It has been a very Martha Stewart week for me, hanging out with rappers and making large financial transactions while gardening. There may, or may not, have been “5 on it” at some point in the process. Last week’s chicken recipe was fairly well received so I thought I would try something else, just as simple and just as exacting in execution.
Tonight we discuss egg cookery and the influence of Antoine Careme and Auguste Escoffier on modern American brunch cooking.
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I actually did do some gardening this week. I replanted my indoor succulent garden and made some bamboo cuttings. We will see if I can keep them alive. This is my first attempt at such a thing but my research is solid and my method is sound.
Also, Happy Mother’s Day to every woman everywhere because you have all, at some point or another, had to do some mothering to some man at some point repeatedly.
Oh, I promised egg cookery and a history lesson.
Carême was haute cuisine's original maestro. He was the first to distinguish this rich, meat-heavy, decorative, more labor-intensive cuisine from regional French home cooking, and the first to catalogue and organize it so it could be easily understood by future generations.
From a relative disarray of recipes and techniques, he extrapolated four essential sauces, known as "mother sauces," which formed the basis of and garnish for hundreds of dishes. Over a century later Auguste Escoffier would update and revise this system, but Carême gave Escoffier something to build upon.
French culinary artist, known as “the king of chefs and the chef of kings,” who earned a worldwide reputation as director of the kitchens at the Savoy Hotel (1890–99) and afterward at the Carlton Hotel, both in London. His name is synonymous with classical French cuisine
As a student of the culinary arts in the US, the traditional home of and source for technique and ingredient combinations is classical French cuisine. We are talking about the system that was built to entertain royalty, heads of state, and wealthy patrons in France and England just after the turn of the 20th century.
Careme was before, Escoffier was slightly after, but in the balance we are talking about eating as a display of wealth as the world economy transitioned from Mercantilism to Capitalism in the wake of the Industrial Revolution among the colonizing class. At the heart of classical French cuisine is the perfection of a dish that is best served at a banquet.
Even the concepts of canapes and hors d’ouevres evolved out of a need to feed multiple guests an array of dishes meant to delight and impress as well as sustain. And sometimes, let’s be honest, sustenance is often the last purpose of some of haute cuisines highest heights.
Alas, I digress. Anyway, These gentlemen laid the foundation of not just food but the business of food for nearly two centuries. And thus, I have to know how to make veal stock and veloute, petits fours and finger sandwiches, scrambled eggs and quiches, etc.
And I am damn proud of my level of egg cookery execution. But, since I went off on a rant, I have to end here.
more next Sunday
peace
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Mollytraveler had a perfect comment to Liberal in a Red State's Diary about people going maskless everywhere on Mother's Day, no less. It's just perfect. Pithy, and touching.
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