You ever wonder why a tire company gives out food's most prestigious award?
And why all Michelin star meals are so fancy schmancy?
Well to that last question they haven't always
been as seen by this recipe from 1932 from a three star restaurant.
So thank you to Made In cookware for sponsoring this video as we try to figure out
why the Michelin Man is the world's most influential food critic
this time on Tasting History.
Today it's not uncommon for Michelin star
restaurants to publish cookbooks featuring their award-winning recipes
but that's actually a relatively new phenomenon and since usually on this
channel I like to cook from historic recipes I had some trouble finding historic recipes
that belong to restaurants that had won Michelin stars,
and then I came across Eugénie Brazier who was described as
"A formidable woman with a voice like a foghorn,
rough language, and strong forearms." And in 1932
this formidable woman became one of the first to win a Michelin star
though actually it's the restaurant that technically
wins the star but usually the chef is very much associated with it.
There was actually a whole group of women in Lyon at the time who dominated the food
scene in France. They were known as Mères Lyonnaises or Lyon mothers
which is why Brazier's restaurant was named La Mère Brazier. She ended up
opening another restaurant just outside of Lyon and both of those restaurants
won three Michelin stars making her the first person to have six Michelin stars,
a feat which would not be replicated for 64 years.
The great thing about Brazier is that she wrote down many of her most famous recipes.
They weren't published until after she had died but they're out there for us to see now,
recipes like poulet sauté aux Ducs de Bourgogne, or chicken sauté for the Dukes of Burgundy.
Now compared to what you would expect to find in a Michelin star restaurant
today this recipe seems downright basic
but as Mère Brazier herself said
"Cooking is not complicated: you have to be well organized,
to remember things and have a bit of taste. I learned to cook by doing it - as simple as that."
Though it helps if you have really high quality ingredients and the proper tools
like the cookware from today's sponsor Made In,
and it's rather apropo that I am using Made In cookware
to make a recipe from a Michelin star restaurant
because today they are actually used in several Michelin star
restaurants including Le Bernardin in New York and Alinea in Chicago.
That's because while they are designed for the home cook they are made with a
high quality that is meant for professional cooks,
and can stand up to the rigors of being used every day in a restaurant.
Their stainless clad pans are crafted in Italy and can go from stove top to the oven at up to 800° F.
They are made with a premium five ply stainless
steel material which sets them apart from other pans,
and it allows for a quick and even sear and it really retains the heat,
you'll see when we sear our chicken today just how perfect it does.
And what I really love about the pans is actually their shape, they have wonderfully curved walls,
and so it's easier to flip things in them and to pour sauces,
something that I've often made a mess when the pan doesn't have the proper lip.
And you can check out their stainless clag collection along with Made In's other
cookware by clicking my link in the description to save on your order.
Now while my kitchen may not be as fancy as the one at Le Bernardin or Alinea
doesn't mean I can't try my hand at a Michelin star meal from La Mère Brazier
for which I will need a: 3 and 1/2 pound chicken cut into quarters,
some salt and pepper for seasoning,
about 4 tablespoons of butter, 2 egg yolks, 2 cups of heavy cream,
1 glass of port, 1 glass of cognac, 1 glass of whiskey, and 1 glass of kirsch. Now she
isn't specific in how much a glass is, she just says a glass of each of those things
usually that would be about 1 and 1/2 oz or 45 ml of each
though maybe a little bit more of the port
but it's kind of up to you just like a lot of historic recipes
she writes this with a lot of room for interpretation.
What she is clear about is that you use very high quality ingredients and I think that's
probably actually what won her those Michelin stars was that she just demanded excellence.
In fact her most famous dish the volaille demi-deuil required a
Bresse chicken once called the Poultry of Kings.
And the man who supplied her with these chickens once joked that
she was so picky that if she raised her standards anymore he would have to give
each chicken a little manicure before presenting them to her. Unfortunately
finding a Bresse chicken here where I live it turns out it's pretty impossible
but they do have wonderful Heritage chickens that are nice and small so that's what I'm using.
So sprinkle the quarters of the chicken with ample salt and pepper rubbing it into the skin.
Then heat the 4 tablespoons of butter in a deep pan and once
sizzling place the chicken pieces in letting them fry for a couple of minutes
before turning them and frying to a light golden brown all over.
Then take the pan off the heat and set it in the oven at 400° F or 205° C.
She doesn't actually say how hot it's supposed to be but she does
say that it's supposed to cook for 40 minutes
and 400° should should cook it all the way through in that amount of time
start checking it though maybe a little bit before.
As soon as it's cooked to the temperature that you like take
the pan out of the oven and remove the chicken keeping it warm on a cover plate.
Then return the pan to the stove and deglaze it with the port, cognac, whiskey and kirsch.
Leave it over medium heat until it starts to simmer and then allow it to reduce to about half,
this should take between 5 and 10 minutes.
While it does whisk the egg yolks into the heavy cream, and then add that to
the jus and whisk vigorously while it cooks for several more minutes.
It'll take a few minutes to really thicken up so just be patient but
make sure to keep whisking otherwise it'll start to get lumpy and it won't be good.
Now there is some technique technique involved in this making sure that you
don't overcook the chicken making sure that you season the sauce properly.
Also make sure to add some salt and pepper and give it a taste as it's cooking but overall it's a
very simple dish, much simpler than anything that you'd find at a Michelin star restaurant today.
In fact after the great food writer Elizabeth David ate at one of Mère
Brazier restaurants she wrote "The menu scarcely changed from year to
year. With the exception of one dish of fish quenelles with a rather rich sauce,
the food was comparatively plain. There was no showing off, no fireworks." But today you
would expect fireworks, you would expect showing off if you went to a Michelin star restaurant.
So the question remains why does the food world pull out all the stops to impress a tire company.
In 1889 in the French town of Clermont Ferrand,
two Brothers André and Édouard Michelin founded a tire company.
This was a rather bold move and cutting edge because their tires were for cars and at the
time there were less than 3,000 cars in the entire country. There was still unease about
the automobile and it was often seen as unsafe and so that's not good for a tire company.
Well the brothers began to think how do we get more people interested in driving
cars? And how do we get those people who are already driving to drive more so we
can sell them more tires? Both of those questions were answered with one phrase
"Roadtrip!"
In one of the greatest marketing and branding moves in history
they realized that selling tires is boring but selling freedom,
the freedom that you can obtain with driving, well that was interesting.
In a world of horse drawn carriages getting out of town was tricky,
and even with the train system you were limited in where exactly you could go,
but with a car you could go anywhere and so in the year 1900
the Michelin brothers published 35,000 little
red guides that were offered free of charge to drivers.
That first Michelin guide was filled with maps and information on how to take care of your car,
car and tire maintenance. There was information
on the laws around driving and even instructions on how to drive
since so few people actually knew how to drive.
There were the locations of fueling stations very few existed then,
and auto mechanics in case you broke down.
And then almost as an afterthought there was a list of quality restaurants
that you could visit when you were going around the country.
Now at first the guide was limited to France but in 1904 they began making
guides for other countries starting with Belgium.
This was followed by Algeria and Tunisia, and parts of Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal,
and in 1911 the British Isles.
Then when World War I broke out they put a pause on making the guide but it came back after the war
but it had lost something, it kind of became like junk mail today.
People just didn't really hold it in high regard and the story goes that
one day André Michelin went into a tire shop where they were selling his tires,
and he saw his little prized red guide being used to prop up a workshop table,
and at that moment he realized that
"Man only truly respects what he pays for."
So starting in 1920 the guide was no longer free
but instead cost 7 francs, and this made all the difference.
They soon stopped taking paid advertisements
and they started including the names of several hotels in Paris,
but it was the restaurant section that they realized was becoming
the most popular section in the book. So they expanded the number of restaurants
that they considered and they started to put them into different categories,
and by the mid-20s they had hired a small team of restaurant inspectors
to anonymously visit different establishments to give them a rating,
not a review just a rating and in 1926 this rating became a star.
Although I think it looks more like a flower, it became a star and it was just a single star.
The best restaurants got the Michelin star. It wasn't until
1931 that they expanded to their three star system which is still in use today,
and in 1936 they published exactly what these three stars meant.
1 was "A very good restaurant in its category."
2 was for "Excellent cooking, worth a detour."
And 3 was for "Exceptional cuisine, worth a special trip."
The stars were and still are today given out to the restaurant based on the cuisine.
It is not based on the service, though many people think that it is.
Granted they do tend to go hand in hand but technically it's just the food,
and even all the way back in the 1920s they were anonymous.
All of the food inspectors or restaurant inspectors
were anonymous and told not to tell their friends and family what they were doing,
and today it's all kept so secret that many of the top executives at the Michelin Company
don't know who the people are who are doing the inspections.
It's all kept very separate from the tires.
Now as useful as these restaurant ratings were to people who were traveling about by automobile
it was their maps in the 1940s that became so important.
See Michelin hired some of the best cartographers in Europe to create the maps for their guide,
and their maps were always up to date every year,
it was redone and they were very detailed and supposedly some of the best available.
So during World War II this led the Germans to take many of the Michelin maps,
and use those as the basis for their own maps as they invaded Belgium and France.
Well a few years later when the Germans were preparing for an imminent Allied invasion
they began destroying street signs and and anything that could help the the Allies
know where they were going once they got into France.
But someone in the U.S. had a 1939 copy of the Michelin Guide from France
and so in Washington DC in 1944 they republished many of these old guides
and gave them to the soldiers who were storming the beaches
of Normandy. Supposedly they were invaluable and some of the best maps that the Allies had.
What I think is impressive is that while the guide was not published in its in full
form during the war, the restaurant inspectors seemed to have kind of kept doing what they could
because only a week after the war in Europe ended, VE Day, they published the guide.
Though it came with the caveat "This edition prepared during the war,
cannot be as complete and precise as our pre-war publications. Nevertheless, it should be useful."
Now because of food shortages and a general just drop in the quality of cuisine following the war
the Michelin Company got rid of the three stars and reduced it to two for several years
because they didn't want to lower their standards, they just gave people two stars.
Eventually they did restore the three star system and they brought in something new.
See by the 1950s the restaurants that had Michelin stars
had become extremely expensive in most cases, just like they are today,
and so the Michelin Company created a new category to acknowledge those restaurants
who provided quality fair at moderate prices.
In 1957 these restaurants were marked with a red R and later in 1997 that became the 'Bib Gourmand'
which was an image of the Michelin Man licking his lips.
Though these lower cost restaurants could earn
themselves a Michelin star should it be warranted because
price is not a prerequisite for a star. In fact in
2016 a Singapore restaurant confusingly named Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice
and Noodle earned a star even though the price of their main dish was $2.
They did lose the star in 2021 but are still included in the Bib Gourmand.
Also Bib Gourmand what exactly does that mean?
Gourmand is someone who is a connoisseur of fine food, and Bib well that's the Michelin man's name.
Yeah, he has a name. I had I had no idea.
And Bib is actually short for Bibendum which is his full name,
which is Latin for 'to drink'.
See the character was created for the Lyon Exhibition in 1894,
and was was really quite creepy at first but in one of his first ads
he appeared under the words "Nunc est bibendum", or now it is time to drink.
In it he is surrounded by other men made of tires but they are all deflated,
only he remains unpunctured. He is lifting a glass filled with
nails and broken glass and below in French it says
"To your health, the Michelin tire drinks down the obstacles",
and ever since that ad Bibendum has been his name. Now originally the
Michelin Guide was just for France and then for for parts mostly of Western
Europe. It wasn't until 2005 that a guide reviewing New York restaurants premiered,
and in 2007 a Tokyo guide went on sale and today the guide covers 37 countries.
The guide is both prestigious and fraught with controversy,
and earning or losing a star can make or break a restaurant and the chef but
today a trip to a Michelin star restaurant is the promise of a unique culinary experience.
Now today it isn't just about the flavor of the food really, but also the presentation,
and the show that kind of goes on around it and very often the chef,
but in 1932 it seems that taste was the real prerequisite,
and so I'm very excited to taste this Michelin star winning recipe from Eugénie Brazier.
Now as your sauce thickens don't forget to add some salt and pepper make sure to taste it,
and then as it is thickened enough that it coats the back of a spoon take it off the heat,
and pour it through a strainer. A conical strainer is going to be best for this.
Then pour it over the chicken and here we are Eugénie Brazier's recipe for
chicken sauté for the Dukes of Burgundy. I want to
make sure I get plenty of sauce on it. I'm going to try some of the dark meat.
[Le Chomp]
Hmm.
It's so simple but wow.
That sauce is really, really good. I was worried that the alcohol was going to be
overpowering but it's really not. You only get it at the very end and you don't get any burn.
It's just you start to get the flavors and I'm having trouble picking out any one of
the alcohols. It's more like almost a floral woodiness, which is really,
really nice but at first you're really tasting that kind of creamy sauce
and what's interesting is it tastes like it has a lot more herbs and spices in it,
and I think that's probably coming from the alcohol,
and the drippings from the chicken,
that's absolutely fantastic. And the chicken too really simply cooked,
but it's chicken in butter so it's pretty much per perfect.
I don't think you would find something like this on a
Michelin star menu today it's just too simple,
but I think I prefer it to most Michelin star meals that I've had, at least in the
way that I would say a lot of the Michelin star meals that I've had, and I haven't that many,
they're really unique and interesting and after one bite I want to move on whereas
this I'm probably going to eat like half of this chicken right when I turn this off.
So what is cool though is that while Brazier died in 1977 her restaurant in Lyon, Mère Brazier,
is still open today and they still make some of the dishes that she used to make.
I'm going to guess that they have more of a modern flare to retain
the two Michelin stars that it has now,
but even so just having those on the menu I think is a wonderful tribute so
if I ever get to France or when I get to France,
I will have to make a detour to Lyon and visit that restaurant but for now
I have my own Michelin star meal ready to eat,
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.