Chef Senderens like his fellow chefs, Paul Bocuse and others, shunt butter and cream -laden dishes, heavy sauces and longer cooking times, they said they would with Nouvelle Cuisine, breathe life into a cuisine that hadn't changed in decades.
BUT For me, as a classicist, today, its a cry from my heart as to the disappearance of the great French sauces. They were banished during the late 20th century when they were found to be guilty of dietary hearsay.
Today if a sauce is present in a dish at all,it is reduced to a few artistic-looking splashes or spots. To my mind, these 'spots' do not allow the sauce to fulfill its function of linking the different elements that make up a dish, where its main mission is to confer unity and heighten flavor.
In the wonderful movie ' Who's killing the great chefs of Europe', One of the chefs whose is confronted by someone who is against sauces say "my sauces don't conceal, but reveal'.
The superiority of French cooking was ( and is no more) its quest for perfection of flavor, which takes ( in my mind) the priority over a dishes appearance. Its because of the disappearance of the great French sauces that the cuisine today has become banal, save for good French country/regional cooking.
I can go into length at what a sorry state of classical French cooking has been for the last few decades, but I'll stop, because I need to keep my blood pressure........... low.
The sauce boat as well as the ladle has become a museum piece.
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