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Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef
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Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef
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by Ian Kelly
Sales Rank : 332790
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Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Walker & Company August 25, 2005
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0802777317
ISBN-13: 978-0802777317
Product Dimensions:
8.4 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Readers who enjoy being privy to the evocative details of a past era will devour this book, and foodies will have a field day with the engrossing story of a man who literally died for gastronomy. Carême (1783–1833) was born poor in Paris, and by his late 20s he was already Europe's most famous chef. He cooked for monarchs and noblemen, even baking Napoleon's wedding cake, and his fame dovetailed with the rising interest in gastronomy—what Kelly, a British actor who played a luncheon guest in Howard's End, calls "a cult in want of a priest." Luckily, Carême was also a prodigious author who recorded every major meal and became rich off his cookbooks. Kelly feasts on the wealth of source material; his fine book offers a recipe at the end of each chapter, plus more in an appendix. The scale of Carême's meals will astonish today's readers: he served literally hundreds or even thousands of elaborate dishes for throngs of guests. He'd cook for weeks on end without a break, and Kelly theorizes that he eventually died of "low-level carbon-monoxide poisoning after a lifetime of cooking over charcoal in confined spaces." Worse, this superchef was buried in an unmarked grave and no one attended his funeral (due to a cholera epidemic). But his work wasn't in vain—we can thank Carême for numerous culinary advances, including chef's toques, which he invented, and the course-by-course meal service we're accustomed to today. 18 color and 13 b&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From The New Yorker
Antonin Carême was the most illustrious chef of post-Revolution France—Napoleon, the Rothschilds, and Tsar Alexander all employed him—and he is still remembered as the father of modern French cuisine, the popularizer of the soufflé, and the designer of the iconic chef's hat. Kelly charts Carême's use of food as a tool of social leverage, although he perhaps takes the self-promoting chef too much at his own estimation when he attributes the rise of the Rothschilds to their decision to hire Carême. Many of Carême's recipes appear here, but Kelly suggests that his more lasting legacy is the public figure of the celebrity chef. In Carême's dining rooms, ostentation often trumped taste. His signature dishes were elaborate replicas of classical architecture in pastry and spun sugar, held together with gum and colored with spinach. They were not intended for consumption.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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