home the better.

I always wondered why this was, until one day at a food history and anthropology conference, someone was speaking about the diet in early New France, and I understood just how deep rooted this sentiment was. When it came to several indigenous foodstuffs, the colonists would not eat them until they were endorsed by the French or the English (corn, jerusalem artichoke?). Only if the Europeans desired it, was it good enough for our ancestors to eat. So, this inferiority complex is a part of our cultural heritage. I knew our colony was founded on derelects and rejects from the old world, and generally regarded by Europeans as a bare notch above the “savage” natives on the food chain, but still, this reverse food snobbism was a surprise to me. Funny, but not so funny. I guess I never got it because I have always been proud and patriotic, and I trust my palette. And when I like something, I really like something, especially if from here.