Carême - "we can never know"

"The challenge with having an overall good show ... is that viewers like me will want more, of many things." Recap Lab

Those words "We can never know", were constantly inserted into the biography The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes of Samuel Jean de Pozzi - a French surgeon and gynaecologist at the turn of the 19th/20th century. La Bell Epoque. Although a lot of facts were known about this man, and the other characters who appeared in the tale, Barnes constantly stressed that really you could never know what the man was like, and what really happened.

So the quote at the top of the page struck a chord with me with reference to the Apple TV+ French series - Carême, which we are currently enjoying - well me more than David I think. It's simultaneously rather obviously untrue in so many aspects of the story, but tantalising based on true and almost true events and characters. The central character of course is gorgeous and as one critic said comports himself like a rock star rather than an 18th century chef. As Emma Jones of the BBC says

"He wears an earring, his clothes seem to owe more to the 1980s New Romantic movement than 19th-Century costume."

And yet the clothes sort of fit the times. The earring and the hair too. True and yet not true.

The words: "viewers like me will want more, of many things" from my opening quote is particularly apposite, and sort of why I am writing this post. Because this is not a TV review - and besides you probably don't have Apple TV+ - but because of the show and because I write a food blog, I wanted to find out more about Carême, whose name I obviously knew but about whom I knew very little. Other than that he is one of the really big names in culinary history.

So I checked it all out and will begin by saying that all that stuff about he and others in the series spying and so on is made up. Although - as Julian Barnes says 'we can never know" because he certainly worked for Talleyrand - an extremely dextrous politician of the times - and he also had access to the major players on the world scene of the time. Unlikely that he did more than provide show-stopping food at important diplomatic meetings, which may have influenced people, but well - you never know.

What do we know? Not a lot it seems. Well not a lot beyond his cooking career. He was described as a bit of a lothario somewhere in contemporary writing of the time and, of course, the makers of a TV show are going to jump on that. He married a lady called Henriette - like his lover on TV, but they had no children. He also had a daughter by a lady called Agathe - and so we have a black and beautiful sous-chef on TV. called Agathe. No love affair as yet, but it's looming.

We know a tiny bit more about his beginnings. He was the sixteenth - yes sixteenth - child of a very poor family - father was a carpenter - who lived in the poorest slums of Paris. At the age of 10 he was either dumped on the streets by his father or taken to work in a poor café by his family and left there. Whichever it was, his early working life - from the age of 10 - was fortuitously for the development of haute cuisine - all about rising from kitchen boy to apprentice at Bailly - the premier patisserie on the Rue de la Paix. Here he really learnt his craft. His master - the TV promotes him to be sort of adopted father - not only taught him the craft of patisserie, but also encouraged him to visit the Royal Library, now the Bibliothèque Nationale, across the road. He was a voracious reader, and became entranced with architecture, and the imposing monuments of history, which led him to developing various architectural pastries and cakes because he was a great marketer and recognised the power of appearance:

"I want order and taste. A well displayed meal is enhanced one hundred per cent in my eyes." Marie-Antoine Careme

The towering wedding cake is a legacy of his as is the croquembouche. He would make meticulous drawings of these centrepieces. Perhaps he would have been an architect, given other circumstances. But chance led him to the kitchen.

"The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry." Marie-Antoine Careme

That name - Marie-Antoine. As David says, it's a girl's name - Marie - although it does often appear in those hyphenated Christian names - Jean-Marie is fairly common. But here's the thing - he was named for Marie-Antoinette, the not so long ago beheaded and hated queen of France. This was the time of the beginning of Napoleon's reign, and the recent memory of the post revolution reign of terror. Not a good name to have, and so for the rest of his life it became Antonin. Carême is not much better - to English ears it's close to caramel, but he did not invent that. No Carême is the French for Lent - a time of austerity and fasting. So not an auspicious name.

Having achieved a great reputation for his cakes he entered the service of various titled people, eventually working for Talleyrand - the French Foreign MInister - for ten years, although he also ran his own patisserie at the same time. Not shown on TV. Talleyrand was by all accounts a devious and talented diplomat - in many ways the most interesting character in our TV show. They should make a series about him. Through Talleyrand he made the acquaintance of Napoleon although he never directly worked for him, other than making the wedding cake for his second wedding. He also, however, at his own request, worked for Tsar Alexander of Russia for a period in Paris, on a couple of state visits. The Tsar was impressed and invited him to Russia - where he did eventually go, but it was not a success. The Tsar was not there when he arrived, the weather, of course, was not good, and so he left after a few months. But he loved the city of St. Petersburg and its beautiful buildings.

The weather also determined his departure from the Court of the Prince Regent in England for whom he worked. Other notables he worked for were French and British aristocrats, the new French kings, and the Tsar and the now George IV also tried unsuccessfully to woo him back. His last employer was Baron Rothschild. But then his health deteriorated - some say because of the fumes from charcoal fires in the grand kitchens - and he retired to his home in the Tuileries to die at the young age of 48 or 49. Too young. I have no idea whether he was still married.

So apart from his skill as a pastry chef, why is he so renowned? Well a number of things. Maybe the first of these was the number of cookbooks he wrote. Prior to Carême in France, there existed very few cookbooks. He was not the first, but he was the first to be prolific, and exact. His last work was a 5 volume treatise - L'Art de la Cuisine Française aux Dix-Neuvième Siècle. He actually only finished three volumes, but others finished it after his death. Not that these cookbooks were for the ordinary housewife. They were really aimed at the professional chefs. It's all Haute Cuisine stuff.

He changed the way large kitchens were organised and run. Chaos became order. and in the process he introduced the chef's toque - that high hat that chefs in top restaurants wear. I think the height is a recognition of how high the chef is on the ladder to supremity. He did this because he believed the caps that chefs wore before that were an indication of low level workers. In Apple's version he doesn't wear a hat at all.

Although he did become a master chef in a much more general sense than a patissier, today he is most famous for his pastry creations - the croquembouche and the choux pastry it is made from, the vol-au-vent, millefeuille, piped meringes and soufflé aux fraises. Yummy and special.

I have a special soft spot for strawberry soufflé as I ate this as a last meal with no children. I was to be induced and David took me out for lunch on the way to the hospital, at the long defunct Fanny's opposite the hospital. And I had strawberry soufflé. One of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. At least that's how I remember it. Maybe it was really the occasion.

Outside of the pastry he also set in stone the recipes for the mother sauces of French cuisine. I'm not sure that he invented any of them, but he certainly established how they should be made and how they should be incorporated into French cuisine. For France was all-important - “My soul is utterly French, and I cannot live except in France" he once said, which also explains why he could not stay in England, Russia or Vienna for very long.

Here in Australia we have our own Carême - the company that makes very superior puff pastry for we ordinary mortals, who really can't do it, but also for the professionals. I did not know it was an Australian company - based in the Barossa Valley and family owned. I have not yet made myself buy their more expensive product. Maybe I should.

Having now found out more about our glamorous chef Carême - and yes the series did make me want to know more - it has made me marvel about how geniuses seem sometimes to come out of nowhere. The beginnings were so extremely awful. How, you wonder, can somebody from a background like that fortuitously discover that he was a genius cook and organiser, and possibly would have been a genius architect too - or in modern times a PR genius - definitely a celebrity chef. Indeed many say he was the first celebrity chef. Almost by accident he ends up working in a kitchen. It could have been a carpenter's shop - his father was a carpenter remember? Would he then have become a genius carpenter? My son believes that anyone, with practice, can learn a skill. To a certain extent I agree, but not to the point of genius surely? Carême obviously had the drive to succeed but could he have become a genius musician for example? Surely there is a point at which proficiency is as far as you get. It takes more than practice to be that creative. It's an amazing story of the man that is known as the ‘chef of kings and king of chefs’

Season 1 is coming to an end - but I'm guessing there may well be a season 2. It seems to have been a success. What's not to love - it's gorgeous to look at, a charismatic villain - I didn't mention him - well acted and speeds along with verve.

YEARS GONE BY

June 3

2024 - That was the week that was

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Cream - a guilty necessity

2021 - Random ramblings

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Do I think about food too much?

2018 - Nothing

2017 - Nothing