He picked up some skills there and then worked in a patisserie called Bailly's and then eventually opened his own pastry shop. This is where he started to do some wicked things that Parisians had never seen before, like making the Egyptian pyramid with pastry, sugar and marzipan. He really loved modeling his pastries after great architectural structures and displaying them in the window of his shop. That is where he really started his niche with elaborate centerpieces called pieces montees. If the paparrazzi existed at the time, this is when they would have started stalking Careme. He became famous for those things and was essentially the first
celebrity chef. Wouldn't it be so great to step back in time and go see what he made? Of course, as I discovered how there is a lot more to an 8 tiered basic wedding cake than meets the eye, I am an avid admirer of any kind of sugar show stoppers and monstrous works of food art. I have got to see if there are drawing of his stuff. But I digress...
Careme was so fantastic with his skills that he turned the heads of aristocrats all over Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte hired a guy name Tallyrand to run an estate kitchen where Napoleon wanted to do some serious negotiations. Tallyrand brought Careme with him. I wonder if Tallyrand was anything like Gordon Ramsay, because he told Careme to come up with a menu that had not a single repetition (something different every day for a year) using only local seasonal ingredients. I love Gordon Ramsay and it sounds like a challenge he'd come up with in Hell's Kitchen, right?
This is where Careme excelled. First of all, he was up to the challenge. You gotta admire a guy that says "okay, let's do it" and does it well. He came up with a spectacular menu and in the process, he went above and beyond Tallyrand's orders by creating efficient systems to organize the professional kitchen, creating the professional look and feel with the chef uniform and the hat called the toque and he was especially skilled with flavors and organizing sauces under a grouping of four mother sauces. I think he even invented the roux technique. He wrote lots of detailed books and basically defined the concept of professional cooking vs. home cooking. If he changed an original recipe, he explained, in thorough detail, why he changed it. He was very thoughtful about studying complementary flavor profiles and sought to enhance flavors through unique uses of equipment and cooking techniques. Does this mean that cooks before him would have their meats swim in a bastardized mixture of sauces and spices that didn't even go well together? Now I'm curious about medieval cooking, but I ain't got time for that right now. Maybe later.
So, in general, Careme was creator and master of French haute cuisine, also called grande cuisine. Think "fancy schmancy" cuisine. Today, we might have thought he was pretty damn fussy. He made pretty centerpieces by garnishing the hell out of a turkey or pig with fancy skewers and fruits and vegetables in the shapes of flowers, birds, etc.; he also created platforms for these centerpieces made of intricately sliced and arranged produce, nuts, berries, etc. Food versions of our modern parade floats come to mind. It must have been so amazing to be sitting at one of his tables, watching the parade of chefs carrying huge centerpieces throughout the restaurant. Careme also created the "experience" of dining by bringing out items on the menu to the guests one by one, a practice called service a la russe. Whereas before, chefs would provide the meal via service a la francaise, which meant that if you were a customer, you'd get your appetizer, salad, soup, entree and dessert all at once. Careme's books are still studied by chef today.
Careme died pretty young, at age 48. It is thought that the charcoal cooking fumes probably did it. But he sure left a legacy of greatness.
So that's it for Lesson 2. My apologies for the lack of appropriate ticks and marks and apostrophe things that make up the appropriate french letters. But I think you'll be forgiving, right? :) I got most of this information from my textbooks: Oncooking, Professional Cooking and the great Wikipedia. But I went through the trouble of writing it in my own words as proof that I'm actually studying this stuff. And I hope it helps those of you who don't have textbooks cuz we're all about the kitchen love around here.I highly recommend you read the Wikipedia article on him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Antoine_Car%C3%AAme and any other online source you can find because I'm sure there is some detail I left out. Otherwise, I think we covered all the main points about how fabulous a chef Careme was in his time and how he has inspired foodie generations that followed to get professional about cooking.
If you are really curious about Careme, here is a book all about him. Looks like it would be a fun read and I'll probably order it now. :-P
Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef
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