SYMHC Classics: Auguste Escoffier

This 2018 episode covers chef Auguste Escoffier. This one man revolutionized food preparation and restaurant dining in ways that are still part of almost any meal you may be served today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We name dropped a Gusta Scoffier on the
show this week, and so Today's Saturday Classic is our
episode on him, which I was shocked to realize had
not already been a Saturday Classic. This originally came out
on August twenty eighth, twenty eighteen. You think that because
I invoke him at every opportunity. We hope you enjoy

(00:27):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, So we are
officially into fall and winter, at least in our hemisphere. Yep.

(00:48):
And for a lot of cultures, this is a season
where there are a lot of holidays and celebrations that
often involve super delicious things. So this seemed like a
good time to finally do the episode I had more
or less promised that I was going to do back
when we talked about Chef Marie Antoine Carem. So we
are delving into the man who followed right after Carem

(01:10):
and became known as the King of Chef, Chef of Kings,
Augusta Scoffier, And if there are any chefs in our
listening audience, they already know about Escoffier. He is that
important to basically everything involving professional cooking at this point.
But people who haven't studied cuisine may not realize that
this one man really revolutionized food preparation and restaurant dining

(01:33):
in ways that are still part of just about any
meal that you would be served today. George Auguste Escoffier
was born on October twenty eighth, eighteen forty six and
Villeneuve de Lube, France, and that's in the country southeastern shore.
His parents were Jean Baptiste Escoffier, was a blacksmith and
Madeleine Sivat. Although Jean Baptiste had no formal education, he

(01:56):
and the other children of the village had been taught
to read and write from a priest and then entire
and Jean Baptiste shared that knowledge with the children of
the community and his own children once he became an adult. Yeah,
I sort of loved that tradition of teaching that they
had in their family, even if it wasn't formal education.
The young Augusta Scoffier did not initially want to cook
his dreams as a kid, or that he was going

(02:17):
to be an artist and specifically a sculptor. But there
was somemerly indication that he was curious about things that
happened in the kitchen. This happened when he watched his
grandmother make herself coffee. This is at a time when
coffee was not guzzled at the rate, for example, that
I guzzle it today. It was more of like a
special drink you would have from time to time. But
after he watched her, he waited until everyone had left

(02:39):
the house so he could try making it himself, which
he did, and he was just ten at the time.
At the age of thirteen, A Scoffier began working for
his uncle as an apprentice at a restaurant in Nice,
which was just northeast of where they were living. So
basically his career choice had been made for him. He
would go into cooking, and so he headed into La
Restoral Francaists, who began learning in eighteen fifty nine, and

(03:02):
he stayed at his apprenticeship there until eighteen sixty three,
and early on he realized that while cooks weren't especially
highly regarded, he also saw the potential of the job,
and he decided, also very early on, that he was
going to work as hard as he could to quote,
improve the standing of the kitchen chef. I'll also point
out that this is a time when the word chef

(03:24):
did not have the connotations it had today. It meant
chief like the person that runs the kitchen, although he
wrote that particular line much later on, when it also
had the connotation of being in the kitchen. I just
want to make clarity for that. He started writing menus
very very early on in his apprenticeship. He took a
great interest in menu writing specifically, and he carefully selected

(03:45):
words to name and describe dishes that he thought would
sound quote gentle and pleasing, and when it came to
menus for special occasions, he described them as a sort
of poem recalling the happy hours spent. After his apprenticeship,
Auguste was very busy with the whole series of jobs. First,
he was hired as first assistant at a restaurant called

(04:06):
circlea Messena in November of eighteen sixty three. When that
kitchen closed for the summer in April of eighteen sixty four,
he moved on to Le Freer Provenceau in Nice as
kitchen chef. He trained there for six months before being
hired at Sae Philippe, and then in the spring of
eighteen sixty five he moved to Paris to work as
a kitchen aide at a restaurant called Le Petit Moulin Rouge,

(04:30):
which catered to the high society, including the royal families
of Europe. Yeah, he basically was always kind of jumping up,
even though the rankings of those positions as we know
them today may sound lower. In some cases, when he
went from one to another, he was going to a
bigger restaurant, so it was still a move up. In
a little more than a year into his Paris job,
Escoffier was called up for mandatory military service, so from

(04:53):
September eighteen sixty six until the following spring he served
in the active Army reserves at Vin, and as soon
as his military service was complete, he returned to Le
Petit moulain Rouge. A few years later, military service called again.
The Franco Prussian War had begun, and in July of
eighteen seventy Auguste was selected to be Chef de cuisine

(05:16):
at the Rhine Army headquarters. He was feeding the chief officers,
and his accounts of providing meals during this time show
how really committed he was to his ideals as a chef.
Even while he was camping in mud with the rest
of the men, he wrote out menus for every day
the night before. Sometimes he would start food prep at night.
He became really adept at improvising to create these multi

(05:39):
course meals even in very rough circumstances. The men who
he served ate roast beef, potato salad, soft boiled eggs,
and sauteed rabbit, along with fresh sausage that he and
his assistant made themselves. In camp. He would catch wild animals,
sometimes procure things like eggs from nearby farms, always with
a mind toward creating very filling, balanced meals. Yeah, he

(06:01):
really was quite nutritionally minded at a time when people
weren't really thinking about nutrition necessarily in how they put
together meal menus and literally, when you're in the military,
that's probably not always your first priority. But he really
took great care and great pride in how he handled things,
and Escafier saw this work as making room in the

(06:22):
minds of officers so that they could worry about more
important things. Than what they would eat. He's like, I
will take care of your nutritional needs, you worry about
the other stuff. But he also saw the horrors of
war during this time. He for example, watched the injured
being carried into a makeshift hospital that was set up
on the same farm where he and his regiment camped
during the Battle of Gravelotte, and he hurried to bring

(06:45):
what he could to the men who needed treatment. Well,
continue talking about his experiences during the war, but first
we're going to pause for a little sponsor break. As
the war stretched into months, rationing began to impact the

(07:08):
menus that a scoffier prepared. Horse Meat was used to
supplement because beef was unavailable, but even so, the chef
was keenly aware of the drop in his ability to
provide for the nutritional needs of the men that he
cooked for. On October twenty eighth of eighteen seventy, which
was his twenty fourth birthday, August Escuffier became a prisoner
of war when the French surrendered after the Siege of Metz.

(07:31):
He remained a pow until the end of the war,
although his skills let him move out of the camp
proper and into a kitchen roll. Yeah, there's a great
story in his memoir about how, even though he was
kind of in like a better situation than the men
he had left behind in camp, at Christmas that year,
he made a point to take as many things as
he could from the kitchen that he was allowed to

(07:53):
take and bring them back to them so they could
have sort of their own little celebration, and he could
try to help them have a better Christmas than they
would otherwise have had. And after the war ended, Escafier
moved into the role of chef de cuisine at the
Hotel de Luxembourg in Nice. But in spring of eighteen
seventy three he was back at La Petite MoU Lain
Rouge as Chef de cuisine, and he parleyed his success

(08:17):
there into a side business for himself when he bought
a small grocery in Cannes called La fe d're that
means Golden Pheasant, and he bought that in eighteen seventy six,
and over the next two years, while he continued to
work at La Petite MoU Lain Rouge, he renovated the
store and added a winter dining room to it. He
moved into running his new business full time in eighteen

(08:37):
seventy eight, after the end of the summer season at
La Petite Moulin Rouge. That August was really busy for him.
He got married to his fiancee, Delphine Dafis, and he
did that in between the two jobs. But after only
two months in his new venue and his new marriage,
his father in law suddenly died. That meant that he
took on a lot of responsibility and to help the

(08:59):
family gets through the strain of this period, Auguste gave
up his little fledgling shop and can to take more
stable work in Paris. He became the general manager of
La Maison Chevet, but he worked there only eight months
before a new opportunity presented itself, and that was Chef
de cuisine at the new cafe restaurant du Casino, which was,

(09:20):
as the name suggests, part of a larger luxury casino property.
And Escaffaier had been hired simply to get the restaurant
up and running, and he did this job admirably. This
is something he did throughout his career after this, where
he would kind of come in and set up a
new restaurant and then he would go back to his
regular thing and the restaurant would continue on its own.
But he did this so well with the casino and

(09:42):
restaurant that when they had a press event to promote
this new luxury entertainment complex, all of the reporters there
were way more interested in Escaffier's food than any other
aspect of the business that they were trying to talk about.
After the casino, while working as the restaurant manager of
the Grand Hotel in Monte car Hello, Auguste Escoffier met
Swiss business in sesar Ritz was eighteen eighty four and

(10:06):
Ritz was already a successful hotelier, but he didn't quite
have the name recognition that he would have later. Ritz
wanted an expert in the food service end at the
hotel industry, and Escaffier really fit that bill. So when
Ritz began managing the Hotel Nacional in Lucerne, Switzerland, he
eventually hired a Scaffier on there. But their partnership in

(10:28):
business truly cemented when Ritz became the manager of London's
Savoy Hotel, and he brought a goost right along with him.
So in eighteen ninety Escaffier took charge of the kitchens
at the Savoy Hotel. Ritz was hired at the Savoy
to fix its problems. It had only been opened since
eighteen eighty nine, and while it was glamorous and beautiful,

(10:49):
it was managed really terribly and was facing bankruptcy. The
hotel offered an a la carte menu in the restaurant,
but the chef that had been in charge had really
only managed fixed price menus where all the courses were
part of one order. Handling the different supply and prep
needs of a kitchen that had more items in play
on the menu was a really different skill set and

(11:11):
it just had not gone well. Escaffier, though, was excellent
at this, and he walked into a mess, but he
straightened it all out. Yeah, he claimed that the day
that they got there, and he was like, I can't
imagine why anyone would do this, but I'm like, maybe
angry on the way out that all of the kitchen
equipment had been broken and all of the food stores

(11:31):
had been damaged in some way. Like basically, someone was
really angry on their way out the door. And so
he had to call around to chef friends and be like,
do you have stuff I can borrow today? And so
he got through that first day. He said he didn't
even have salt to begin with, but he got through
that first day with the help of the chef community,
and then the next day he kind of got all
of his contacts with suppliers and got everything right and

(11:53):
could move forward from there. And Escoffier instituted a number
of processes to get the hotel's restaurant running smoothly. So
often when high profile London clients would want to book
a dinner party, for example, they relied on the Metre
d'hotel to make decisions on the food because the French
menus were sometimes a little daunting for them, and a
scuffier began keeping copious records of what they served at

(12:16):
each meal like this, so that if the same person
booked another high end dinner party with them at a
later date, they could be sure that they would never
serve them the same meal twice and they would always
be getting different dishes. Everything about the restaurant was examined
and optimized to attract the best possible clientele. Even the
lighting was really carefully designed to be soft and glowing

(12:37):
so that their customers would look their absolute best while
they were eating their royalty heads of state, the wealthy,
and the famous all flocked there as Ritz and Escoffier
put their mark on the place. It was during his
early years at the Savoy, in eighteen ninety three that
Auguste Escaffier invented the dessert peach Melba in honor of

(12:57):
prior podcast subject Dame Nelly Melba, although it didn't appear
on a menu for a number of years. Yeah, we'll
talk about when it pops up. But he made it
basically specially for her one night, and then he always
remembered it and used it later. And it was also
early on in his Savoy days that Escafier made charity
a priority for his kitchen. So when he first started

(13:18):
working there, he was visited each morning by two nuns
from a group called Little Sisters of the Poor, asking
for things like coffee grounds or tea that could potentially
be brewed a second time, or for crusts of bread,
and these they would take back to what was essentially
a poor retirement house, and the chef was inspired by
them to incorporate giving into the kitchen's normal routine, So

(13:41):
first he always made sure that he had some good,
clean supplies to give to them. He would always make
sure the food was as high end as he could
possibly manage and always very clean. But he also instructed
his staff to save any cuts of meat that they
could during preparations for banquets and set it aside just
for the little sisters. For example, when they served a

(14:02):
dish like quail to a large group, they'd normally only
be serving the breast, and that meant the legs could
be given to the nuns, along with instructions on how
to prepare it for the people they were feeding. Since
the Savoy's banquets were off in really huge affairs, this
was a substantial amount of food to donate, but it
was also a substantial amount of food to otherwise be wasting. Yes,

(14:23):
he was not a fan of that kind of waste.
Now and people were hungry. Escaffie continued to do this
through his whole career. Yeah, he basically instructed his people
like any cut of meat that was edible but was
not considered like high end enough for some of their
fancy meals, he would be like, okay, you know where
to put it, And they just had a place in
the kitchen where they would always put those things. At
the end of every night, everything that was edible went

(14:45):
to the poor, and then they started each new day fresh.
A Scaffie also engaged in this wonderful little bit of
devious ingredient renaming while he was at the Savoy. So
he had prepared frog legs many times as a chef
in France, but he also knew that the English thought
this whole idea was gross, and that they often mocked

(15:06):
the French for eating frog. And he was adamant that
frog meat was a very fresh and light tasting option
and it was easy to digest. So during a large
banquet again remember that often these people would just order
a banquet and let them select the menu, one of
the dishes that he served was called nymph a lur
or Nymphs at Dawn, and the nymphs were in fact frog,

(15:29):
and his English guests ate them up in a chauffroi
sauce with paprika, declaring the dish absolutely delicious. This sounds
appalling to you, I encourage you. If you see things
on your menu that you don't recognize, ask yes. It
makes me laugh so hard. And there were cases where

(15:51):
he particularly I think it was the Prince of Wales
at the time who was well traveled in New French food,
recognized what it was and what was going on, and
it was like their little shared seecret, like we're kind
of pulling one over on these people. While the Savoy
years of a Scaffier's career were overall really happy and
they made him very well known, he didn't finish the
nineteenth century there and we will talk about his next

(16:13):
career shift. After another quick sponsor break in eighteen ninety seven,
things started to unravel at the Savoy for Ritz and Escafaier.
So throughout their time with the hotel, both men had
worked side jobs opening new hotels and restaurants, and per

(16:36):
Escaffier's memoir, a misunderstanding over the nature of these side
businesses led to him and his partner Ritz being fired.
In recent years, journalist Paul Levy has made the case
based on documents which he's come into the possession of
that in fact, the two men were taking kickbacks from
suppliers and stealing from the hotel's supplies to an exorbitant degree.

(16:58):
Part of this was because Ritz was also working on
some other projects and he would have potential business partners
from those projects come to the Savoy and they would
feed them sumptuous, very very expensive meals without charging of
course for them, and so that was kind of considered
part of this theft. Because Ritz was also signing agreements

(17:18):
that made him in charge of like large development projects,
some that would bear his name eventually, So this is
part of the problem. Descendants of a Scoffaia have challenged
these claims, but we wanted to make sure we mentioned
it at least, and regardless of the reason for their sacking,
Escaffier and Ritz moved into a new venue, the Ritz
Hotel in Paris, named for Seesar Ritz, which opened on

(17:40):
June fifth of eighteen ninety eight. This is all the
same kind of stuff that if you work for a
big company today, when you have to take your business
ethics and compliance training, it is absolutely similar all that
kind of stuff. Yeah. Once the Paris Ritz was up
and running, Escoffier and Ritz both returned to London in
eighteen ninety nine to work at the brand new Carlton Hotel.

(18:02):
While Escoffier's career before this involved constant shifting around, either
seasonally or just to take better jobs, he stayed at
the Carlton for over twenty years and on the menu
for the opening of the new hotels. The restaurant was
peach Melba, appearing on a menu for the first time
and for the record, a lot of the clientele from
the Savoy chose to follow Ritz and Escafie over to

(18:24):
the Carlton. In nineteen oh three, Escafier wrote what is
probably his most famous book, Laguide Kulnaire, which he co
wrote with Phileas Julbert and Emil Feitout. And this book,
which is still in print by the way, became the
bible of French cooking, but really cooking in general in
terms of restaurant cooking, and it features recipes for all

(18:45):
possible courses. It's laid out in the narrative form that
shows dishes in the order that they should be prepared
and served. And Auguste saw the need for such a
book because he saw that the restaurant industry was growing
and that it was increasingly important for chefs to be
able to manage kitchens that served huge numbers of guests,
and there was not at this point formal training for it.

(19:07):
He saw this writing as quote a work tool more
than a book. He was adamant that even though it
had more than five thousand recipes, it was incomplete. He
knew that the industry would always be evolving and progressing,
and that any new edition of the book would need
to be updated to reflect all those changes. He also
thought the basics would remain constant, and he thought he

(19:28):
could write what would be, in essence, a foundation document
that chefs could use for years and years to come.
And he was one hundred percent correct, because most chefs
that run restaurants today have a copy of this book somewhere.
When the fiftieth anniversary of Escoffier's professional career loomed in
nineteen oh nine, his colleagues took up a collection with
the intent that they would use the money to buy

(19:50):
him a piece of art with it. But when Agusta
Scoffier was told how much money had come in and
that they were planning to do this it was about
six thousand francs, he asked that it instead be donated
to a retirement home that took care of elderly chefs
who had little or no money, and on the night
of the celebration of his career, he was gifted with
a silver cup from the hotel rather than a lavish

(20:11):
piece of art. In nineteen ten, Escoffier published a pamphlet
on suppressing poverty. He felt that if every person followed
the adage to love your neighbor as yourself, like really
truly followed it, that poverty would be erased. He advocated
for a universal old age pension system, particularly citing the

(20:32):
people who had worked their whole lives and jobs that
just hadn't allowed them to put money aside for retirement. Yeah,
because he had worked in the service industry his entire life,
he had been very keenly aware that the people that
were kind of at the lowest levels in any organization
and were getting paid the least, were often working the hardest,
and he thought their work was just as honorable as
anyone else's, and that they should not have to rely

(20:53):
on charity in their elder years to get by, and
that there should be some sort of system put in
place to make sure that all people had an equal
shot at a lovely retirement. Starting in nineteen eleven, A
Scaffier started publishing a magazine which came out monthly called
Le Coue de Piqueure That's a Gourmet's Notebook, and he
published that magazine for three years and his hopes that

(21:16):
it would spread knowledge of French cooking to other countries
and in turn would help French tourism. But when World
War One began, the magazine would put aside. Also in
nineteen eleven, a fire started in one of the elevators
at the Carlton Hotel that did an estimated two million
francs worth of damage. There weren't any fatalities, but all
of the rooms were damaged. A Scaffaer rallied the staff

(21:38):
and the restaurant was immediately open and serving meals. Uh yeah.
The rooms that they could rent out to guests could
not be filled for a while while they fixed things up,
but the restaurant at least could continue to bring in
a little bit of money. In nineteen twelve, A Scaffier
participated in what I think is a fabulously interesting dinner
with his friends from a club that he had formed

(21:59):
called La Ligue de Germande, and A Scafier created a
menu that was served simultaneously to club members in restaurants
throughout Europe. So each kitchen prepared all of the dishes
as outlined by the famous cook, and then, according to
Escaffier's memoirs, throughout the continent. At the same time, four
thousand people were eating the same meal, and during this event,

(22:23):
called the Dnee Depiqueux, Escafier received telegrams from friends and fellows,
some of whom were very famous, taking part in this
celebration and marveling at what a wonderful thing it was.
While his magazine was underway, Escaffier also published a book
titled Le Livre de minute or The Book of Menus,
in nineteen twelve. And as we said, once the war

(22:44):
began in nineteen fourteen, things changed. His magazine ceased publication,
but Escafier also faced rationing and shortage issues, not unlike
when he had been a cook in the military, but
this time it was his job not to feed soldiers,
but to keep a luxury restaurant running today spite those shortages,
and to that end he once again got very creative
with menus. So he increased the use of venison, eggs

(23:07):
and bacon, among other non ration food ingredients. And he
made contact directly with fishermen so that he could get
fresh seafood without having to go through the rationed markets.
And he substituted cocoa butter for dairy butter which was
not available at the time. He kind of threw this
really started getting a sense of what we would call
today farm to table, where he was like, oh, yes,

(23:29):
fresh directly from the supplier is the best way to go.
And he had always been excellent at improvising when faced
with problems of supply, and it really served him well
during these lean times because he created some very, very
beloved dishes. He also kept on with his philanthropic work
during the war. He created a support committee to help
raise the funds for the families of staff that had

(23:50):
been sent to the front to fight, and he distributed
the funds that were raised on a weekly basis. He
also hired more staff than he really needed to try
to keep families afloat, and he worked to make sure
that when men returned from fighting they could once again
find a position at the Carlton. On November eleventh, nineteen eighteen,
when the armistice was announced, the hotel's restaurant was almost

(24:11):
immediately booked to capacity, with reservations for people who were
eager to celebrate the end of the war. And so,
with seven hundred and twelve seats booked for the night
and food restrictions still in place that limited his options.
Escafaier got very, very creative, indeed, so for the main
dish that night, he combined all of the various meats
he had on hand in a mincer because he didn't

(24:32):
have a whole lot of any one meat, and then
he mixed that result with a patie and bread and
that had been soaked in cream so it was soft,
and he made what he called little mignonettes, so they
were almost like a French meatball. On the one year
anniversary of the Armistice, Escafaie was awarded the Legion of
Honor and he became an officer of the Order in
nineteen twenty eight. Yeah He described a becoming part of

(24:55):
the Legion of Honor as one of the greatest honors
of his life and Augusta Scoffier, after the war, was
tired and he retired from running kitchens in nineteen twenty one.
He has this unique distinction of having never worked for
a private household in his career as a cook or chef.
But even after he and his wife, Delphine moved to
Monte Carlo for their retirement, he continued to write books

(25:17):
about cooking and running a kitchen. Professionally, and in his
writing he codified a lot of the innovations that he
had implemented during his long career. He wrote about the
importance of sanitation and kitchen safety, and his brigade the
cuisine system of kitchen management, which is organized military style,
with the Chef de cuisine, which is the chief of
the kitchen, as the leader, and all the other positions

(25:39):
ranked below that one. He also wrote about something that
we mentioned earlier in his first book, of serving meals
one course at a time, because prior to that the
standard practice had been everything hitting the table at once,
and then people just knew to eat them in order.
And he also outlined his method of canning vegetables, which
was new that was something he had pioneered in response

(26:01):
to rationing during his time in the military. And he
also was entirely ahead of his time when it came
to healthful cooking. I mentioned already that he thought about
nutrition in a much broader way than most people did,
and as you may recall from our Marie Antoine carrem episode,
France had shifted to less decadent cooking trends over time

(26:22):
after the French Revolution, and Escafier took that idea even
farther by extolling the virtues of the freshest possible ingredients
obtained directly from farms and fishermen. He felt and wrote
that everyone should have access to good, healthy food and
what he called a courteous style of living, meaning meals
shared among friends and loved ones using fine cooking traditions

(26:44):
and shared from one generation to the next. Yeah, he
thought like fine cooking should not be something that only
someone who ran a professional kitchen should know, but that
families should know it and share it with one another,
and that it should just be part of life. And
when you went to a restaurant, it was just so
you didn't have to do that, but you had the knowledge.
And of course Escoffier built on the four mother sauces

(27:06):
established by Marie Antoine cauerrem and the result ended up
being a little bit of a rework that landed at
five mother sauces, which remained standard in French cooking. So
those are Beschema, tomat veloute, Espanol and Hollandais. Thank you,
Monsieur Scoffier, because they have all given me great joy.
Augusta Scoffier died in Monte Carlo, Monaco and his home

(27:30):
on February twelfth, nineteen thirty five, just a few days
after his wife died. He was eighty nine. His remains
were buried in the town where he was born, in
his family's vault. Escoffier's memoirs were published well after his death.
When he died, his son Paul had assembled all of
the notes and documents that he had gone and collected

(27:51):
from the Monte Carlo house as well as Escoffie's apartment
that he kept in Paris, and those notes included a
memoir that the chef had written, and those works were
finally published by A Scoffier's grandson in nineteen eighty five
in French, and those were expanded and translated beginning in
nineteen ninety six to mark Augusta Scoffier's one hundred and
fiftieth birthday. Today, the Augusta Scoffier Foundation runs the Escaffie

(28:15):
Museum of Culinary Arts at his birthplace. The Escoffier School
of Culinary Arts offers training at several campuses and online
courses as well, and Michel Escoffier, who is the great
grandson of the Chef of Kings sits on the advisory
board for the school, and in Escoffier's memoir, which is
a great read and really easy to read because it's

(28:38):
the chapters are short, but it's also very fun because
you really do get a sense that he could not
stop talking about how to make food, because he'll be
in the middle of telling a story and then be like,
let me give you the recipe, and it will just
drop in, like in the middle of sort of a
paragraph of a narrative. But there was a passage in
that memoir that struck me that he wrote about when

(28:59):
he first entered the cooking profession as a teenage apprentice
and how he began to look at cooking, and it
really nicely encapsulates his ideology about the importance of this career.
He wrote quote, at the time, high society held little
esteem for the profession of cook This should never have
been the case, for cooking is a science and an art,

(29:22):
and one who puts all his heart into satisfying his
fellow man deserves recognition. Hey French food, yeah, which is
always a big favorite of mine. And I just love
his story. I love how he has impacted so many
meals that you know you and I and everyone who

(29:43):
has ever eaten in a restaurant has had as well
as just sort of bringing French cooking to a wider
audience in some ways. You know, we talk about in
the modern era Julia Child being a person that really
really disseminated information about French cooking to the masses, and
he was sort of her precursory that they have a
little overlap in their lifetimes, but they did not actually meet.

(30:04):
I don't think. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all

(30:28):
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(30:49):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.