Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A unique feast of biography and Regency cookbook, Cooking for Kings takes readers on a culinary tour of the palaces of Britain and Europe in the ultimate age of gastronomic indulgence, when, for the first time, chefs became celebrities and the modern restaurant was born. Drawing on the legendary cook's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Antonin Careme's meteoric rise from a child abandoned on the streets of revolutionary Paris to international celebrity and provides a dramatic below-stairs perspective on one of the most momentous, and sensuous, periods in European history -- First Empire Paris, Georgian England, and the Russia of War and Peace -- when emperors, kings, and princes wielded Careme's gastronomy as a diplomatic tool.

Careme was much more than the inventor of the chef's hat, the vol-au-vent, and the souffle. He had an unfailing ability to cook for the right people in the right place at the right time. He knew the foibles and the favorite dishes of the Romanovs, the Rothschilds, and Rossini. He worked for the gourmet-king George IV, the Viennese court, and even made Napoleon's wedding cake. But Careme's reputation rested ultimately on a novel idea that changed cooking forever: by marrying food and glamour in his books -- which transported readers to the tables of the famous households for whom he cooked -- he was the first chef to become rich and famous by publishing cookbooks. Careme's recipes still grace the tables of restaurants the world over. Now classics of French cuisine, created for, and named after, the kings and queens for whom he worked, they are featured throughout this captivating biography. In the phrase first coined by Careme, "You can try them yourself."

FROM THE CRITICS

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.

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. Car me (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, Car me 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 Car me'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 Car me 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. Agent, Ivan Mulcahy. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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