[Sca-cooks] Careme was Brazillian pig-out- OOP

Johnna Holloway johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu
Sun Aug 26 12:49:51 PDT 2007


Yes, it's the Scully volume Early French Cookery that has the
chapter on what life was like for a medieval French cook.

Johnnae

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
> On Aug 26, 2007, at 1:27 PM, Johnna wrote:
>   
>> That's a rather marvelous book, isn't it?
>> It has this wonderful quote:
>> " 'Our work destroys us,' Careme once said of the life
>> of a great chef. 'Our only duty after cooking, is to record and  
>> publish,
>> or if not we will suffer such regrets.' Three years later, he was  
>> dead." Johnnae
>>     
>
> He seems to harp pretty consistently on the working conditions of  
> cooks and how, at the time, they were probably considerably  
> shortening their lifespans. The standard chief culprit is now  
> believed to have been low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. Obviously,  
> the way to get food hot to the table is to cook over ("a cubic metre  
> of") charcoal, indoors, and shut all the windows an hour before  
> service to prevent drafts.
>
> Is it Scully's "Early French Cookery" that has the wonderful  
> fictional account of a [feast] day in the life of Chiquart? The  
> opening chapter of "Cooking For Kings", the Careme bio in question,  
> mirrors that with an account of a great dinner party at the Regency?  
> Post-Napoleonic?-era Rothschilde estate. The detailed description of  
> the sugar work alone is worth the price of admission.
>
> Everybody remembers Escoffier as the father of modern French haute  
> cuisine, but most of his work is merely refinement of Careme's,  
> simplifying it and to some extent refining the system away from great  
> households and toward hotels and restaurants.
>
> Adamantius 



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