Chef Roger Vergé’s cookbook has French recipes suitable for all abilities
- A proponent of lighter nouvelle cuisine dishes, Vergé’s recipes are divided into menus – some easy, others more difficult
- ‘The successful realisation of a menu depends on intelligent shopping – unless you are lucky enough to have a garden,” he wrote
French chef Roger Vergé seems larger than life as he admits to an enormous capacity for eating in the introduction to his book, Roger Verge’s Entertaining in the French Style (1986). “Some of these menus may strike you as overabundant, but they are scaled to my own appetite, which is not small,” he writes.
Fortunately for his waistline, Vergé was a proponent of nouvelle cuisine, which was a lot lighter than the cream-and butter-laden dishes of haute cuisine (Vergé died of complications from diabetes, however, in 2015, at age 85).
Like so many other great cooks, Vergé – who owned, among other restaurants, the three-Michelin-starred Le Moulin de Mougins, in Cannes – believed good food starts with good ingredients. “The successful realisation of a menu depends on intelligent shopping – unless you are lucky enough to have a garden. Nothing equals the aroma of freshly cut vegetables, fruits and herbs.
“At the Moulin, the gardener brings me fresh figs for the fricassée de volaille, but he has found uses for the leaves as well. In the back of the restaurant, the herb garden supplies an abundance of thyme, chives, chervil, and so forth.
“But if you don’t have a garden, you must learn how to shop. I was fortunate to learn this art in my early childhood, and that is probably what made me a chef.”
