Cooking for Kings : The Life of the First Celebrity Chef Antonin Careme

A unique feast of biography and Regency cookbook, Cooking for Kings takes us on a chef's tour of the royal pleasure-palaces of Britain and Europe in the ultimate age of culinary indulgence. Drawing on the patissier royal's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Careme's meteoric rise from orphan of the French Revolution to international celebrity, and provides a dramatic below-stairs perspective on one of the most momentous, and sensuous, periods of European history - First Empire Paris, Georgian England, and the Russia of War and Peace. Careme had an unfailing ability to cook for the right people at the right place at the right time. If, as his colleague Brillat-Savarin had it, 'we are what we eat', then he knew the great men of his era better than any. He knew the favourite dishes of George IV, the Rothschilds and the Romanovs; he knew Napoleon's fast food requirements, why Empress Josephine suffered halitosis and how to curry favour with the 'Prince of Whales'. At the same time his recipes - now the classics of French cuisine, created for the gourmet-kings and queens for whom he worked - can bring the very taste and smell of the early 19th century alive.