Culinary Battles of Mitterrand’s Chef Go From Kitchen to Screen
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Version 0 of 1. CHAVAGNAC, France IN the fall of 1988, a local farmer and self-trained cook named Danièle Delpeuch was approached by a series of mysterious government officials with an unusual proposition: Would she move immediately to Paris to become the “personal chef” of President François Mitterrand? She pointed out that her ewes were ready to give birth. The reply from one official was swift: “Madame, this is not a position that can be refused.” In his first seven-year term, Mr. Mitterrand was served by an all-male staff skilled in haute cuisine. After his re-election, he wanted simple country cooking for his private meals. “I want a woman of the countryside in my kitchen!” he told his aides. So Ms. Delpeuch abandoned her animals and vegetable garden in the Périgord for a two-year adventure preparing the president hearty bourgeois meals from a small kitchen in the bowels of the Élysée Palace. She lived in a small apartment in a complex of government buildings, which also housed Mr. Mitterrand’s mistress, Anne Pingeot, and their daughter, Mazarine. “If you make me the cuisine of my grandmother, I will be satisfied!” he told Ms. Delpeuch during their first meeting, which lasted 50 minutes. “That’s a difficult task, Mr. President,” she replied. “No one can match a grandmother. I’ll try.” Now the story of the chef and the president has been celebrated in a fiction-frosted film, “Les Saveurs du Palais” (which means both “The Tastes of the Palace” and “The Tastes of the Palate”), directed by Christian Vincent and released last month. The Weinstein Company has bought the American rights to the film, which will be called “Haute Cuisine.” MS. DELPEUCH, who is 70, is traveling around Europe, talking about both the film and her cooking. She has self-published a new edition of her 1997 memoir, “Carnets de Cuisine du Périgord à l’Élysée” (“Kitchen Notebooks From the Périgord to the Élysée”) — recipes included — and is negotiating with French publishers for another edition with a new preface. “People didn’t know who the real cook was, and now they do,” Ms. Delpeuch said in an interview in her kitchen as she prepared a lunch of foie gras with roasted figs and grapes and a chicken in a pot (feet included) with potatoes, carrots and blood and egg stuffing. “The film is opening doors for me. Of course, some moments have been invented. At times, the legends are prettier than the reality.” In real life, Ms. Delpeuch was by no means a simple woman of the French countryside by the time she was plucked from her farm and sent to Paris. Born in Paris into a working-class family, she moved when she was 12 with her mother back to her grandmother’s farm, with its 700-year-old stone farmhouse, after her father’s death. A mother of four by the time she was 25 years old, she campaigned in the 1970s to revive the moribund foie gras industry, making a name for herself as “the queen of foie gras.” In 1974, she began foie gras weekends at the farm, attracting gastronomes, including American tourists, to eat and stay at the farm. She sold her foie gras to famous French chefs like Joël Robuchon. A few years later, she founded the region’s first cooking school, turned part of her home into a small restaurant that featured local products, taught cooking courses in the United States, became friends with Julia Child and lived for a while in Paris. Her acres of oak trees yielded a rich harvest of truffles every winter (and still do). In 1980, the French agricultural industry decorated her as Chevalier du Mérite Agricole, its highest honor, and one that rarely had been given to a woman. So when Culture Minister Jack Lang was ordered to find a chef for Mr. Mitterrand, it was Mr. Robuchon who referred him to Ms. Delpeuch. She was by then divorced, and her youngest child was 20. There was no one to stop her. THE film captures the struggle between “Hortense Laborie,” as Ms. Delpeuch is called in the movie, a gifted but stubborn cook determined to impose her authentic cuisine on the table of the president, and an army of bureaucrats and chefs equally determined to follow the rigid norms of the palace. Catherine Frot, who plays Hortense, endures the taunts of the Élysée head chef and his all-male team. “It is the last time I eat with those machos,” she tells her assistant, a young male chef, when the official chefs make fun of her at their first — and only — lunch together. They nickname her Countess du Barry after the favorite mistress of King Louis XV, and Mamie Nova, after a brand of dairy products that has a grandmother as its logo. The meals she prepares are the hearty fare of the French countryside. Her first meal for the president is cèpe mushrooms with eggs, followed by stuffed cabbage with braised salmon and bacon cubes, and a “Saint-Honoré,” a rich puff pastry, caramelized sugar and whipped cream confection. Believing her only mission is to serve the president, she becomes a self-righteous Joan of Arc of the kitchen. When nutritionists are hired by the president’s doctor to impose a fat- and sauce-free diet, she refuses. When an Élysée accountant chastises her for circumventing the official food provider and spending too much money to buy from her own sources, she tells him she must be guided by the freshest of ingredients. At one point in the film, she criticizes the main kitchen’s mille-feuille pastry as having “no author,” no identity. “I was told that I had to be nice to Mr. Normand,” Ms. Delpeuch recalled, referring to the Joël Normand, the Élysée head chef, who had worked for every president since Charles de Gaulle. “Well, there are limits to niceness.” Mr. Normand apparently felt the same way. In his 2000 memoir, “La Vème République aux Fourneaux” (“The Fifth Republic at the Stoves”), he confessed his unhappiness during the Mitterrand years. The president had a personal chef; he felt ignored. “François Mitterrand never gave the smallest compliment to his chefs,” he wrote. “But he often complained.” IN the film, the president, played by Jean d’Ormesson, 87, an author of more than three dozen books and a member of the Académie Française, is portrayed as a lover of food prepared without the frills. This is Mr. d’Ormesson’s first role in a film, but he boasted that he had shared a meal with Mr. Mitterrand 26 times. (He was also the last visitor received by Mr. Mitterrand on the day he left the Élysée.) In their last scene together in the film, the president visits Hortense in her kitchen one night. She serves him a large slice of toasted country bread with butter and topped with thick slices of black truffle that arrived that morning from the Périgord, accompanied by a glass of 1969 Château Rayas. “Adversity, personally, it’s adversity that keeps me standing,” he tells her. (In real life, Mr. Mitterrand was told in late 1981 that he had prostate cancer, but he kept his illness secret from the public throughout his 14-year presidency, which ended in 1995. He died the following year.) In the end, the combination of Ms. Delpeuch’s strong will and the conflicts within the Élysée made the two-kitchen arrangement untenable. A broken ankle was the catalyst for her departure. “My request to leave was accepted without delay, without commentary and without consideration for my vulnerable state,” she wrote in her memoirs. Bernard Vaussion, the current Élysée chief chef, who was a sous-chef at the time, explained the cohabitation in the Élysée kitchen this way: “Sure it was macho in those days. The woman was supposed to cook at home, for the family. The men were the artists of the kitchen. But she could have had a bit of a different attitude toward us. She had the idea that she had been appointed by the president, and that no one else mattered.” She returned to the farm. She traveled. Then, in 2000, without the means to support herself, she answered an ad for a highly paid job as a cook in Antarctica. She spent 14 months cooking for 60 people based at a French scientific research station there. Food deliveries were made once every four months. At the Élysée today, much of what Ms. Delpeuch served during the Mitterrand era is off limits. A cream-filled Saint-Honoré dessert would be considered too rich, a cabbage-based dish too heavy, lobster and truffles too elitist. But some things have not changed. Although dozens of female interns have passed through the Élysée kitchen in recent years, all the permanent chefs today are men. |