Hold the Butter! Dam the Cream!

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new star.

--Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

No group has given more meaning to Brillat-Savarin's statement than the chefs of France. They are the world's gastronomers royal. But they exact from their followers a literally heavy price --in calories and cholesterol. Their creations call for churns of butter, streams of cream and eggs by the dozen. With the late great Chef Fernand Point, they cry with all the fervor of a Richard III, "Du beurre! Donnez-moi du beurre! Toujours du beurre!"

But hold the butter! Dam the cream!

A veritable blasphemy is threatening some of the world's best kitchens. It is the notion that people--even the French--can enjoy a memorable meal that contains only 500 calories instead of the 3,000 or more that tradition demands. No longer, as the old adage had it, need a Frenchman dig his grave with a fork. The blasphemer is an impish, outgoing, pint-sized ex-pastry chef named Michel Guerard, 42, who has invented la cuisine minceur--the cuisine of slimness.

He describes it as a weight-loss diet whose user can shed up to 5 lbs. a week. Guerard is building on the culinary ideology of la nouvelle cuisine, which began to transform grande cuisine some ten years ago. The high priest of the new way was Paul Bocuse, who brought to French cooking a new emphasis on freshness and simplicity (TIME, April 9, 1973)--and in 1975 received the Legion of Honor from President Giscard d'Estaing. The orgiastic bouffe--meals that would consume long hours of relentless, if not hoggish stuffing of the gullet--got its just desserts. Then Guerard, a close friend of Bocuse's, carried la nouvelle cuisine further by finding ways to cut the calories while maintaining the highest order of taste. Now, says an admiring Bocuse: "For the first time, cuisine and dieting are no longer contradictions. Michel is the one who is doing something really original and new. He's the most imaginative of us all."

Hot Piano. As a consequence-of his waist-not, want-not approach, Guerard today commands the hottest "piano" (as professional chefs call their stoves) in the trendy, fiercely competitive world of grande cuisine. After only 1% years of operation, the Restaurant Michel Guerard at the spa in Eugenie-les-Bains near Lourdes is about to receive a top rating of 19 points in this year's edition of the Guide Gault-Millau, France's sprightliest food publication. (The spa also has a gourmand menu for the calorie-careless.) The more conservative and authoritative Guide Michelin, which awarded two stars to Guerard's first restaurant, Le Pot au Feu, outside Paris, has just given two stars to the Eugenie-les-Bains establishment--an unusual distinction for what is, after all, essentially a fat farm.

In addition to his activities at the spa, Guerard directs the kitchen at Regine's, the chic Paris nightclub. Guerard also commutes regularly to the U.S., where he is in charge of kitchen planning for the Manhattan branch of Regine's, which will open in April. On the side, he is working on a minceur cookbook, which is to be published in the U.S. Indeed, Guerard's fame has already reached into the kitchens of American homes, where for years housewives have been searching for ways to cook well while keeping their families fit. Even Julia Child acknowledges the Guerard fad. "On a tour of the U.S.," she says, "no one wanted to talk about anything but cuisine minceur."

Guerard, already a famed practitioner of la nouvelle cuisine, was challenged by the notion of dietary cooking when he met and married Christine Barthelemy, whose family owned the health spa at Eugenie-les-Bains. The idea of catering to overweight patrons wretchedly trying to trim avoirdupois might have curdled the soul of an Escoffier--but not of a Guerard.

Velvety Texture. The first problem was sauces. "Remove fat, flour and sugar from cooking, and you're not left with much," Guerard recently explained to TIME Correspondent George Taber. "Remove cream and butter, and you can't make a sauce. I had to reinvent a system and above all find a substitute for cream." Guerard became the alchemist of cream: he now speaks of his "yogurt phase" and his "frontage blanc phase" like so many Picasso periods. Day after day he stood over his hot piano and played--and parlayed--new combinations. Yogurt turned out to be too acidic and frontage blanc alone too dry. Gradually he found that by mixing a dry nonfat frontage blanc in a blender with a puree of freshly cooked vegetables (including mushrooms, carrots, leeks and one or two seasonal varieties), he could practically duplicate the velvety texture and taste of classic cream-based sauces. He even developed a minceur version of mayonnaise by whipping together egg yolks, fromage blanc, lemon, cayenne pepper, basil, green pepper, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce.

A study of Chinese cuisine taught him to adapt Asian techniques for steaming fish and meat without the use of butter or cream. He steamed sea bass a la vapeur under a bed of fresh seaweed; and river trout over water perfumed with pine needles, wild mint and other herbs; beef and veal in wine that cooks off its own alcohol content; lobster over a defatted fish stock. He had always cooked one of his favorite dishes, galette de homard (lobster pancake), in butter. Now, by substituting fish stock, he says, "the galette rises much higher, tastes much better than before, and does not have the calories of the butter."

The simplicity of minceur fare lies neither in its preparation nor its expense. Guerard has meticulously searched out a dozen farmers who supply his vegetables, including one who delivers nothing but green beans. All the ingredients in his sauce base must be chopped up to the size of peas in order to increase the cooking surface for the fast, dry heating he gives them. "I mix my vegetables together the way a painter mixes colors--until he obtains the exact shade that he wants," says Guerard in one of his favorite painting metaphors. But it is deliciously simple in taste and calorie count. One of Guerard's favorite dishes, l'aiguillette de caneton au poivre frais (breast of duckling in pepper sauce), packed a belt-whopping 700 calories per serving in his original version; the minceur variety contains 280. Guerard can prepare a celestial blanquette de veau, which to most Frenchmen is something only their mothers can do properly; but Guerard's blanquette contains 280 calories per serving, v. Mother's 1,000. A typical 500-calorie menu at Eugenie-les-Bains last season included: first day--mousseline of crayfish with watercress sauce, leg of milk-fed lamb cooked in wild hay, apple surprise, eggplant caviar, salmon with sorrel sauce, pear souffle. Second day--salad of artichokes and green beans in wine vinegar, sweetbreads with mushrooms, melon sherbet, poached egg with watercress, whiting with chopped vegetables, baked apple.

Marriage. Altogether, the master of minceur has perfected some 150 low-calorie dishes. He admits that some French specialties simply do not have a minceur equivalent--calf s liver, for example, dries out when cooked a la vapeur, and extravagances like foie gras are obviously not duplicable. Guerard's extraordinary accomplishment has been to create something close to a parallel French cuisine. Says Dr. Georges Halpern, vice president of the French Gastronomical Medical Society: "Guerard has a genius for satisfying the upper part of the body--the tongue, eyes and mind --without filling up the bottom part, the stomach."

Ironically, the perfectionist who developed the cuisine minceur still prefers to cook with the butter, cream, eggs and flour that he virtually outlaws. "Minceur is much more difficult," admits Guerard. "It demands great care and forces you to push your ideas. In five years, when the minceur is fully developed, it will be easier. But now I still prefer to forget the calories and cook gourmand." In fact, following publication of his minceur book, Guerard will issue one on gourmand cooking. But his longer-range goal is to "marry" the two cuisines--by which he means applying such cuisine minceur techniques as the use of puree bases, vapeur and white cheese cooking to classic French cuisine. The result, he predicts, will actually improve the taste of many dishes, but will not be so restrictive as minceur cooking in the use of rich ingredients when they best serve the purpose. In any case, such a marriage promises yet another galaxy of new dishes, and is doubtless one that Brillat-Savarin would say was made in heaven.

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