Auguste Escoffier
French chef, restaurateur and culinary writer
Biography
Georges Auguste Escoffier (born 28 October 1846, Villeneuve-Loubet; died 12 February 1935) was a French chef, restaurateur and culinary writer who shaped the course of professional cooking at the turn of the twentieth century. He is often described as the great modernizer of traditional French cuisine. He systematised recipes, reorganised the professional kitchen and gave the trade a new standing. His influence lies as much in the working methods and recipes he left behind as in the way he changed the everyday life of hotel and restaurant kitchens.
He was born in the village of Villeneuve-Loubet, near Nice, in what is now the Alpes-Maritimes. He showed early promise as an artist, but his father took him out of school at the age of twelve to start an apprenticeship in the kitchen of his uncle's restaurant in Nice. According to the accounts that have come down to us, the work was harsh. He was bullied and beaten by his uncle, and his small stature made even ordinary tasks difficult, such as opening the oven doors; the story goes that he wore boots with raised heels. These anecdotes are useful for understanding the conditions of the period, though they are best read as tradition rather than documented fact.
He later worked at the Hôtel Bellevue nearby, and in 1865, at the age of nineteen, he was offered the post of apprentice roast cook at a fashionable Paris restaurant. Only months after arriving in the capital he was called up for military service and given the post of army chef. He spent nearly seven years in the army, first in barracks across France and then at Metz, where he served as chef de cuisine of the Rhine Army when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870. The experience gave him a practical interest in the technique of canning food, which stayed with him throughout his career.
Sometime before 1878 he opened his own restaurant, Le Faisan d'Or, in Cannes. Shortly afterwards he married Delphine Daffis, and the couple later had three children. In 1884 they moved to Monte Carlo, where César Ritz, manager of the new Grand Hotel, employed him to take control of the kitchens. In the summers he ran the kitchens of the Grand Hôtel National in Lucerne, also managed by Ritz. This partnership would define the following decade of luxury hotel dining in Europe.
In 1890 Ritz and Escoffier accepted an invitation from Richard D'Oyly Carte to move to his new Savoy Hotel in London, bringing with them the maître d'hôtel Louis Echenard. Ritz described their team as a little army of hotel men for the conquest of London. Escoffier recruited French cooks and reorganised the kitchens from the ground up. The Savoy quickly attracted a distinguished clientele headed by the Prince of Wales. It was here that he created dishes that were celebrated in their own time, among them pêche Melba, invented in 1893 in honour of the Australian soprano Nellie Melba. He is also credited with tournedos Rossini, although that attribution is disputed.
In 1897 the Savoy's directors began to notice falling revenues despite rising business. After a discreet investigation of about six months, Ritz, Echenard and Escoffier were dismissed in March 1898 for gross negligence and mismanagement. Escoffier later signed a confession admitting that he had taken kickbacks from suppliers, a scandal that damaged his reputation at the time. The matter was settled privately in 1900, and the details did not become public straight away. The partners had already set up the Ritz Hotel Development Company, so their departure from the Savoy did not end their work together.
Escoffier set up the kitchens of the Ritz in Paris, which opened in 1898, and those of the Carlton in London, in 1899, where he introduced the à la carte menu. In this period he became a well-known figure in the press, which called him the king of chefs and chef of kings, a title that had earlier been given to Carême. Ritz gradually retired after opening the Ritz in London in 1906, and Escoffier remained the figurehead of the Carlton until his retirement around 1920. He kept the kitchens running through the First World War, a period in which his younger son was killed in action.
In 1903 he published Le Guide Culinaire, a work of around 5,000 recipes that became both a cookbook and a textbook of classical cooking. It is still used in professional kitchens and schools. He wrote other works too, including a treatise on wax flowers, the magazine Le Carnet d'Epicure, and books on rice and cod, as well as Ma Cuisine in 1934. His memoirs, Memories of My Life, were assembled from notes gathered by his grandson and offer a personal view of his career.
Much of his technique rested on that of Marie-Antoine Carême, one of the codifiers of French haute cuisine, but Escoffier's achievement was to simplify and modernise Carême's elaborate, ornate style. He is also associated with the brigade de cuisine, a hierarchical system in which each section is run by a chef de partie, which remains standard in many restaurants today. He introduced service à la russe, in which dishes arrive in the order of the menu, replacing service à la française, where everything was served at once. He demanded cleanliness, discipline and sobriety in kitchens that had often been loud and where drinking on the job was common, and in doing so he raised the social standing of the cook.
In 1919 he was made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, and in 1928 he was promoted to officer of the order, a distinction described as the first given to a chef at that rank. The same year he helped found the World Association of Chefs' Societies and became its first president. He died in February 1935, a few days after his wife, and is buried in the family vault at Villeneuve-Loubet. The house where he was born is now the Musée de l'Art Culinaire, run by the Foundation Auguste Escoffier. His legacy lives on in the organisation of professional kitchens, in recipes still in use, and in the way European fine cooking is still understood.
Key contributions
- Le Guide Culinaire (1903): a recipe collection and textbook that systematised classical French cooking and remains a standard reference.
- The brigade system: a hierarchical organisation of the professional kitchen, with a chef in charge of each section, still common in many restaurants.
- Service à la russe: dishes served in the order of the menu, replacing service in which everything arrived at once, and easier to manage.
- Simplification of Carême's style: a pruning of the elaborate haute cuisine of the previous era, with clearer and more direct recipes.
- The à la carte menu at the Carlton in London (1899): a way of ordering individual dishes that gave diners more choice.
- Pêche Melba (1893): a peach dessert created at the Savoy in honour of Nellie Melba, still found on pastry menus today.