Search Results for: escoffier

What was so great about Escoffier?

Borne in 1846, Auguste Escoffier was one of the first chefs to have global name recognition. People traveled from everywhere to eat his food and to this day every serious student of cooking owns a copy of his cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire. But then a lot of chefs over the last century or so have cooked well, had broad name recognition and published cookbooks. So what made Escoffier a legend? Was his food that good? Could he have beaten Morimoto on Iron Chef?

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I Am Melba!

Though you wouldn’t think something as simple and unassuming as melba toast actually had to be invented, it was. And not by just anybody. Melba toast was invented by the greatest chef of all time for the greatest prima donna of all time: an Australian soprano by the name of Nellie Melba. Melba’s real name was Helen Mitchell, but she changed her name at the urging of her voice tutor to something a little more…showbiz. She took “Melba” as her stage name, which was a contraction of the name of her old home town, Melbourne.

Though she was from Australia (in fact she was the very first internationally-known female soprano from that continent), she rose to prominence singing at the Royal Opera in Covent Garden, London. During her engagements there she stayed, often for extended periods, at the Savoy hotel where the chef was a mustachioed French fellow by the name of Auguste Escoffier.

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So then is Bavarian cream actually Bavarian?

Nice follow-up question, Robin! The answer is no. Probably not. Maybe not. It’s hard to say, for the origin of Bavarian cream is murky. Some food historians say that Bavarian cream — classically known as fromage Bavarois — was brought to France by a French chef who’d worked in Bavaria, but there’s no evidence for that.

Auguste Escoffier claimed that “bavarois” was actually a Russian invention that should by all rights be called “Muscovite”, yet no one is entirely sure whether Escoffier was talking about a pastry filling or a drink, a concoction of hot tea, milk, egg yolks, sugar and Kirsch that went by the same name.

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Sauces à la Carême

One of Carême’s great legacies was the hierarchy he developed for French sauces. Prior to his arrival on the scene there were literally hundreds of sauces in the French culinary canon, many of them absurdly elaborate, containing dozens of ingredients. At Talleyrand’s urging, Carême took on the project of organizing and simplifying them. The result was a system based on four “mother sauces” from which all others were derived. They were:

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