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

Ian Kelly

May 2009 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

A unique feast of biography and Regency cookbook, Cooking for Kings takes readers on a chef's tour of the palaces of Europe in the ultimate age of culinary indulgence.

Drawing on the legendary cook's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Antonin Carême's meteoric rise from Paris orphan to international celebrity and provides a dramatic below-stairs perspective on one of the most momentous, and sensuous, periods in European history-First Empire Paris, Georgian England, and the Russia of War and Peace.

Carême had an unfailing ability to cook for the right people in the right place at the right time. He knew the favorite dishes of King George IV, the Rothschilds and the Romanovs; he knew Napoleon's fast-food requirements, and why Empress Josephine suffered halitosis.

Carême's recipes still grace the tables of restaurants the world over. Now classics of French cuisine, created for, and named after, the kings and queens for whom he worked, they are featured throughout this captivating biography. In the phrase first coined by Carême, "You can try them yourself."

About the author

Ian Kelly is an actor and writer who has created and acted in a one-man play about Carême at New York City's 59E59 Theaters. He has lived and worked in France, Russia, South America and the United States, and writes frequently about food and travel for many British publications, including the Times and the Guardian.

He currently lives in London with his wife and son. The son of academics, Kelly was brought up in Philadelphia, Bristol and Liverpool, and is a graduate of Cambridge University, where he studied 17th and 18th century British and European history. He holds an M.A. in Theater, Film, and Television from UCLA's film school, and has appeared in the films Howard's End, Attenborough's In Love and War, Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus and was nominated for Best Actor at the 2002 Montreal Film Festival for his performance as a British hostage in Chechnya in the award-winning Russian epic Voina (The War). His stage work includes playing Henry V for the English Shakespeare Company; another Best Actor nomination for Tom Stoppard's Arcadia; and championing the lost 1800 comedy A Busy Day from fringe to West End. Kelly's adaptation of Justin Cartwright's Whitbread nominated novel In Every Face I Meet was shortlisted for the Orange Screenwriting Prize. Cooking for Kings is his first book.Ian was recently featured on CBS Sunday Morning, CBS TV. He has also written and presented THE REGENCY BANQUET, a syndicated program for Channel 4 in the UK, and A TASTE OF HISTORY!, a new regular feature on the Richard & Judy Show which looks at the history of food and the food historical figures would have themselves eaten.