"It is a joke. It is nothing serious. Now it looks Japanese: large dishes, small portions, no taste, but very expensive."

Said Roger Vergé, in 1985, about what had happened to the nouvelle cuisine movement he had founded back in the 1960s. Originally, called "the cuisine of the sun" and "happy cuisine," it was based on the cooking of his mother and his Aunt Célestine, in Provence. It was "the antithesis of cooking to impress — rich and pretentious." It was "a light-hearted, healthy and natural way of cooking which combines the products of the earth like a bouquet of wild flowers from the garden."

 Roger Vergé died last week at the age of 85.