Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme the First Celebrity Chef. Ian Kelly. Walker. New York 2003.
I was reading a review of Ian Kelly’s latest book on Casanova and was jogged into recalling he’d done this one five years earlier on Antonin Careme who cooked for Talleyrand, Napoleon, the Tsar and the Rothschilds.
It is both fascinating and boring if you know what I mean; fascinating in the telling of some of the minutiae of 19th Century cooking for royalty but boring in its listing of the meals they ate; man, did they eat. One can only shudder reading that George, the Prince Regent of Britain was so overweight his unsupported stomach drooped down to his knees.
The number of dishes served at a meal for the Rothschilds, for instance, makes Gagnaire look like a piker. And the six pages spent on how Careme spun sugar does get a bit too much.
I liked the idea that Talleyrand asked him to compose 365 meals for every day of one year, using local ingredients but again, reading just the descriptions of the 18 dishes comprising each meal was dizzying.
At some point Colette asked posited that the portion size must have been small, but no, it too was Gargantuan; sides of beef, racks of lamb, numerous wild turkeys and so on.
This is not a book for everyone but of its kind, it is unique.
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