Lecture 28: First Restaurants, Chefs, and Gastronomy
it off well and charged their customers a fortune, and others were
less extravagant and had to lower their standards to attract more
customers. In the smaller restaurants, the number of courses was
fewer, and the quantity of food was less—the general trend up to
the present—but the structure of the meal stayed the same across
restaurants: from light foods to heavy in the middle and back to
light at the end. The fi rst and most important celebrity chef is Marie Antonin
Carême, who served as chef to Prime Minister Talleyrand and Baron
Rothschild, Emperor Alexander of Russia, and King George IV.
Carême is generally recognized as the founder of grande cuisine,
which is the height of classic French cooking. Carême is also
credited with inventing the classic chef’s jacket and toque, or “toque
blanche,” which is a uniform that only trained chefs are entitled to
wear—indicative of the professionalization of this business. Another celebrity chef was Alexis Soyer, who eventually became
chef for the Reform Club in London. Through his popularity, Soyer
did many positive things. He was sent to Ireland to open soup
kitchens during the potato blight, and he worked with people like
Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War by providing food for
the troops. It was Soyer’s A Shilling Cookery for the People, which
explained how to make meals on a limited budget, that really won
people’s respect. Chearles Elmé Francatelli was another mid-19th-century celebrity,
who eventually worked for Queen Victoria. He also published one
of the more popular cookbooks of the era, The Modern Cook, in
1845, but the most remarkable thing he wrote was a pamphlet called
A Plain Cookery Book for The Working Classes (1861), which tells
how to set up a kitchen and how to cook basic but nutritious foods
economically. It was presumably written for women who had never
learned how to cook from their mothers. Toward the end of the century is the last of these celebrities,
Auguste Escoffi er, who made his fame in the restaurants of the