Paul Bocuse held three Michelin stars for 53 years without a break, cooking on butter, cream and wine, and died at 91 in the room he was born in. He was born in 1926 above his father's inn at Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or, just outside Lyon, into a family that had been cooking since the 1700s. He started his apprenticeship at 16, learned under Eugénie Brazier and then Fernand Point, and turned the family inn into the most famous restaurant in France. In 1975 he cooked lunch for the President at the Élysée and served a truffle soup under a dome of pastry. It is still on the menu. In the 1970s he was one of the faces of nouvelle cuisine, the lighter style that swept through French kitchens. Then he watched it shrink to three peas on a plate the size of a hubcap and walked away from it. The label, he said later, had more to do with the bill than with the food. Ask him what cooking was and he would tell you. Butter, cream and wine, he said. He had no time for little peas cut into four. "Nothing replaces butter." While the rest of the world was being moved onto spread, his restaurant held its three stars every single year from 1965 to the year he died. In 1989 he was named chef of the century. He kept sleeping in the bedroom above the dining room where he had been born, and in January 2018, aged 91, that is where he died. France's interior minister announced it by saying Monsieur Paul was France. Monsieur Paul would have said France was butter.