Fernand Point: the Joyous, Amazing Father of French Cuisine

The Treasury of Great Recipes begins with French cuisine and French cuisine begins with Fernand Point. As an active gourmand and America’s original foody, Vincent Price knew the importance of French cooking to the culinary landscape of the west. French techniques define good cooking and form the foundation of critical skills for most chefs in Europe and America. Starting a collection of the world’s greatest recipes in France lays a similar foundation for the rest of this book. Starting the French section off with La Pyramide and its formidable Chef d’ Cuisine, Fernand Point, makes the first pages of the Treasury historic.

Restaurant La Pyramide, Fernand Point, and the Birth of Modern French Cuisine

Point was a chef almost from birth. His parents were Cordon Bleu chefs and ran a buffet restaurant in a train station in the Louhans. He began cooking when he was ten years old.

When his father left him the restaurant, Point quickly realized it was never getting a Michelin star (possibly due to its location in a train station). He moved his operation to a little 19th-century building in Lyons. Famous for its ruins, Point was fascinated with the Roman pyramid located in the town square. He named the restaurant after this structure, incorporating its image into his menus. Point had specialty butter forms made so he could serve butter pyramids. The pyramid became his symbol and indeed the structure and the restaurant are synonymous in France.

Point was the chef who broke the long-held tradition of Grande Cuisine that the maitre d’ hotel was the face of the restaurant while the chef was the angry pot throwing maniac behind closed doors, too rustic, too rough for mixing with refined diners.

Point was too enthusiastic for that, too involved. He was deeply involved, properly obsessed, with every stage of a dish, following it from its departure from Las Halles in Paris to its preparation in La Pyramide’s kitchen, to the moment a guest placed a forkful on their tongue. Just as he could not properly oversee dishes without being in the kitchen, he couldn’t understand how people enjoyed his food without joining them at their table. Point was known to sit with his guests and discuss their meals, drink with them, and even custom design a dish on the spot.

Ma Gastronomie

Point’s influence on contemporary cuisine is born from his enthusiasm for perfecting every aspect of the dining experience. His plates and servers were Limoges porcelain. His glasses were Baccarat crystal. He remodeled

the restaurant to include a garden and a larger room, capping it at a strict 50 seats. His desire to create and deliver perfect food drove him to develop a philosophy, collected over years in a worn, khaki-colored notebook that became his opus, Ma Gastronomie (1969), that you will no doubt recognize as normal for your favorite restaurants.

If someone were to take away all my cookbooks except for one, I would keep Fernand Point’s Ma Gastronomie. For me, his philosophy instilled what cuisine is all about: generosity and hugeness of heart.—Charlie Trotter

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar:

• “Every morning the cuisinier must start again at zero, with nothing on the stove. That is what real cuisine is all about.”
• “For a chef to be respected his superiority must not be in doubt. He must excel in everything; including pastry cooking and purchasing.”
• “The best cooking is that which takes into consideration the products of the season.”
• “If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony.”
• “As far as cuisine is concerned one must read everything, see everything, hear everything, try everything, observe everything, in order to retain in the end, just a little bit.”