[Sca-cooks] Celebrity Chef???

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Elaine Koogler:
>I'm watching CBS' Sunday morning, and they will, in a few minutes, 
>be doing a segment on what they term "the World's First Celebrity 
>Chef."  They claim that Napoleon's chef was this.  I can't help but 
>wonder what de Nola, Martino and Chiquart were, then...chopped 
>liver????
>
>Any opinions?
>
>Kiri

They were all great chefs in an age before real mass communications, 
and therefore, while great, probably not celebrities in any modern 
sense of the word.

See if you can get this great chef's name: I'd have thought Careme, 
who was just a little later than Napoleon, who wrote extensively 
about kitchen organization, began the process of codifying French 
haute cuisine, which process was more or less completed by Escoffier 
almost a century later, and whose services were much and 
competitively sought after by both royalty and the fabulously 
wealthy, would qualify him as the first celebrity chef in the modern 
sense.

And then there's Alexis Soyer, author of, among other works, the 
Pantropheon, who was the nineteenth century's answer to Bobby Flay. 
Now _there_ was a celebrity chef. Now if only he could cook...

Adamantius
-- 






"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread, you have to say, eat brioche."
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", pub 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04