SYMHC Classics: Auguste Escoffier

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. We name dropped a Gusta Scoffier on the show this week, and so Today's Saturday Classic is our episode on him, which I was shocked to realize had not already been a Saturday Classic. This originally came out on August twenty eighth, twenty eighteen. You think that because I invoke him at every opportunity. We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, So we are officially into fall and winter, at least in our hemisphere. Yep. And for a lot of cultures, this is a season where there are a lot of holidays and celebrations that often involve super delicious things. So this seemed like a good time to finally do the episode I had more or less promised that I was going to do back when we talked about Chef Marie Antoine Carem. So we are delving into the man who followed right after Carem and became known as the King of Chef, Chef of Kings, Augusta Scoffier, And if there are any chefs in our listening audience, they already know about Escoffier. He is that important to basically everything involving professional cooking at this point. But people who haven't studied cuisine may not realize that this one man really revolutionized food preparation and restaurant dining in ways that are still part of just about any meal that you would be served today. George Auguste Escoffier was born on October twenty eighth, eighteen forty six and Villeneuve de Lube, France, and that's in the country southeastern shore. His parents were Jean Baptiste Escoffier, was a blacksmith and Madeleine Sivat. Although Jean Baptiste had no formal education, he and the other children of the village had been taught to read and write from a priest and then entire and Jean Baptiste shared that knowledge with the children of the community and his own children once he became an adult. Yeah, I sort of loved that tradition of teaching that they had in their family, even if it wasn't formal education. The young Augusta Scoffier did not initially want to cook his dreams as a kid, or that he was going to be an artist and specifically a sculptor. But there was somemerly indication that he was curious about things that happened in the kitchen. This happened when he watched his grandmother make herself coffee. This is at a time when coffee was not guzzled at the rate, for example, that I guzzle it today. It was more of like a special drink you would have from time to time. But after he watched her, he waited until everyone had left the house so he could try making it himself, which he did, and he was just ten at the time. At the age of thirteen, A Scoffier began working for his uncle as an apprentice at a restaurant in Nice, which was just northeast of where they were living. So basically his career choice had been made for him. He would go into cooking, and so he headed into La Restoral Francaists, who began learning in eighteen fifty nine, and he stayed at his apprenticeship there until eighteen sixty three, and early on he realized that while cooks weren't especially highly regarded, he also saw the potential of the job, and he decided, also very early on, that he was going to work as hard as he could to quote, improve the standing of the kitchen chef. I'll also point out that this is a time when the word chef did not have the connotations it had today. It meant chief like the person that runs the kitchen, although he wrote that particular line much later on, when it also had the connotation of being in the kitchen. I just want to make clarity for that. He started writing menus very very early on in his apprenticeship. He took a great interest in menu writing specifically, and he carefully selected words to name and describe dishes that he thought would sound quote gentle and pleasing, and when it came to menus for special occasions, he described them as a sort of poem recalling the happy hours spent. After his apprenticeship, Auguste was very busy with the whole series of jobs. First, he was hired as first assistant at a restaurant called circlea Messena in November of eighteen sixty three. When that kitchen closed for the summer in April of eighteen sixty four, he moved on to Le Freer Provenceau in Nice as kitchen chef. He trained there for six months before being hired at Sae Philippe, and then in the spring of eighteen sixty five he moved to Paris to work as a kitchen aide at a restaurant called Le Petit Moulin Rouge, which catered to the high society, including the royal families of Europe. Yeah, he basically was always kind of jumping up, even though the rankings of those positions as we know them today may sound lower. In some cases, when he went from one to another, he was going to a bigger restaurant, so it was still a move up. In a little more than a year into his Paris job, Escoffier was called up for mandatory military service, so from September eighteen sixty six until the following spring he served in the active Army reserves at Vin, and as soon as his military service was complete, he returned to Le Petit moulain Rouge. A few years later, military service called again. The Franco Prussian War had begun, and in July of eighteen seventy Auguste was selected to be Chef de cuisine at the Rhine Army headquarters. He was feeding the chief officers, and his accounts of providing meals during this time show how really committed he was to his ideals as a chef. Even while he was camping in mud with the rest of the men, he wrote out menus for every day the night before. Sometimes he would start food prep at night. He became really adept at improvising to create these multi course meals even in very rough circumstances. The men who he served ate roast beef, potato salad, soft boiled eggs, and sauteed rabbit, along with fresh sausage that he and his assistant made themselves. In camp. He would catch wild animals, sometimes procure things like eggs from nearby farms, always with a mind toward creating very filling, balanced meals. Yeah, he really was quite nutritionally minded at a time when people weren't really thinking about nutrition necessarily in how they put together meal menus and literally, when you're in the military, that's probably not always your first priority. But he really took great care and great pride in how he handled things, and Escafier saw this work as making room in the minds of officers so that they could worry about more important things. Than what they would eat. He's like, I will take care of your nutritional needs, you worry about the other stuff. But he also saw the horrors of war during this time. He for example, watched the injured being carried into a makeshift hospital that was set up on the same farm where he and his regiment camped during the Battle of Gravelotte, and he hurried to bring what he could to the men who needed treatment. Well, continue talking about his experiences during the war, but first we're going to pause for a little sponsor break. As the war stretched into months, rationing began to impact the menus that a scoffier prepared. Horse Meat was used to supplement because beef was unavailable, but even so, the chef was keenly aware of the drop in his ability to provide for the nutritional needs of the men that he cooked for. On October twenty eighth of eighteen seventy, which was his twenty fourth birthday, August Escuffier became a prisoner of war when the French surrendered after the Siege of Metz. He remained a pow until the end of the war, although his skills let him move out of the camp proper and into a kitchen roll. Yeah, there's a great story in his memoir about how, even though he was kind of in like a better situation than the men he had left behind in camp, at Christmas that year, he made a point to take as many things as he could from the kitchen that he was allowed to take and bring them back to them so they could have sort of their own little celebration, and he could try to help them have a better Christmas than they would otherwise have had. And after the war ended, Escafier moved into the role of chef de cuisine at the Hotel de Luxembourg in Nice. But in spring of eighteen seventy three he was back at La Petite MoU Lain Rouge as Chef de cuisine, and he parleyed his success there into a side business for himself when he bought a small grocery in Cannes called La fe d're that means Golden Pheasant, and he bought that in eighteen seventy six, and over the next two years, while he continued to work at La Petite MoU Lain Rouge, he renovated the store and added a winter dining room to it. He moved into running his new business full time in eighteen seventy eight, after the end of the summer season at La Petite Moulin Rouge. That August was really busy for him. He got married to his fiancee, Delphine Dafis, and he did that in between the two jobs. But after only two months in his new venue and his new marriage, his father in law suddenly died. That meant that he took on a lot of responsibility and to help the family gets through the strain of this period, Auguste gave up his little fledgling shop and can to take more stable work in Paris. He became the general manager of La Maison Chevet, but he worked there only eight months before a new opportunity presented itself, and that was Chef de cuisine at the new cafe restaurant du Casino, which was, as the name suggests, part of a larger luxury casino property. And Escaffaier had been hired simply to get the restaurant up and running, and he did this job admirably. This is something he did throughout his career after this, where he would kind of come in and set up a new restaurant and then he would go back to his regular thing and the restaurant would continue on its own. But he did this so well with the casino and restaurant that when they had a press event to promote this new luxury entertainment complex, all of the reporters there were way more interested in Escaffier's food than any other aspect of the business that they were trying to talk about. After the casino, while working as the restaurant manager of the Grand Hotel in Monte car Hello, Auguste Escoffier met Swiss business in sesar Ritz was eighteen eighty four and Ritz was already a successful hotelier, but he didn't quite have the name recognition that he would have later. Ritz wanted an expert in the food service end at the hotel industry, and Escaffier really fit that bill. So when Ritz began managing the Hotel Nacional in Lucerne, Switzerland, he eventually hired a Scaffier on there. But their partnership in business truly cemented when Ritz became the manager of London's Savoy Hotel, and he brought a goost right along with him. So in eighteen ninety Escaffier took charge of the kitchens at the Savoy Hotel. Ritz was hired at the Savoy to fix its problems. It had only been opened since eighteen eighty nine, and while it was glamorous and beautiful, it was managed really terribly and was facing bankruptcy. The hotel offered an a la carte menu in the restaurant, but the chef that had been in charge had really only managed fixed price menus where all the courses were part of one order. Handling the different supply and prep needs of a kitchen that had more items in play on the menu was a really different skill set and it just had not gone well. Escaffier, though, was excellent at this, and he walked into a mess, but he straightened it all out. Yeah, he claimed that the day that they got there, and he was like, I can't imagine why anyone would do this, but I'm like, maybe angry on the way out that all of the kitchen equipment had been broken and all of the food stores had been damaged in some way. Like basically, someone was really angry on their way out the door. And so he had to call around to chef friends and be like, do you have stuff I can borrow today? And so he got through that first day. He said he didn't even have salt to begin with, but he got through that first day with the help of the chef community, and then the next day he kind of got all of his contacts with suppliers and got everything right and could move forward from there. And Escoffier instituted a number of processes to get the hotel's restaurant running smoothly. So often when high profile London clients would want to book a dinner party, for example, they relied on the Metre d'hotel to make decisions on the food because the French menus were sometimes a little daunting for them, and a scuffier began keeping copious records of what they served at each meal like this, so that if the same person booked another high end dinner party with them at a later date, they could be sure that they would never serve them the same meal twice and they would always be getting different dishes. Everything about the restaurant was examined and optimized to attract the best possible clientele. Even the lighting was really carefully designed to be soft and glowing so that their customers would look their absolute best while they were eating their royalty heads of state, the wealthy, and the famous all flocked there as Ritz and Escoffier put their mark on the place. It was during his early years at the Savoy, in eighteen ninety three that Auguste Escaffier invented the dessert peach Melba in honor of prior podcast subject Dame Nelly Melba, although it didn't appear on a menu for a number of years. Yeah, we'll talk about when it pops up. But he made it basically specially for her one night, and then he always remembered it and used it later. And it was also early on in his Savoy days that Escafier made charity a priority for his kitchen. So when he first started working there, he was visited each morning by two nuns from a group called Little Sisters of the Poor, asking for things like coffee grounds or tea that could potentially be brewed a second time, or for crusts of bread, and these they would take back to what was essentially a poor retirement house, and the chef was inspired by them to incorporate giving into the kitchen's normal routine, So first he always made sure that he had some good, clean supplies to give to them. He would always make sure the food was as high end as he could possibly manage and always very clean. But he also instructed his staff to save any cuts of meat that they could during preparations for banquets and set it aside just for the little sisters. For example, when they served a dish like quail to a large group, they'd normally only be serving the breast, and that meant the legs could be given to the nuns, along with instructions on how to prepare it for the people they were feeding. Since the Savoy's banquets were off in really huge affairs, this was a substantial amount of food to donate, but it was also a substantial amount of food to otherwise be wasting. Yes, he was not a fan of that kind of waste. Now and people were hungry. Escaffie continued to do this through his whole career. Yeah, he basically instructed his people like any cut of meat that was edible but was not considered like high end enough for some of their fancy meals, he would be like, okay, you know where to put it, And they just had a place in the kitchen where they would always put those things. At the end of every night, everything that was edible went to the poor, and then they started each new day fresh. A Scaffie also engaged in this wonderful little bit of devious ingredient renaming while he was at the Savoy. So he had prepared frog legs many times as a chef in France, but he also knew that the English thought this whole idea was gross, and that they often mocked the French for eating frog. And he was adamant that frog meat was a very fresh and light tasting option and it was easy to digest. So during a large banquet again remember that often these people would just order a banquet and let them select the menu, one of the dishes that he served was called nymph a lur or Nymphs at Dawn, and the nymphs were in fact frog, and his English guests ate them up in a chauffroi sauce with paprika, declaring the dish absolutely delicious. This sounds appalling to you, I encourage you. If you see things on your menu that you don't recognize, ask yes. It makes me laugh so hard. And there were cases where he particularly I think it was the Prince of Wales at the time who was well traveled in New French food, recognized what it was and what was going on, and it was like their little shared seecret, like we're kind of pulling one over on these people. While the Savoy years of a Scaffier's career were overall really happy and they made him very well known, he didn't finish the nineteenth century there and we will talk about his next career shift. After another quick sponsor break in eighteen ninety seven, things started to unravel at the Savoy for Ritz and Escafaier. So throughout their time with the hotel, both men had worked side jobs opening new hotels and restaurants, and per Escaffier's memoir, a misunderstanding over the nature of these side businesses led to him and his partner Ritz being fired. In recent years, journalist Paul Levy has made the case based on documents which he's come into the possession of that in fact, the two men were taking kickbacks from suppliers and stealing from the hotel's supplies to an exorbitant degree. Part of this was because Ritz was also working on some other projects and he would have potential business partners from those projects come to the Savoy and they would feed them sumptuous, very very expensive meals without charging of course for them, and so that was kind of considered part of this theft. Because Ritz was also signing agreements that made him in charge of like large development projects, some that would bear his name eventually, So this is part of the problem. Descendants of a Scoffaia have challenged these claims, but we wanted to make sure we mentioned it at least, and regardless of the reason for their sacking, Escaffier and Ritz moved into a new venue, the Ritz Hotel in Paris, named for Seesar Ritz, which opened on June fifth of eighteen ninety eight. This is all the same kind of stuff that if you work for a big company today, when you have to take your business ethics and compliance training, it is absolutely similar all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Once the Paris Ritz was up and running, Escoffier and Ritz both returned to London in eighteen ninety nine to work at the brand new Carlton Hotel. While Escoffier's career before this involved constant shifting around, either seasonally or just to take better jobs, he stayed at the Carlton for over twenty years and on the menu for the opening of the new hotels. The restaurant was peach Melba, appearing on a menu for the first time and for the record, a lot of the clientele from the Savoy chose to follow Ritz and Escafie over to the Carlton. In nineteen oh three, Escafier wrote what is probably his most famous book, Laguide Kulnaire, which he co wrote with Phileas Julbert and Emil Feitout. And this book, which is still in print by the way, became the bible of French cooking, but really cooking in general in terms of restaurant cooking, and it features recipes for all possible courses. It's laid out in the narrative form that shows dishes in the order that they should be prepared and served. And Auguste saw the need for such a book because he saw that the restaurant industry was growing and that it was increasingly important for chefs to be able to manage kitchens that served huge numbers of guests, and there was not at this point formal training for it. He saw this writing as quote a work tool more than a book. He was adamant that even though it had more than five thousand recipes, it was incomplete. He knew that the industry would always be evolving and progressing, and that any new edition of the book would need to be updated to reflect all those changes. He also thought the basics would remain constant, and he thought he could write what would be, in essence, a foundation document that chefs could use for years and years to come. And he was one hundred percent correct, because most chefs that run restaurants today have a copy of this book somewhere. When the fiftieth anniversary of Escoffier's professional career loomed in nineteen oh nine, his colleagues took up a collection with the intent that they would use the money to buy him a piece of art with it. But when Agusta Scoffier was told how much money had come in and that they were planning to do this it was about six thousand francs, he asked that it instead be donated to a retirement home that took care of elderly chefs who had little or no money, and on the night of the celebration of his career, he was gifted with a silver cup from the hotel rather than a lavish piece of art. In nineteen ten, Escoffier published a pamphlet on suppressing poverty. He felt that if every person followed the adage to love your neighbor as yourself, like really truly followed it, that poverty would be erased. He advocated for a universal old age pension system, particularly citing the people who had worked their whole lives and jobs that just hadn't allowed them to put money aside for retirement. Yeah, because he had worked in the service industry his entire life, he had been very keenly aware that the people that were kind of at the lowest levels in any organization and were getting paid the least, were often working the hardest, and he thought their work was just as honorable as anyone else's, and that they should not have to rely on charity in their elder years to get by, and that there should be some sort of system put in place to make sure that all people had an equal shot at a lovely retirement. Starting in nineteen eleven, A Scaffier started publishing a magazine which came out monthly called Le Coue de Piqueure That's a Gourmet's Notebook, and he published that magazine for three years and his hopes that it would spread knowledge of French cooking to other countries and in turn would help French tourism. But when World War One began, the magazine would put aside. Also in nineteen eleven, a fire started in one of the elevators at the Carlton Hotel that did an estimated two million francs worth of damage. There weren't any fatalities, but all of the rooms were damaged. A Scaffaer rallied the staff and the restaurant was immediately open and serving meals. Uh yeah. The rooms that they could rent out to guests could not be filled for a while while they fixed things up, but the restaurant at least could continue to bring in a little bit of money. In nineteen twelve, A Scaffier participated in what I think is a fabulously interesting dinner with his friends from a club that he had formed called La Ligue de Germande, and A Scafier created a menu that was served simultaneously to club members in restaurants throughout Europe. So each kitchen prepared all of the dishes as outlined by the famous cook, and then, according to Escaffier's memoirs, throughout the continent. At the same time, four thousand people were eating the same meal, and during this event, called the Dnee Depiqueux, Escafier received telegrams from friends and fellows, some of whom were very famous, taking part in this celebration and marveling at what a wonderful thing it was. While his magazine was underway, Escaffier also published a book titled Le Livre de minute or The Book of Menus, in nineteen twelve. And as we said, once the war began in nineteen fourteen, things changed. His magazine ceased publication, but Escafier also faced rationing and shortage issues, not unlike when he had been a cook in the military, but this time it was his job not to feed soldiers, but to keep a luxury restaurant running today spite those shortages, and to that end he once again got very creative with menus. So he increased the use of venison, eggs and bacon, among other non ration food ingredients. And he made contact directly with fishermen so that he could get fresh seafood without having to go through the rationed markets. And he substituted cocoa butter for dairy butter which was not available at the time. He kind of threw this really started getting a sense of what we would call today farm to table, where he was like, oh, yes, fresh directly from the supplier is the best way to go. And he had always been excellent at improvising when faced with problems of supply, and it really served him well during these lean times because he created some very, very beloved dishes. He also kept on with his philanthropic work during the war. He created a support committee to help raise the funds for the families of staff that had been sent to the front to fight, and he distributed the funds that were raised on a weekly basis. He also hired more staff than he really needed to try to keep families afloat, and he worked to make sure that when men returned from fighting they could once again find a position at the Carlton. On November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, when the armistice was announced, the hotel's restaurant was almost immediately booked to capacity, with reservations for people who were eager to celebrate the end of the war. And so, with seven hundred and twelve seats booked for the night and food restrictions still in place that limited his options. Escafaier got very, very creative, indeed, so for the main dish that night, he combined all of the various meats he had on hand in a mincer because he didn't have a whole lot of any one meat, and then he mixed that result with a patie and bread and that had been soaked in cream so it was soft, and he made what he called little mignonettes, so they were almost like a French meatball. On the one year anniversary of the Armistice, Escafaie was awarded the Legion of Honor and he became an officer of the Order in nineteen twenty eight. Yeah He described a becoming part of the Legion of Honor as one of the greatest honors of his life and Augusta Scoffier, after the war, was tired and he retired from running kitchens in nineteen twenty one. He has this unique distinction of having never worked for a private household in his career as a cook or chef. But even after he and his wife, Delphine moved to Monte Carlo for their retirement, he continued to write books about cooking and running a kitchen. Professionally, and in his writing he codified a lot of the innovations that he had implemented during his long career. He wrote about the importance of sanitation and kitchen safety, and his brigade the cuisine system of kitchen management, which is organized military style, with the Chef de cuisine, which is the chief of the kitchen, as the leader, and all the other positions ranked below that one. He also wrote about something that we mentioned earlier in his first book, of serving meals one course at a time, because prior to that the standard practice had been everything hitting the table at once, and then people just knew to eat them in order. And he also outlined his method of canning vegetables, which was new that was something he had pioneered in response to rationing during his time in the military. And he also was entirely ahead of his time when it came to healthful cooking. I mentioned already that he thought about nutrition in a much broader way than most people did, and as you may recall from our Marie Antoine carrem episode, France had shifted to less decadent cooking trends over time after the French Revolution, and Escafier took that idea even farther by extolling the virtues of the freshest possible ingredients obtained directly from farms and fishermen. He felt and wrote that everyone should have access to good, healthy food and what he called a courteous style of living, meaning meals shared among friends and loved ones using fine cooking traditions and shared from one generation to the next. Yeah, he thought like fine cooking should not be something that only someone who ran a professional kitchen should know, but that families should know it and share it with one another, and that it should just be part of life. And when you went to a restaurant, it was just so you didn't have to do that, but you had the knowledge. And of course Escoffier built on the four mother sauces established by Marie Antoine cauerrem and the result ended up being a little bit of a rework that landed at five mother sauces, which remained standard in French cooking. So those are Beschema, tomat veloute, Espanol and Hollandais. Thank you, Monsieur Scoffier, because they have all given me great joy. Augusta Scoffier died in Monte Carlo, Monaco and his home on February twelfth, nineteen thirty five, just a few days after his wife died. He was eighty nine. His remains were buried in the town where he was born, in his family's vault. Escoffier's memoirs were published well after his death. When he died, his son Paul had assembled all of the notes and documents that he had gone and collected from the Monte Carlo house as well as Escoffie's apartment that he kept in Paris, and those notes included a memoir that the chef had written, and those works were finally published by A Scoffier's grandson in nineteen eighty five in French, and those were expanded and translated beginning in nineteen ninety six to mark Augusta Scoffier's one hundred and fiftieth birthday. Today, the Augusta Scoffier Foundation runs the Escaffie Museum of Culinary Arts at his birthplace. The Escoffier School of Culinary Arts offers training at several campuses and online courses as well, and Michel Escoffier, who is the great grandson of the Chef of Kings sits on the advisory board for the school, and in Escoffier's memoir, which is a great read and really easy to read because it's the chapters are short, but it's also very fun because you really do get a sense that he could not stop talking about how to make food, because he'll be in the middle of telling a story and then be like, let me give you the recipe, and it will just drop in, like in the middle of sort of a paragraph of a narrative. But there was a passage in that memoir that struck me that he wrote about when he first entered the cooking profession as a teenage apprentice and how he began to look at cooking, and it really nicely encapsulates his ideology about the importance of this career. He wrote quote, at the time, high society held little esteem for the profession of cook This should never have been the case, for cooking is a science and an art, and one who puts all his heart into satisfying his fellow man deserves recognition. Hey French food, yeah, which is always a big favorite of mine. And I just love his story. I love how he has impacted so many meals that you know you and I and everyone who has ever eaten in a restaurant has had as well as just sort of bringing French cooking to a wider audience in some ways. You know, we talk about in the modern era Julia Child being a person that really really disseminated information about French cooking to the masses, and he was sort of her precursory that they have a little overlap in their lifetimes, but they did not actually meet. I don't think. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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