The First Celebrity Chef: Marie-Antoine Carême

Today, there is an entire industry around celebrity chefs. But the first celebrity chef in the western world's history was born in late 18th-century France.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Before we get started, we have a couple
of live shows to announce. First April, we will be
at Universal Fan Con in Baltimore, Maryland. Our exact schedule
for that show is still in the works, but this
will include a live show, and our listeners can get
discounted tickets using the offer code History. And for all

(00:20):
the folks who have asked us to do a show
in the Boston area, of which there have been many,
we are finally on the way with the show in
Quincy at Adams National Historical Park on Sunday, July eight
at two pm. That one is an outdoor show. It
will happen rain or shine. And we also have more
appearances that will be announcing soon, as well as more

(00:41):
details about both of these shows, and we will put
that all at our website also at miss in history
dot com. Welcome to steph you missed in history class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
a podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy,

(01:04):
you want to talk about food a little bit? I
love to talk about food. Uh, this isn't so much
about food as it is about the people that make food.
We will talk about some food along the way today.
No secret, there's a whole entire industry around celebrity chefs,
and often they'll start on TV, but then they tend
to branch out. So today there are so many chefs

(01:25):
with branded cookwer lines and food lines and endorsement deals,
and you know, their restaurants are well known throughout the
world and people go to see them and their faces
on the outside sometimes. Yeah, like being a celebrity chef
is a thing now, But the first celebrity chef, it
might surprise you to learn, was around long before uh

(01:45):
Farnsworth ever conceived of the television which launches most celebrity
chefs today. And to find said chef, we actually have
to take a peek all the way back at late
eighteenth century France and the life of Marie Antoine Kedem.
Eight century France is the source of so many trends.
It is, and I will confess it's one of the
areas of history that I love. So that's why you're

(02:08):
getting it today. Well, and it's it's incredibly incredibly possible
that there were also famous chefs in other parts of
the world, but this was the one that like to
get to a whole other level. Yeah, certainly in the
Western world. This is definitely the first celebrity chef. So
we are talking about Marie Antoine Korem, who was born
in a slum in Paris on June. His family was

(02:33):
massive and it was also destitute. He was the sixteenth
child in the family and was named after Marie Antoinette.
This is a little bit of a weird choice for
a baby name at this point. Marie Antoinette was not
beloved by this time, but the reasoning for why his
parents decided to name him after her is not clear.

(02:53):
What is clear as that soon after he was born
he was being called by antonin instead of Marie Antoine,
and then throughout his life he would shift among various
uh combinations of his name. Yeah. One point, like there
are instances where he's referred to as Mark Antoine even um,

(03:14):
the name Antoine gets moved around a little bit. And
because he was born to a very poor family at
a time when France was deeply unstable, it wasn't long
before Antonine was abandoned and it's unclear exactly why, but
this is Krems account of his abandonment, as dictated to
his Secretary Frederic Fayo quote, his father, with fifteen children,

(03:36):
was a prey to a very painful poverty. This man
was frequently intoxicated, perhaps out of disgust with life, and
his irregularities of conduct increased the misery and sorrows of
those whom he had to feed. One day, when he
returned before dinner, he took his young son with him.
They went to the fields. After the walk, they returned
to dinner at the main barrier, that's the gates of France.

(04:00):
When the meal was over, the father spoke of the
future to the poor child and urged him to part
with his family. Quote, go child, go well in the world.
There are good trades. Let us languish. Misery is our lot.
We must die there. This time is that of beautiful fortunes.
It is enough to have wit to make one, and
you have it. Go, little one, and perhaps this evening

(04:23):
or tomorrow some good house will open for you. Go
with what God has given you. These words, which are
almost remarkable in the mouth of this simple workman, always
resounded in the ears of Kadam. Forty years after having
heard them, he still had before his eyes the bitter
face of his father the young Karim was left in
the street. Literally, he did not see his parents again.

(04:46):
His father and his mother died young, his brothers and
sisters were scattered. Uh. Is almost like he is leaving
a dog in the woods and claiming that he has
set it free. Very much so. Uh. And at this
time there was a lot of street violence in Paris

(05:06):
and children were not immune to it. So this seems
just bizarrely optimistic in this idea that he's just going
to go and immediately find a good place. He Yeah,
and we'll talk about this story and just a second, uh,
because according to Kadam, he was offered a bit of
good fortune when he was taken in almost immediately by
a cook who let him do menial tasks around the

(05:28):
kitchen and home in exchange for room and board. And
we honestly don't know if this or that story about
his father is entirely true. These are Krems stories of
his own life, and each of them became part of
his mystique and was told by him and then his
students and his clients for years and years. He did

(05:49):
have a kitchen apprenticeship as as a boy that started
sometime in sevente and At this point, France was having
sort of an identity crisis in terms of its cuisine,
which was running parallel with the French Revolution. So the
sentiment towards the Royals became increasingly negative, and there was
this impulse in a lot of professional kitchen kitchens to

(06:11):
really get away from the rich, indulgent food that was
associated with the royalty into a lot simpler, fair, but
simultaneously fine food was a big part of French identity,
and there were other cooks who were not willing to
give that up, nor were they willing to give up
the delicious food that they personally left eat just because

(06:32):
they were fed up with royalty. Yeah, and you have
to trace some of this back to Louis the fourteenth,
who had made kind of a conscious decision that what
France was going to be known for was luxury and
the finest of everything. So this is something that had
been ingrained already and had been established and then to go, no, no,
we hate the Royals now and we don't want to

(06:53):
include luxury in our cooking in this way. Uh was
a big sea change to try to enact, and of
course it was a little bit controversial, and I want
to put food culture of this period in a little
bit more context. So cafes at this time literally meaning
like where you would go to get drinks, had been

(07:13):
common in Paris throughout the eighteenth century, but it wasn't
until the late seventeen hundreds that restaurants in the sense
that we think of them now popped up. So starting
in the seventeen sixties there were places to gets de hong.
Those were soups h The word restaurant came from the
route cristaua, which means to restore, and these soups were

(07:34):
believed to be almost medicinal in nature, intended to restore
the body's vigor. And from there that concept evolved so
that the soup served began to be seen less as
a curative and more as a food and something to
just be enjoyed. And so too did the word restaurant
evolve to become the place and not just the soups,
and then of course to include other menu offerings. As

(07:58):
a devotee of soups, I am behind this. Well, you
would have loved Careen because he was obsessed with soups,
and his soup recipes are the stuff of legend. So
in the context of the politics of the day, the
so called restaurants soups were considered health food of a sort,

(08:19):
they were associated with the common man, and then cuisine
par x and lance, which were the decadent, the decadent
dishes that wealthy people favored that was considered to be
unwholesome and intended to encourage gluttony. So there was this
whole morality element in play and denouncing the rich foods
that the aristocracy favored. I think this still exists today, yeah,

(08:43):
for sure. Uh. And in seventeen eighty two, just before
Krem was born, the book Histoire de la vie prive
de France, which was a history of French private life,
was published by Pierre Jean Baptiste Le Grand doc and
it was not about general life, as the title might suggest,
but about food, although it was originally intended to have

(09:04):
a broader scope, but apparently he became so obsessed with
the food portion of his writing and research that that
took up the whole volume. But what this really indicated
was that despite this contest of ideas that was going
on as to what direction French cooking should go, there
was clearly a sense of French cuisine as being worthy
of examination and of historical documentation. Ideas like new velle

(09:28):
cuisine literally new cooking, and the idea that cooks should
be inventing new recipes to please people's palates had been
around since at least the seventeen thirties, as France was
trying to seek an identity in the kitchen and at
the table, and the concept of cooking as an art
was also beginning to take take shape but wasn't yet
fully formed. Uh yeah, I was reading an interesting piece

(09:52):
that mentioned that it was interesting that cooking emerged as
an art, but other trades that required equal levels of
skill in consideration didn't ever quite get to that level.
But as France moved into the nineteenth century, many of
the cooks who had worked in the homes of of
the upper class suddenly found themselves without work as the
aristocracy fled in the wake of the French Revolution, and

(10:15):
those cooks often set themselves up as chefs in their
own restaurants in order to make a living. A word
on the words cook versus chef at the time, so
today the words chef implies a certain level of formal training,
and a lot of times it indicates a management position
within the kitchen, and there are subdivisions below an executive

(10:38):
chef in a modern kitchen, and they follow this established
hierarchical system known as the brigade the cuisine. But the
word chef, which literally means head or chief, wasn't codified
as a cooking related term in the eighteenth century. It
actually wasn't used in the chef de cuisine since until

(10:59):
eighteen twenty six, according to Miriam Webster. So when we
dip back and forth between chef and cook, and speaking
of these people who worked as servants in the homes
of the wealthy and then set up their own shops,
we're really using it more in the chief sense rather
than in the formal training of food prep sense. And
most people learned the trade of preparing meals informally through

(11:20):
an apprenticeship. At this point, there was not uh an
instance where there were certifications or established training programs for chefs,
if people are curious. The Oxford English Dictionary agrees with
Miriam Webster on this. So we're about to jump back
into Karam's place and all this culinary upheaval, but we're
gonna pause quickly for a little sponsor break before we

(11:41):
do so. In the midst of all of this food
culture and shifting that we were talking about was young Karim,
who worked in the tavern where he was taken in
initially for several years and then moved to a restaurant
in seven in ten and after two years there, he

(12:02):
then moved when he was hired in the patisserie run
by Savambaiyee, where he spent several years learning baking and confectionery.
And this was actually the first thing he truly was
taught to do in the kitchen. Those previous positions had
been more about cleaning up and helping out than actual
food prep, and he wouldn't learn to cook a full
meal until later with his employer's permission. He also started

(12:25):
educating himself because he hadn't received any formal education as
a child. I Am taught himself to read and write
over the years from the ages of thirteen to eighteen,
and as his reading comprehension got better, he also just
started reading voraciously. He studied books on travel and then
books about architecture. He also started sketching buildings, and he

(12:47):
used these sketches to create center pieces made with a
sugar and gelatine modeling past called pastiage. He eventually started
studying science to gain an understanding of how all the
different ingredients combined. Yeah, he was passionate about education his
whole life, and there are many instances where if you're
reading any biography of him, it will mention how almost

(13:10):
his entire life he was constantly running to a library
because he just wanted to learn more. And the work
that he was doing it by patisserie, which was one
of the best known and most highly regarded in the city,
was largely focused on catering, so Baye and his staff
would prep and deliver baked goods and sweets to large
parties and banquets known as extraordinaires or just extras, hosted

(13:33):
by high society patrons. These massive architectural pastiage centerpieces, where
I mean they were big. A lot of times they
were more than a meter wide and sometimes even taller.
They gained the attention of heads of state and the aristocracy.
Everything from crumbling Greek ruins to pastoral scenes to the
Great Pyramids could be found in car M's repertoire of

(13:55):
sugar sculptures. When one of his works of art was
made for a ball or a date dinner. A lot
of times it was placed at the head table. Yeah,
BAYI was you know, he had a whole staff. But
usually if Karem made something for for any feast that
went in front of the most important people. And Karem
made his way up to the position of first piemaker

(14:17):
at Bai's patissori, which was basically as far as he
could go there, and he attributed his achievements during this
time those masterful centerpieces, his mastery of baking, and his
education to a dogged work ethic, later writing quote, I
succeeded in my plans, but how many nights I stayed
up in order to do so. Having gotten to the
highest position that he could while working for somebody else,

(14:40):
Karem transitioned into a new place. He started working in
the patissary of the chef Gendrone, and he continued to
operate it underneath under that man's name, but Karrem was
actually the one running things. This move was made with
the assurance that he would still be available available to
work with Baii on some catering events, and he was
once again burning the midnight oil and beyond as he

(15:03):
ran his own kitchen, although it was under a different
name and used his name essentially as an artist for hire. Yeah,
so it's kind of that thing where someone um either
purchases or gets hired into an established place that has
an established, recognized name, and it keeps going under their
their leadership, but it still uses the original name. That

(15:25):
was the situation with Gendron and Karem was right in
the thick of the restaurant boom that was happening in
Paris in the early eight hundreds, and this really really
excited him. He saw opportunity before him, and soon he
actually left Gendron's patisserie to work in catering full time.
He didn't want to be bound by baking exclusively, but

(15:45):
instead he wanted to learn about preparing all types of food,
and he used his pastry knowledge to open the door
to learning more. At massive events that were thrown by
the Napoleonic nobility, it was really common for multiple chefs
to be in employed for the evening to oversee various
parts of the meal, and so while managing the pastries,

(16:06):
Karem learned cooking from some of the finest culinary talents
of Paris. While he worked alongside them, Karem soon became
the favorite of Charles Maurice de te Pery Gore, who
was Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, and Karem
would often work for Telera for multi day engagements where
lavish spreads were needed, and during this period of near

(16:27):
constant banquet bookings for France's heads of state, Karrem opened
his own patissary in his own name, although it seems
that this was really more of a kitchen and staging
area for food prep for these events than a functioning
pastry shop that was open to the public. Through his
connection to Telem, came began creating dishes for the French nobility.

(16:48):
When Napoleon Bonaparte married his second wife, Marie Louise of Austria,
it was Karem who baked their wedding cake. Ever, the
workaholic Marie Antoine Careme, so how main time, made time
to write a book when he wasn't feeding government officials
and their guests, titled Histoire de Romen or History of
the Roman Table. No known copies of that text exist,

(17:12):
but it is believed to have been a comparison between
French and Roman food, with France's fair being determined to
be far superior. Karem was as his eye for creating
amazing masterpieces made clear a visual thinker, and he championed
the idea that a dish should look beautiful in addition
to tasting good. So when you see people talking about

(17:32):
the importance of presentation and plating a dish perfectly, this
really comes from Karrem's ideology. He wrote about the importance
of order at the table and his books on cooking,
and he thought that it enhanced the meal. Dovetailing on
that idea, he also thought that chefs should look tidy
and appealing, and the uniform that he adopted really set
the standard that's still in place today. Yeah, that idea

(17:57):
of the double breasted, white, very crisp tunic that is
still very very common was part of his his concept.
And when politics shifted once again in France and the
Pollan's reign ended, it marked a significant change for Kutam,
as he had risen to a position of really high

(18:17):
favor within the Napoleonic government and he benefited from the
big budgets that their events afforded. That change in government,
of course, made for a change in his life. He
had massive prestige at this point, though he didn't need
to worry about jobs his His legend had spread far
beyond France, but he didn't want to stay in France,
even though it was his home. He was definitely aware

(18:40):
of his cache and his fame as it grew. He
was not afraid to talk himself up or to accept praise,
so he traveled safe in the knowledge that his reputation
would carry him through. At the beginning of the Bourbon Restoration,
which spanned the years eighteen fourteen eighteen thirty, he was
welcomed into the houses of Russia, Austria and England, and

(19:00):
and he did very well for himself during this time.
His skills in the kitchen were of such renown that
he could turn down jobs if he wasn't interested in them,
because he always had more wealthy patrons looking to book
his services. In eighteen fifteen he wrote two books. The first,
Lpaticier Petresque or Picturesque Pastry, offered basic instructions and designs

(19:24):
for the types of sugar center pieces that had made
him famous throughout France and beyond. The second book was
titled Lupatzier Royal Parisien, which is Royal Parisian Pastry, and
that was much more of a conventional cookbook filled with
pastry recipes. In eighteen sixteen, after spending time abroad and
being asked by royal houses and heads of state to

(19:44):
become their permanent chef, Karam finally accepted one of these offers.
He was employed by George the Fourth of Great Britain
while he was still the Prince Regent. One of the
most impressive meals during that time was a banquet that
was prepared to honor Nicholas, Grand Duke of Ussia when
he visited George the Fourth on January eighth, eighteen seventeen.

(20:06):
For that event, they created a hundred and twenty dishes.
There were eight different roasts, dozens of entrees, and eight
partissari centerpieces, including a pastry recreation of the Royal pavilion
at Brighton where the feasts took place. But despite his
triumphs in Great Britain, that job only lasted eight months

(20:26):
before Kudam decided that he just could not stand the
English weather. He found it too dreary, and after bouncing
around for a while throughout Europe and parts of Russia,
Kudam ended up back in Paris. We'll talk in a
moment about the next high profile job that Kim took,
but we're gonna pause again for a quick sponsor break.

(20:52):
In nineteen eighteen, Kudam took another permanent and we have
to use the air quotes their position, because he did
seem to be a little bit of a traveler in
his heart. Uh. This time it was in St. Petersburg
to work for Czar Alexander the First, managing his kitchen staff.
Once again, this did not last long, and after that
he worked for a string of people, including the English
inbassador to Vienna, Lord Stewart, and cadem actually had a

(21:15):
bit of a tricky time connecting with Lord Stewart after
the cook had left St. Petersburg, but he did eventually
catch up with the Ambassador on his travels, and then
they traveled together to London for George the Fourth Coronation,
but they didn't actually make it there in time, and
then they went their separate ways. Stewart headed back to
Vienna and his job, and Kedem once again returned to Paris.

(21:37):
In the early eighteen twenties, he published another book, this
one titled Machel d'hotel Francais or the French Major Hotel.
This book featured an essay discussing the merits of old
versus new cuisine, and a variety of menus based on
the calendar. Yeah, it's basically like, if you're going to
manage uh meals for fine people here, or some sample

(22:00):
menus you could use no matter whether you are in
the finest houses of Vienna or London or St. Petersburg.
He basically kind of used all of that knowledge he
had gleaned working in all of these very high profile
places and put together sample menus for someone to follow.
I had an instant where I was about to ask you,
is this like a seasonal food thing? And then I

(22:21):
was like, of course it was, because this wasn't an
era before so much modern technology where you can have
seasonal foods year round a lot of time. Well, and
that was actually something you know, they were obviously there
were ways to preserve and pickle things. But like one
of the things that made teleron allegedly like really just

(22:41):
adore him is that teleron Um challenged him at one
point back during the reign of Napoleon to create seasonal
menus basically never repeating addish and always using the freshest
fruits and vegetables and apparently did just a super bang
up job of this, and so everyone was like, Wow,
he's amazing. He doesn't even need preserves, Like, uh, he

(23:05):
was really really good at doing seasonal um cooking. He did, however,
continue to have weird luck with jobs that didn't quite
pan out until he began working for financier baron James
dar Rothschild in eighteen twenty four, and he actually worked
for a Rothschild longer than he had in any other position,
for five years up until eighteen nine. While he was

(23:26):
working for Rothschild, he wrote his first true cookbook, called
The Cuisine Yer Palisan or The Parisian cook The That
book was published in eighteen twenty eight, and he almost
immediately started working on a second version of it. He
also reopened his particilary after he finished his work with
James D. Rothschild. Yeah, we he had made that book

(23:48):
of pastry recipes, but this was really like a comprehensive
cookbook that included many courses throughout a meal um. And
Kadam was actually busy expanding this book because he really
loved it. When he died on January twelve of eighteen
thirty three, he died quite young. He was only forty
eight at the time, and it turned out that all
of those years of looking after food that was cooking

(24:09):
over a coal fire had really damaged his lungs. Volumes
one and two of that new expanded cookbook that he
had been working on when he passed, La de la
cuisine Fan says Oh, which is the Art of French
Cooking in the nineteenth Century, came out later in the
year of his death eighteen thirty three. The third volume
of this came out in eighteen thirty five, and one

(24:31):
of his students finished the last two volumes and published
them in the eighteen forties. His cookbooks are among the
first that really show, with step by step sketches and
a lot of cases, how to create what became French
eat cuisine. And but in his mind these foods were
really for the home. His career, which went from working

(24:51):
for a business to working as a freelancer at banquets
to working in private the wealthy homes, really traces his
evolution of the idea that beautiful, delicious food should be
accessible and part of home life. And for clarity, this
does not mean that he thought fine food should be
simple He was infamous for concocting really complicated recipes that

(25:13):
could take days and days to prepare. One of the
things I stumbled across while I was prepping this was
a blog by someone who is uh pretty versed in
French cooking and has done a lot of these And
and they made one of his famous soups and it
took them five days because there are so many steps, uh,
and it has a very complicated even the way it

(25:35):
had to be arranged in a shallow soup bowl was
laid out very clearly, because again he was obsessed with presentation,
but he really still thought that that information, those recipes
should become a part of the every day crimes legacy
is global and ongoing. It reaches far beyond French food.

(25:56):
Just like his concepts of presentation and fine cooking at
home persist. Even his concrete ideas shape a lot of
the dishes we still eat today. For example, he believed
in what he called the four mother sauces or grand
sauces that formed the basis of all good cooking. And
these sauces were valute, which is made with a simple

(26:18):
rue and a stock. So rue, if you do not know,
is butter and flour quickly, uh, combined in a pan,
and then it can be treated different ways. Espanol, which
is a brown sauce which is made with a dark
brown rue. Once you combine those things, you let it darken,
and then you add beef or veal stock and sewing
bones in some cases, a lamande which is a pale

(26:38):
valute with egg yolks, lemon juice and heavy cream added
to it. And what I believe to be the best
one bechamel, which is a white rue made with milk
or cream, which can also have cheese added for variation. Uh.
These sauces you can still find made all time well,
and it's a it's a common enough idea that like, like,
I could not name the four mother sauces off the

(27:01):
top of my head, even having heard you just say
all four of them. But the idea that there are
four mother sauces and French cooking is something that I
am aware of, and I am not a French cook
by any stretch. When it has actually changed a little
bit right. That list was later amended by um Augusta Scoffier,
who followed in Cudam's footsteps. He's going to be an

(27:21):
episode all his own soon uh, and then there were
five mother sauces, so that shifted and alamand shifted to
something else. But Cutams basics endure and they're still using
restaurants throughout the world today. So all this codification, innovation,
and style, combined with a really healthy dose of self awareness,
made Marie Antoine Karam the Western world's first celebrity chef.

(27:45):
He even included a sketch of himself in his books,
way before the concept of an author photo was a
thing to ensure that people could recognize him on the street,
and that is how he became the so called King
of Chef. I love that he did that. I love
why he did that. Yeah, I want people to be

(28:08):
able to praise me in person if they so desire.
Do you have some listener mail for us? I do
This listener mail is a little weird in terms of timeline,
but it makes sense with today's episode. It is from
our listener Ashley, and she writes, Hello, I know we're
almost into April at this point, we're deep into April,
but she wrote this in March. I know we're almost

(28:29):
into April, but I've been getting caught up on episodes
and just listen to the historical roots of holiday treats,
and I thought I would share my sister's tradition of
making intricate gingerbread houses every year. Her family started a
few years back making a replica of their house and
it has grown ever since. This year they did Hogwarts,
and I think it was I thought it was something
all might enjoy. Thank you for the excellent episode. I

(28:51):
am also a huge fan of food stuff, so anytime
food and history cross is a huge bonus. Holy Moses.
She sent us pictures of this and edible gingerbread house,
and I am blown away one because this is some
of the most It could just be artfully decorated, but
it is some of the most delicate looking gingerbread. Like

(29:12):
I don't know how much gingerbread anyone is made, but
when you start to get thin to get details into it,
it's very easy for it to break. And this all
looks perfect and sharp edged and it's amazing. So thank
you so much, Ashley, because this is beautiful and it
ties in beautifully with the idea of Kudam's amazing centerpieces.
I think he would be pretty impressed by this full

(29:34):
Hogwarts model made of gingerbread. I don't know how you
even make peace with yourself breaking that apart to eat
it when the holidays are over, because it is really
a work of art. So thank you, thank you, thank you,
And if you would like to write to us, you
can do so at History Podcast at house stuffworks dot com.
You can also visit us at missed in history dot
com and missed in History is also our handle across

(29:54):
all of social media. You come to our website, you
will find an archive of every episode of the show
that has every existed, as well as show notes for
any of the ones that Tracy and I have worked
on together. So please come and visit us at missed
in history dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com. M