Marie-Antoine Carême
French chef, pastry cook and food writer
Biography
Marie-Antoine Carême, known as Antonin Carême, was a French chef, pastry cook and food writer who worked in Paris, London, St Petersburg and Vienna between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. He is considered one of the founders of classical French haute cuisine, the so-called grande cuisine, and he is often cited as the first person to be called a chef. His importance lies in having organised a scattered culinary tradition and in leaving written works that served as models for several generations of professional cooks.
He was born in Paris in 1783 or 1784; the exact year cannot be confirmed. He was one of many children in a poor family. His father worked in construction, and they lived in a modest district near the rue du Bac. The Revolution brought most public building work in the city to a halt, and the family struggled. According to the account Carême himself gave, his father sent him off alone in late 1792, asking him to find a house that would take him in; the boy arrived at a gargote, a cheap eating house. Later biographers consider it more likely that the family simply arranged the boy's employment with the owner. Accounts also differ on how long he stayed there and on his time with a baker in the rue Saint-Honoré, where, according to a later witness, he learned to read and write.
The record is more reliable from 1798, when he became an apprentice at the pastry shop of Sylvain Bailly in the rue Vivienne, a short distance from the Palais-Royal. In post-revolutionary Paris pastry was the most prestigious branch of cookery, and Bailly's establishment, recommended by the influential Almanach des Gourmands, attracted distinguished customers. Carême started as a tourier, working and folding puff pastry, and he later became associated with the vol-au-vent and the mille-feuille. He suggested how to make Bailly's celebrated gâteau de plomb lighter and invented decorations to crown it. Bailly gave him two afternoons off each week to visit the old royal library across the road, where he read eagerly: cookery books from other countries and eras, and also works on architecture, another of his great passions.
This training shows in his sugar work. Carême helped revive the art of sugar sculpture, widely practised under the Ancien Régime and neglected after the Revolution. He created croquembouches and pièces montées inspired by ancient architecture, with Greek columns, temples, Chinese pagodas and Egyptian pyramids. His enthusiasm sometimes led him to mix elements from very different periods and styles in a single piece, something admired in his day and criticised later. He is credited with saying that the fine arts are five in number and that the principal branch of architecture is confectionery, though the remark is better read as a reflection of his outlook than as a documented statement.
After three years with Bailly he moved to the workshop of Gendron in the rue des Petits-Champs, where he worked for prestigious clients and was allowed to take on important banquets on his own account. In 1803 he opened his own shop in the rue de la Paix, which he ran for a decade. The same year he began working in the kitchens of Talleyrand at the Hôtel de Galliffet, a connection that lasted until 1814. According to a well-known story, Talleyrand challenged him at the château of Valençay to plan a full year of menus without repeating dishes and using seasonal produce. His advances in cold cuts and buffet presentation date from this period. Carême acknowledged learning sauce work from the great sauciers of the Condé household and cold buffet skills at the festivities of the Hôtel de Ville.
After Napoleon's defeat in 1814, Talleyrand hosted Tsar Alexander I and asked Carême to provide a continuous run of fine meals for his guest. The tsar then asked him to serve as head chef at the Élysée Palace. For the review of troops at Châlons-sur-Marne he had to prepare three banquets for 300 people each, with food, wine, linen, glassware and even livestock brought from Paris. Carême did not share the tsar's preference for Russian service, with individual courses, over French service, in which many dishes were laid out on the table at once. In the long run the Russian style spread across Europe. In 1815 he published his first books, Le Pâtissier royal parisien and Le Pâtissier pittoresque, illustrated with plates of elaborate centrepieces. In 1816 he joined the service of the Prince Regent in London and Brighton on an exceptional salary, but he never settled, disliking the climate, the smoky kitchens that worsened his breathing problems and the household staff, and he returned to France in late 1817. He then worked for Esterhazy, for Rothschild, for Princess Bagration and, in Vienna, for Lord Stewart, where he is said to have introduced the chef's toque. According to tradition, he did so because the cotton caps of the time made cooks look unwell.
His last salaried post was in the household of the banker James de Rothschild, from 1823 to 1829, when he retired to devote himself to writing. He published Le Cuisinier parisien in 1828 and left unfinished L'art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle, planned in five volumes. He completed the first three; his pupil Armand Plumerey wrote the last two from Carême's notes. He died at his Paris home on 12 January 1833, aged 48 or 49, after years of breathing the fumes of the charcoal he cooked with. He is buried in Montmartre Cemetery.
His legacy is twofold. He systematised the basic sauces of classical French cookery, the so-called mother sauces, velouté, béchamel, allemande and espagnole, which later chefs kept with modifications. He also championed fine ingredients and grand presentation for elite diners. His followers Jules Gouffé, Urbain Dubois, Émile Bernard and Auguste Escoffier carried his method forward until nouvelle cuisine and simpler styles displaced it in the second half of the twentieth century. His reputation is still debated: some see a great talent who showed that a humble apprentice could reach the summit of his profession, while others describe a pretentious man whose showpieces were an extravagant waste.
Key contributions
- A classification of the mother sauces (velouté, béchamel, allemande and espagnole), the foundation of classical French cookery.
- The revival of sugar sculpture and of showpieces inspired by ancient architecture.
- The spread and refinement of pastry preparations such as the vol-au-vent, the mille-feuille and profiteroles.
- Le Pâtissier royal parisien and Le Pâtissier pittoresque (1815), illustrated books that fixed recipes and designs for professional pastry cooks.
- L'art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle, a posthumous work that passed his method on to cooks of the following generation.
- The chef's toque, a symbol of the profession, traditionally attributed to him during his Vienna period.