Saint-Étienne edition 🇫🇷: Difference between revisions

To that end, we believe that environmentally resilient dishes also have to be culturally resilient. They have to implement themselves in the cultural landscape of the area and make sense for its inhabitants. This may rely on its shape, but we believe that it also relies on its storytelling. That may well be the reason why the burger hype could end, it is a dish which does not share a story with our regions. Many dishes, like the “Tarte Tatin” of the Tatin sisters or the “Chantilly” of Vatel rely on stories which are completely made up (the “Tarte Tatin” was not actually a mistake, we can’t even prove that Vatel ever cooked a dish) but they still add an emotional value to it: it is simply what we call “branding”, and it works: these dishes are still eaten today, and the stories are still told for the occasion.

Since September 2018, as part of our “Nederland edition”, we have been testing out various ways of linking a story to a dish, focusing on one region: North Holland. Here are a two examples:

This is the process we followed with the “Puffed potato haring”. Being quite to vulnerable to diseases, the potato is not such a resilient crop. The fries being very dear to the dutch, the solution could not have been to ask the dutch to altogether stop eating fries for the sake of the environment. We therefore needed to find a way to create fries which would call on the use of less potatoes. That is where the puffed potato comes in. A technic which asks for 4 times less potato as it fill the frite with air. We thus needed a story to make our alternative dish seductive to the public: why would the dutch go for potatoes filled with air?

We dug in the history of the frite to find a solution, and we found a Belgian legend which said that “the poorest inhabitants of Namur (which was part of the Netherlands), used to fish in the nearby river, to fry the smallest, inexpensive fishes and to eat them warm and whole. But when the winter ice made it impossible to fish, the poor fish fryers started to cut up potatoes in the shape of small fishes, fry them, and serve them as is.”

By shaping the puffed potatoes in the shape of a little fishes and equipping it with a story, the dutch could therefore draw the link between this new frite and their national history.  

This is the process we followed for the design of the “Lunetten kroket”.  

The idea of this dish was to swap the bad quality meat used in the famous dutch Kroket for a more resilient ingredient. After much research the ingredient we chose was the cauliflower. However, for the dutch to seriously consider going for a cauliflower kroket, rather than the traditional meat one, we needed a good reason. We thus decided to make the dutch believe that our cauliflower kroket was as traditional as the meat one.  

Very few dishes can be eaten all year long. This Lunetten kroket we talked about was a winter dish which called on the use of cauliflower, which doesn’t really grow in the summer. So the cauliflower would have to be swapped with another vegetable. The pâté chaud is in the same way, a seasonal dish, it calls on the use of tomato and olives and is not in tune with the period we are in. We thus decided to work on a spring pâté chaud which we called: “Le Tissé chaud”. And it is the making of it that what we will demonstrate to you now.

Here are 3 possible narratives which could be linked to our dish.  

From the 15th to the 20th century, female workers of the silk industry were swallowing the eggs of silk worms in order to help them germinate in their warm stomach. In order to help with the ingesting, they would combine the eggs with a mixture made out of pureed parsnip (which was one of the cheapest vegetable then). For a few days, they would go through a sort of fast, quitting meat and dairy to make their stomach a less acidic environment. The main thing they would eat was a soup, made out of spinach (a heavy source of nutrients).

This other narrative is here based on the ascertainment that the title of the recipe can also be the recipient of a concept which can evolve in time. The “quenelle”, for example, is now also used to describe a shape. You can make a quenelle out of ice-cream, purée, mousse, etc. We can therefore translate the pâté chaud to our own liking by adding a new meaning to each of its components. If the taste is as convincing as our new definition, it might stick. The vol-au-vent, implies lightness and fragility: ergo our transparent brick. It is also surprising to find a red “turtle sauce” in the original pâté chaud. If you think turtle sauce, you do visualize a green sauce: ergo our spinach sauce.  

The narrative of this dish could also be told in such a way that it would allow the residents of Saint-Étienne to push the regional food industry to give shape to the near future they collectively desire. The narrative, here, would therefore be the embodiment of different evolutions the stephanois wish to see happen in Saint-Étienne’s food culture.  

First, the diminution of animal based products (in our case: no use of meat nor eggs).