By Sourish Bhattacharyya
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| Pierre Herme explaining the finer points of a macaroon at his tete-a-tete with the city's leading chefs, restaurateurs and bloggers at Le Cirque, The Leela Palace New Delhi, Chanakyapuri. Picture: Courtesy of Rupali Dean |
WHEN Chumki Bharadwaj, Associate
Editor, India Today Spice, informed us
that more than 90 invitees had confirmed their attendance for the 'High Tea
with Pierre Herme' organised on
Monday jointly by her publication and The Leela Palace New Delhi, Chanakyapuri,
I expected all hell to break loose. But Rajesh
Namby, the hotel's Executive Assistant Manager (F&B), did not bat an
eyelid. With clockwork efficiency and dazzling speed, he re-arranged the
seating at Le Cirque, the appropriately chosen venue of the event, and inspired
the equally even-tempered Executive Chef
Christophe Gillino to make food for a gathering of 100-plus leading chefs, restaurateurs
and bloggers of the city. It is not for nothing that Namby has been named Delhi's
Best F&B Manager not once but on several occasions by top critics,
including Vir Sanghvi, and leading
publications.
Herme, universally hailed as 'The Picasso
of Pastry', was having a quite lunch at Megu, the hotel's Japanese restaurant,
when all this action was happening. When he came up to Le Cirque with his charming
wife and his company's president, Charles
Znaty, after what seemed like a soul-satisfying meal, he looked a little
apprehensive. To unwind him, I asked him how his Sunday visit to Agra was and
he instantly broke into a sunny smile, and said, "It was beautiful! It was
too beautiful!"
France's most celebrated patissier,
whose macaroons and chocolates are in a league of their own, dispensed with the
services of the interpreter and connected effortlessly with the audience, whose
questions were as well-researched as the answers were well thought out. The
session was studded with profound one-liners from Herme.
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| Herme sketches out the macaroons he conceives and then writes detailed recipes below. Here's his sketch of his best-known macaroon, Ispahan. Picture: Courtesy of Rupali Dean |
"If there are no flavours to
invent, I would be dead," said the man who reinvented macaroons (or
macarons, as he insisted on calling them, in the way a true-blue Frenchman
would call these confections). "There's no conflict between tradition and
creativity," he said when asked about how he viewed the contributions of
molecular gastronomy to the pastry chef's craft. "When you're in pastry
school, keep asking questions, keep demanding more. Don't just accept what your
teachers tell you. I was known as the guy who asks too many questions," said
the former student of Lenotre, which Sabyasachi
Gorai described as "the Harvard of pastry chefs", in response to
a question on how a newbie could aspire to become like him.
He also shared with us his personal
gold standard. "A macaron should be slightly crunchy when you bite into it
and then it must be soft, not chewy," he said, laying down the definition
of perfection, which The Oberoi New Delhi's talented pastry chef, Vikas Vibhuti, hopes to follow to the
last letter when he unveils his own line of these delicious little temptations
that Herme has made us fall in love with.
At the India Today Conclave, Herme,
who draws inspiration from around the world, did not say anything categorical about
how India has influenced him, but on Monday, he talked about his love for Alphonso
mangoes and his interest in mustard oil. "I have always wanted to taste
mustard oil to be able to understand its flavours and I got to do it during my
present visit," he said, without divulging more, in response to MasterChef India co-host and The Leela
Gurgaon's Executive Sous Chef Kunal
Kapur's suggestion that he should not leave the country without having Dal
Makhni and Butter Chicken. Well, one of his famous macaroons, inspired by a
visit to an olive oil press in Italy, has among its ingredients the green first-press
olive oil, vanilla and individual green olives sliced by hand into three pieces.
Herme dazzled us with the array of
ingredients that he uses in his macaroons and chocolates. Of course, we didn't
get to bite into the ones with foie gras,
white and black truffles, which Herme rolls out only during Christmas, but we did
get to taste combinations of vanilla from Mexico, Madagascar and Tahiti, hazelnut
from Piedmont, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, lemon from Sicily, and single-origin
chocolate from, among other places, a Venezuelan village named Chuao, which has
no proper road, but whose 122 cocoa farmers produce a magical ingredient for the
patissier's repertoire.
"We always have 18 different
kinds of chocolates on our menu," Hermes said -- and the point to note is
that he never repeats a collection from one season to another. What about the rose-litchi-raspberry
combination that has immortalised Ispahan, his most famous macaroon? "We
have 42 recipes with this combination," said the man who revels in the fine
art of "the management of combinations of flavours".
Herme was only 14 years old when he
got interested in macaroons. That was the year 1976 and a macaroon then meant,
to quote Herme, "two biscuits with just four different types of
fillings". By now, Herme must have left a trail of several hundred flavour
combinations, but he's constantly seeking out more. I now wonder when we'll get
to savour a hint of mustard oil in his macaroons.
