August 15, 2012 Lunch-Bric Brac in Moulinneuf, Dinner – Restaurant du Pont, Rochford sur Loire, Chambord Castle and the difference between creativity and repetition

August 15, 2012 Lunch-Bric Brac in Moulinneuf, Dinner – Restaurant du Pont, Rochford sur Loire, Chambord Castle and the difference between creativity and repetition

Another huge day of travel.  We started with breakfast of a croissant and bread and jam and butter and some tea and coffee at our Hotel du Pont in Moulineuf at 8:00 a.m.  We then walked up the hill to the Bric Brac, which is half traders’ market and half just local folks’ stuff with over 100 booths.  Jean Claude and Kipp had a booth with many of their old family pieces from around the house, some of which dated back to his grandmother over 100 years ago. 

Suzette found curtain holders and a finding for a fabric my mother had bought that needed an edging to complete as a duvet cover.   

We ate moules and frites and drank beer.  Then at noon we shared a Merguez ( lamb)  Sausage n a loaf of French bread and a beer, said goodbye to Jean Claude, and Kitt and Michel and Shelly  and drove to Chambord around noon.

Chambord is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  It sits in a thick forest favored by the kings of France for hunting. It is a large moated castle/hunting lodge linked to a river by a canal for access and fresh water where Francois I and his entire court could comfortably stay.  It was completed after Francois’ death by his son and grad son, Louis IVX. 

Le Croissette.  She said that there was a difference between the food at Du Pont and le Croisette.   I took that to mean that the chef at le Croissette was creating dishes and the chef at Du Pont was merely combining ingredients that were fresh in time tried and proven combinations.  This Is a significant difference in cuisine as it is in building an architectural legacy.  For example at Chambord, h great architectural feature are the staircases within the towers.  There is one central staircase and four additional staircases that form a grid that joins all the three floors at the apex of the central core of the building and the two wings of the chateau together 

Although there is no clear historical evidence that proves who was responsible for the design of the staircases within the towers, it was either Leonardo da Vinci or Francois I under the influence of Leonardo.  Chambord has a central staircase tower that is double loaded.  This means that the floors are tall enough to accommodate a double stairwell with a landing on each side of the staircase.  Likewise the outer tower staircase are also double loaded in the sense that they open to an inside glassed promenade on the outer side of the staircase and on the inner side of the double loaded staircase onto an outdoor gallery at each floor that surrounds an inner courtyard.  This is clearly an example of Leonardo’s fluid dynamics theories, in my opinion.  It allows better use of the available space within the tower and creates a design that allows a better or greater flow of people up and down the staircases.  

Michel, Jean Claude and Kitt’s friend also put us onto this by recommending a visit to Chambord by saying the central staircase must be seen. N

This is what Michel meant I think the difference between following historically established patterns and seeing a new more creative and simpler or more efficient solution to a problem.  At Chambord, the problem was a weird one, to allow Francois exclusive access to the Royal rooms, but the solution was genius. 

The same thing can be said about cuisine.  There is a difference between combining elements, either ingredients or preparation techniques and actually creating a new synthetic technique combination of ingredients.  For example, at Du Pont, we ate the same salad, Angevine, which is similar to the frisee and lardettes salad at Viniagrette called French Bistro Salad.  At Viniagrette it is made with frisee, lardettes and a poached egg and croutons.  At Croisette it was made with a combination of escarole and baby greens (so truer to the original design of the dish), with finely diced bacon lardettes that had been cleaned of any fat and a strong mustard dressing made with seeded mustard, a little oil and an egg enrichment that bound the whole together, with some objection, I was given a thimble full of extra olive oil and I stretched the dressing from a solid into a more flowing mass so Suzette could have some dressing on the salad served on the plate with the fried calamari and pommes frites.  But the point here is that the extra care in technical execution makes a difference.  The Du Pont salad featured the freshness of the butter lettuce and not much else.  The Lardettes were odd large chunks of bacon with the fat still on them.  There was a thin julienne of carrots and two wedges of tomato and a pile of pureed beets.  Although called the by the same name, the Du Pont version clearly was more a combination of available fresh ingredients, instead of a purposeful explication of a theme, like Le Croissette and Viniagrette’s salads of the same name.

A better example of creativity can be found in the gazpacho soup.  At le Croisette, it was a simple lightly creamed combination of pureed and sieved celery, cucumber and tomato with a little olive oil.  The chef had figured out that combining the essence of those three vegetables with a bit of olive oil would create a new emulsification that we would consider to be a cream soup that would stand up on a spoon.  So he abandoned the traditional approach in Gazpacho to combine a bunch of ingredients into a thick soup that sits on your spoon in globs or has been thinned by blending to give an uneven combination of vegetable globs and liquefied vegetable juice.  Instead he united the ingredients into a unified whole by reducing them to their simplest ingredients and then re-combining those ingredients into a unified whole.  Somewhat like combining two staircases into one to achieve a more dynamic and unified whole.

That is what makes Michel and the thousands who come each day to marvel at the great design of Chambord; the evidence of the genius of seeing a simple solution to a difficult problem through vision and the ability to execute a new and different design solution than had ever been used before.  That is what confirms the separateness and superiority of homo sapiens from former hominids and animals.  It is worthy of a World Heritage Site designation.   

Bon Appétit