The name of Marie-Antoine Careme (1784-1833) is mainly known in professional circles, although difficult to overestimate its role in creating today’s top gastronomy and in the fact that French cuisine has become the basis of the culinary art of the world in its current form.
When we say that his name is associated with the invention of such cakes as mille feuille and corqueembouche that are extremely popular to this day or he was the first to make Bechamel sauce then many gourmets realize that they know and grant him.
Careme got only 49 years of life to raise his gastronomy to a level never seen before, to gain world fame and to lay the foundations of fine dining in today’s sense. Of this undeservingly short 49 years of life, he spent 40 years in the kitchen as he began his career at the age of 10, as a kitchen assistantt at a tavern as a boy completely abandoned by his parents in the storms of the French Revolution.
At the age of 16, Carême was already on his next job, this time at the imposing patisserie near the Palais Royal, owned by Sylvain Bailly.
Unlike the taverns — where he began his career — that operated intermittently and served the working classes, the patisseries were visited by the very wealthy class. During this time Carême learned to read and write and showed an interenst in architecture. He spent days studying in the library and then returned to the patisserie to reproduce classic architectural forms from sugar. Bailly, seeing the potential market for these creations, sold them as jewels of lavish bankets of the upper classes.
Within two years, members of France’s ruling class noticed the work of the young apprentice and commissioned him to produce special occasional pieces.
From here, the road was already straight to the position of head chef at Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgold, the chief diplomat of Napoleon,where he gained considerable wealth and serious fame. He fundamentally changed the approach to eating, raising it to philosophical heights in his cookbooks.
King of cooks, cook of kings
He was the chef of the wedding of Napoleon and Mary Louis, then left France after the fall of the French emperor and he worked for King George IV of England and the Russian Tsar Alexander I and Emperor Franz Joseph I. It is no coincidence, that in addition to world fame, he earned the honorary title of King of Chefs, Chef of Kings.
Carême’s genius lay in his keen attention to detail, which he extended to all aspects of the meal, placing great emphasis on harmony, the order of processes, the balance of textures, the harmony of ingredients. As the host of the Congress of Vienna (1814 – 1815), he rearranged the gastronomic map not only of France but also of the whole of Europe.
Today, its name is mainly associated with the spectacular sugar, marzipan and cake sculptures called piéces montées, which he designed and built.
By the way, these are lavish finishes of fine dining to this day, but today’s chefs make it mostly from chocolate. Even though Carême’s true legacy comes from the systematization, rationalization and professionalisation of French gastronomy.
Carême – without exaggeration – was the first true maestro of haute cuisine: he was the first to distinguish rich, meat-filled, decorative, labor-intensive cuisine from regional French home cooking and was the first to catalog and organize all this knowledge for future generations. From the clutter of recipes and techniques, under the conditions of the time, he made four basic sauces, the so-called “mother sauces”, which are still the basis of hundreds of dishes to this day.
He divided his 482-page handbook Le pâtissier royal into two volumes containing sweet and savory recipes and also thematized them according to difficulty.
