Read Online The United States of Arugula by David Kamp - Free Book Online

he claimed, was born to a poor family of twenty-five children and abandoned in the streets of Paris at the age of eleven. He stumbled into a job as an apprentice in a pastry shop, thereby kicking off his illustrious career.) “My book is not written for great houses alone,” he wrote in the introduction of
L’art de la cuisine française.
“On the contrary, I want it to have a general utility … I would like every citizen in our beautiful France to eat delicious food.” Ambitious and prescient, Carême realized that publishing was his way to posterity, and, between the many books he wrote and his high-profile commissions for European nobility (in addition to Talleyrand, he also worked for Czar Alexander I of Russia, the Prince Regent of England, and Baron James de Rothschild), he became famous throughout Europe—truly, the first celebrity chef.
    Carême’s books were the first to collect his nation’s traditions, methodologies, and usages of kitchen equipment into “French cuisine” as we think of it today, with exhaustively thorough chapters devoted to the preparation of various kinds of bouillons, soups, sauces, quenelles, breads, fish dishes, and meat dishes—some of the very same processes that Julia Child and her collaborators would painstakingly deconstruct and reconstruct for an American audience in the early 1960s. It was also Carême who popularized such terms as béchamel, velouté, and soufflé, ensuring that, as one of his biographers put it, “like ballet (another art formed in seventeenth-century France), cuisine would continue to speak in French.”
    All that said, Carême’s most avid readers were not ordinary French citizens but the burgeoning ranks of restaurant chefs, the foremost of whom, Escoffier, streamlined Carême’s grand, fanciful visions into recipes and techniques that could be pragmatically applied in a professional kitchen. (Whereas Carême never worked in a restaurant—hardly any good ones existed in his heyday * —Escoffier never worked for a private patron.) The Provence-born Escoffier was something of a boy wonder, establishing himself in the 1860s at Le Petit Moulin Rouge, Paris’s most popular restaurant of the time. By the 1880s, he was working at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, where he befriended César Ritz, a Swiss up-and-comer on the management side of the hotel. In 1890, Escoffier and Ritz were hired in tandem by the theater impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte † to run the restaurant and hotel operations, respectively, of his new luxury hotel in London, the Savoy. The Savoy gave Escoffier a platform from which to put his Carême-lite theories into practice: the repertoire would still be based on Carême’s principles as set forth in
L’art de la cuisine française
, but without the rococo presentations and cumbersome
service à la française
of Carême’s day, in which a profusion of dishes was laid out on the table all at once. Escoffier helped popularize
service à la russe
(Russian-style), in which courses were brought out in succession by waiters (with diners no longer obligated to pass their plates around to get a taste of this andthat), and he pioneered the practice of à la carte dining, wherein one guest could order a completely different set of courses from another.
    Escoffier also devised the
chefs de partie
system of function-specific kitchen stations, eliminating the old jumble of redundant, overlapping departments, and furnished his kitchens with state-of-the-art iron ranges, making his operations more efficient than the hearth-based kitchens of Carême’s day. (Hearth cooking would remain a backward abomination in restaurants with serious intentions until Americans such as Alice Waters and Peter Hoffman invented urban-farmhouse chic in the 1980s.) Such was the success of the Ritz-Escoffier team that they soon went into business for themselves, with Ritz managing the eponymous Hotel Ritz in Paris and the Carlton in London, and Escoffier serving as