Dor two years, Marie-Victorine Manoa has been offering traditional but light French cuisine at the Aux Lyonnais restaurant in Paris. At the end of June, she also took charge of the Chalet des Îles Daumesnil, in the Bois de Vincennes, for a four-month residency.
“The quenelle is often shunned by people who don’t know it well and only remember a canteen dish with too much béchamel. It can be scary, like endives with ham. I, who grew up in Lyon, in my father’s kitchen, who keeps a cork, I’ve eaten it all my life and I love it. At Les Lyonnais, I always have a quenelle à la carte. Depending on the season, it will be with morels, crayfish or chicken livers. In the spring, it was all green, made from wild garlic. At the moment, it is accompanied by a zucchini flower.
My father makes it “soufflée”, that is to say he puts the sauce on it then puts it in the oven, where it browns, and it’s so good! But for my restaurant, I prefer a slightly lighter version, where it is poached in bone juice. To be faithful to the Lyonnais spirit, I generally choose a freshwater fish, such as pike or pike-perch, which I make a fine puree by passing the flesh through a sieve. I then mix it with panade, a choux pastry, so that it swells a little; I emulsify it with a mixer, then I cook it on a low boil for a very long time. All these operations put end to end, with a lot of attention, it makes a little cushion of air that is easy to eat, universally good: you can’t not like the quenelle!
whole pigs
I studied at the Paul-Bocuse Institute in Lyon and, one day, I wanted to leave, to discover a cuisine diametrically opposed to what I knew. I spent a year at Noma in Copenhagen, where everything I had learned was turned upside down. Trimming, dressing… there were no more rules. There I also met [le chef brésilien] Alex Atala, who was lecturing on animal death. He spoke with a chicken in his hands to which he had given a name, the public had become attached to it. At the end of the conference, he killed him. It jostled me.
My battle today is in the living: I don’t think you have to stop eating meat, but become aware of the life of an animal when you work on it. I was brought up in this tradition, I have memories of returning from hunting where I saw wild boars being cut up in the house, that didn’t shock me. What shocks me is the ego of chefs who, to make the best dish in the world, order two vacuum-packed pork tenderloins without asking themselves the question of what will become of the rest of the animal’s body.
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