A Name You Should Know:

Marie-Antoine Carême
From the four “mother sauces” to croquembouche and mille-feuille,
Carême’s undeniable legacy endures
Welcome to A Name You Should Know, a new series celebrating the people
who created the culinary world we know today.

It is difficult to overstate the importance, in modern Western cuisine, of Marie-

Antoine Carême, a Frenchman many say was the first celebrity chef. Best
known today for the spectacular sugar, marzipan, and pastry sculptures he
designed and built called pièces montées — which still exist in fine dining, but
are now more commonly made of chocolate — Carême's real legacy came
out of his systemization, rationalization, and professionalization of French
cuisine in the early 1800s.

"When we talk about the systems of French cuisine, it goes back to Carême."

French cuisine remains one of history's best documented, and though names
like Escoffier, Soyer, Point, Vergé, and Bocuse are thrown around (and are
indeed important in their own right), Carême was haute cuisine's original
maestro. He was the first to distinguish this rich, meat-heavy, decorative,
more labor-intensive cuisine from regional French home cooking, and the first
to catalogue and organize it so it could be easily understood by future
generations. From a relative disarray of recipes and techniques, he
extrapolated four essential sauces, known as "mother sauces," which formed
the basis of and garnish for hundreds of dishes. Over a century later Auguste
Escoffier would update and revise this system, but Carême gave Escoffier
something to build upon.

"When we talk about the systems of French cuisine, it goes back to Carême,"
says Priscilla Ferguson, professor of sociology and cuisinology at Columbia
University. Carême's work is a key reason why French cooking has
permeated nearly every country across the globe, and remains the dominant
cuisine in fine dining today.
Born in Paris on June 8, 1784, Carême died just 49 years later in 1833,
having spent nearly 40 years of his life working in professional kitchens.
Accounts vary widely, but most sources agree Carême was born to a large,
poor family in Paris. By the age of 10 he was out on his own, and Carême
signed on for a six-year internship at a small tavern on the edge of Paris
called the Fricassée de Lapin; he started as a dishwasher and gopher, or
runner. In those days, taverns were hubs for city life and often operated as
inns for travelers passing through town. They always served alcohol, and
occasionally served food as well.

At 16, Carême was onto his next job, this time at a noteworthy pâtisserie near
the Palais-Royal owned by Sylvain Bailly, a famous pâtissier at the time.
Unlike taverns, which were casual and served the working classes, pâtisseries
served the wealthy. It was at Bailly's shop that Carême blossomed. Bailly
recognized the young boy's talent and encouraged him to get a more formal
education. During this time Carême learned to read and write and took a keen
interest in architecture. He would spend days studying in the library and then
return to the shop to reproduce classic architectural forms in sugar and pastry.
Bailly, seeing a possible market for these creations, set them out as
decorative displays and eventually sold them as banquet centerpieces.

Within two years, members of France's ruling class began to notice the young
apprentice's work and contracted him for special-occasion pieces outside the
pastry shop. According to some sources, around the turn of the century
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (Talleyrand), Napoleon's chief
diplomat at the time, hired Carême to work under his personal chef. About a
decade later, when Napoleon installed Talleyrand at the Château de Valençay
— a residence purchased for the sole purpose of entertaining diplomatic
guests from abroad — Carême came along. Some sources say Carême
owned his own Paris pastry shop while working freelance for Tallyrand.
Regardless, it was under Talleyrand's chef that Carême learned the savory
side of the kitchen.

"The fine arts are five in number: painting, sculpture, poetry, music,
architecture — whose main branch is confectionery."

In 1815, Carême left Paris to work in London as head chef for George, Prince
of Wales. He left the country just three years later, but while in England,
he wrote his first book, Le pâtissier royal, a 482-page manual and treatise
split into two volumes comprising sweet and savory recipes, complete with
rough line drawings for the more elaborate dishes. In Le pâtissier royal, the
first of what would be many books, Carême wrote of pastry's architectural
nature. By 1881, when the novelist Anatole France published his first
book, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, Carême would be quoted as saying,
"The fine arts are five in number, to wit: painting, sculpture, poetry, music,
architecture — whose main branch is confectionery."

For some scholars, it is difficult to separate Carême's talent from his

vainglorious self-promotion. "He printed his portrait in his books, so everyone
knew what he looked like," says Ken Albala, professor of history and director
of food studies at University of the Pacific. "And he referred to himself in a
grand manner, as the 'chef of kings and king of chefs.'" Carême may or
may not have been the first to pipe meringue through a pastry bag; to perfect
the cream puff; to melt and mold sugar like glass, but his methods were the
first to be well-documented. He's credited with being the first cookbook author
to use the phrase, "you can try this for yourself at home." In addition to one-of-
a-kind, fanciful cakes, layered jellies, and molded or carved structures, he
invented desserts like strawberries Romanov, coeur à la
crème, croquembouche, mille-feuille, and charlotte Russe. Carême's
playfulness and outside-the-box thinking lives on in modern molecular
gastronomy; his precision and pageantry informs modern American fine
dining.

Due to the book's popularity, a second edition of Le pâtissier royal was printed
just three months after its first run. Carême wrote several more books in his
lifetime, including the seminal five-volume L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-
neuvième siècle. Traité élémentaire et pratique., in which he posits that
cream-based or otherwise thickened sauces are superior to thinner stocks,
and lays out a complete catalogue of both sweet and savory French cuisine. It
was in the book's final volume where he notes, "I want order and taste. A well-
displayed meal is enhanced one hundred percent in my eyes."

In the early 19th century, when Carême's books were being published, chefs
learned by apprenticeship, mimicking techniques they saw others develop. It
was a process of watching, learning, and repeating. Recipes existed, but were
not organized (formal culinary schools would not appear in France until late in
the century). There was no comprehensive effort to categorize what was
then a very quickly evolving cuisine, specific to high society and France's
ruling class, which involved hundreds of new techniques, expensive
ingredients, and teams of chefs to execute. Rich in butter and cream,
luxurious, decorative, and extremely fussy, this cooking style is called
grand cuisine francaise or haute cuisine, and it continues to influence cooking
across the globe. Were it not for Carême, however, it may never have been
documented as precisely or as extensively.

The Four Mother Sauces

Hollandaise: light stock, lemon juice, egg yolks

Béchamel: milk thickened with a butter and flour roux
Espagnole: reduced brown stock with tomato sauce
Velouté: light stock thickened with a butter and flour roux

"His most lasting change is that he systematized cuisine," Ferguson says. "He
starts his last book with how you make bouillon, and then that bouillon is a
basis for several different kinds of soup; separately, it is a basis for his
sauces. Then, like Legos, you start with one recipe and build upon it, and
build upon that." Eventually you have a complete dish, a full banquet, a
massive slew of foods of all temperatures, textures, and utilizing a range of
techniques. "It's that rationalization," Ferguson says, "that set him apart from
his contemporaries." Carême similarly systemized dress as a way to
professionalize the culinary arts: Just as doctors and lawyers were expected
to dress in a certain way, Carême felt that chefs should wear uniforms. He
donned a double-breasted jacket as a uniform, and popularized a version of
the chef's toque.

It was in his series of manuals that Carême created the concept of the four
mother sauces, recipes that represent a distillation of the elemental building
blocks of French cuisine. Though he is credited with establishing these
sauces, he was not known for them in his day. It would take another century
and another chef — Escoffier — before the systemization of French haute
cuisine would be complete, and before Carême's work on the savory side of
the kitchen would be appreciated by future generations.

But according to Albala, Carême was most certainly the first celebrity chef. "In
many ways Carême was born at just the right time," Albala says. "France is
flourishing and the printing press makes it possible for his books to be mass
produced. They were not expensive at all. They were full of his drawings,
architectural drawings that people liked to gawk at. It was like a coffee table
book today, because for the most part people could not reproduce these
things at home." The books were quickly translated into English and spread
throughout northern Europe, and many are still in print. "Very few chefs before
him are well-known," Albala says, "which is not to say royal chefs before him
hadn't written cookbooks. But these books didn't have enormous print runs,
nor did they become best-sellers."
In subsequent years Carême would go on to work for Russian Emperor
Alexander 1,
Russian Princess Catherine Bagration (while she lived in France), and several
other lords, princes, and ambassadors from across Europe before his final
stint in the kitchens of Baron James de Rothschild.

Some sources say he retired from work in 1829, at the age of 45, to focus on
writing. Others say he died while on the job. "Poor guy, died rather young,"
says Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp professor of history at Yale and author
of Food: The History of Taste. "The techniques of cooking at that time
required coal, so he died of some kind of pulmonary disease in his forties."
Even chefs who cooked for royalty were relegated to the basement and
frequently suffered after years of breathing smoke from the stoves and ovens.
Carême nevertheless sought to inspire young chefs who pursued the culinary
arts: "Young people who love your art; have courage, perseverance... always
hope... don't count on anyone, be sure of yourself, of your talent and your
probity and all will be well," he wrote in L'Art de la cuisine française.

"Carême had a vision of a stable society, while Escoffier thought that society
was changing all the time."

But ultimately, Carême's view of cuisine was limited to that of the ruling
class. He didn't write or categorize cuisine for commerce, and his style was
limited to using the best of the best, to having no constraints — financial or
material. After his formal apprenticeship, he spent no time in restaurants or
bakeries. "Carême had a vision of a stable society," says Ferguson, "while
Escoffier writes in the preface to his guide on French cooking that society is
changing all the time." Carême didn't like the individualization of cuisine, the
19th-century way of serving menus course by course (the service style, which
from Russia, is still referred to as service à la russe). "What he liked,"
Ferguson says, "was a fantastical display, or service à la française. Everyone
sat around a table and it was laid out with all manner of food, presented on
grand platters, towering structures of cold salads, soups, hot roasts, stews,
delicate pastries, rich sauces. The diner was not given a menu, the chef
dictated the menu."

In this way, Carême left room for Escoffier to see the bigger picture: How a
categorization of cuisine could extend to the organization of a kitchen brigade,
the training of chefs, the monetization and modernization of restaurants, and
adaptation to an-ever changing diner with ever-changing demands. Despite
this, Carême understood what many writers and bon vivants since have come
to appreciate: To live well, one must dine well. "When we no longer have good
cooking in the world," Carême wrote in the first few pages of Le Cuisinier
parisien., "we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor
friendly gatherings, nor social harmony."