The chef of kings and the king of chefs,
no not him. Him! George Auguste Escoffier one of the most influential figures in culinary
history, and today we'll be making one of his most famous dishes peach melba. Escoffier, the good and the bad, this time on Tasting History. So this episode is in honor of my Patreon patrons, specifically the Marshals of the Spicery and the Deans of the Larder who every month we have a bit of a virtual happy hour where we make a historical cocktail and then just kind of chat about the
channel or whatever. And it's just cool because we're all having the same drink at the same time
but spread out all over the world and as it turns out Escoffier did it first. In 1912 he held the very first diner l'epicure where he coordinated 4,000 of the exact same meals being served all
over Europe at the exact same time.
Now obviously we don't do an entire meal we just do one cocktail but it's kind of in the same vein so, yeah thank you Patreon patrons. Now I don't know exactly what
was served at that very first diner l'epicure but it is possible that on the menu there was
Escoffier's own peach melba. "Peach melba. Choose six tender and perfectly ripe peaches. The Montreuil peach for example is perfect for this dessert. Blanch the peaches for two seconds in boiling
water remove them immediately with a slotted spoon and place them in iced water for a few seconds. Peel them and place them on a plate. Sprinkle them with a little sugar and refrigerate them. Prepare
a liter of very creamy vanilla ice cream and a puree of 250 grams of very fresh ripe raspberries
crushed through a fine sieve and mixed with 150 grams of powdered sugar.
Refrigerate. To serve fill a silver timber with the vanilla ice cream. Delicately place the peaches on top of the
ice cream and cover with the raspberry purée. Optionally, during the almond season one can
add a few slivers of fresh almonds on top, but never use dried almonds." A simple but lovely dessert for these waning dog days of summer though I think by the time this actually airs it won't
be the dog days anymore so…. cat days of summer. Anyway for this recipe what you'll need
is: 6 ripe peaches, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 2 cups or 250 grams of ripe raspberries, 1
and 1/3 cup or 150 grams of powdered sugar, and optional almond slivers. You'll also need two pints or one liter of vanilla ice cream preferably in the French tradition meaning with egg yolks. So first prepare a pot of boiling water and a large bowl of ice water, then one or two at a time set the peaches in the boiling water for just a few seconds.
Then plunge them into the
ice water. Leave them there for about 10 seconds and then set them on a plate. Once all six are
blanched go ahead and peel them. If you blanch them correctly and they were ripe it should be
very easy to remove the peel. Then set them on a plate and sprinkle with sugar. You want these on a single layer so you might want to use a couple plates. Then put them in the refrigerator for one
hour covering them lightly so they don't brown too much. Then to make the raspberry sauce just put
the raspberries in a blender and puree, then press through a fine sieve into a bowl. Then add in the
powdered sugar just a bit at a time. It's best if you sift it in, I did not but do as I say not as I do, and whisk until fully incorporated. Then set that in the refrigerator as well and then take a break to learn a bit about the life of Escoffier.
Born in 1846 George Augustus Escoffier was almost destined to follow in his father's footsteps and become a blacksmith. Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately he was a tiny person and he actually later on in life had boots built with a special heel just so he would be tall enough to work at a normal counter in the kitchen. So due to his size
his father very quickly realized he was not going to make much of a blacksmith and George wanted to
be an artist but that wasn't really in the cards and so at the age of 13 he was sent to work at
his uncle's restaurant in Nice.
In his memoirs this coffee basically says that his uncle wasn't
a very nice guy to him. Made fun of his diminutive stature a lot and working at the restaurant was
very, very hard as it was very difficult to work in kitchens at the time, and that actually
was probably what inspired Escoffier to have a lifelong desire to make working in kitchens
a more pleasurable and healthier experience. But before he could help future restaurant
workers he had to become a famous chef himself which all started when he got a job at 19 at the
Petit Moulin Rouge in Paris. Though with just a few years on the job in 1870 he was called up
for military duty in the Franco-Prussian War but rather than fighting he was given the post of army
chef serving some of the higher up field marshals of the French army.
Unfortunately one of those
marshals surrendered and so Escoffier spent the last six months of the war as a POW but even there
he was the chef de cuisine who cooked for all of the French officers at the camp. So post-military
life when he finally did return to Paris and Le Petit Moulin Rouge he was made chef de cuisine and
he was able to start his own restaurant called Le Faisan d'Or or the Golden Pheasant in Cannes and it was
during this time that he met and married the poet Delphine Daffis. Now there is a story that he
actually won her hand in a game of billiards against her father. I hope that's a fictional
story it was possibly could have come from a novel that was written years later but some people
say that it is true so who knows, but maybe he did have a penchant for gambling because they ended
up moving to Monte Carlo where he worked in the winter at one of the larger hotel casinos and in
the summer he would go to Lucerne and work at the Hotel Nacional and that is where he became friends
with an ambitious hotel manager named César Ritz.
Yep that Ritz. Now they became one of the great partnerships in history and in 1890 Richard D'Oyly Carte famous for producing the operettas of
Gilbert and Sullivan invited the duo to London to take control of his Savoy hotel and it was
there that his military training must have come flooding back as he developed La Brigade de cuisine, or the Kitchen Brigade. See, before Escoffier many restaurant kitchens were run in a way where each cook was put in charge of a specific dish and then all of those dishes would come together to
create the meal but Escoffier's Kitchen Brigade had it so that each cook was in charge of a
different task and all of those different tasks would come together to create each individual
dish, almost like the assembly line of Henry Ford but 20 years earlier and with food.
So at the top you had the chef du cuisine or what's now known as the head chef. He was supported by the sous-chef who in pretty much every restaurant that I ever worked at was the most overworked person in the kitchen. Under them is an army of cooks each with their specific job. Someone in charge of sauces,
pastries, the grill one person who cooks fish, and one who roasts meat, garden manger in charge
of the pantry, and even the marmiton who was a dishwasher but only of pots and pans. Someone else handled silverware and plates. Now few restaurants today have as many positions as Escoffier had mainly because roles like the entremétier who made entremets who at that point in time it was
like a snack between courses that person would be pretty bored at a modern restaurant but even
with a reduced brigade most restaurants today do follow that general concept that Escoffier had
laid out. Even in my kitchen here Jaime is in charge of the grill and Cersei does sauces. Don't worry I make them wear hair nets. Escoffier also popularized the idea of a la carte
ordering or ordering individual dishes off of a menu rather than kind of having a prefix meal
that just came out as is.
He and Ritz also made it socially acceptable for the ladies of London
to go to restaurants because before that time, at least in the nicer restaurants of the city, it was
a man's domain but it makes good business sense seeing as you just doubled your customer base. He also began foisting some of the finer French foods onto the English clientele. This included more fresh vegetables than the English were accustomed to, and the standardization of the five mother
sauces building on what Antoine Carêm had done in previous decades but there was one bridge that
was too far for the English and that was frog legs. They were not about that French amphibian
delicacy but Escoffier knowing best made a dish called Cuisses de Nymphes a l'Aurore, or thighs of the dawn nymphs.
It was first served at a gathering that included the Prince of Wales and after everyone found out that they were eating frog's legs just under a fancy new name they realized they did like
them and they all ordered it again in the future. It's kind of like when I was a little kid and I
refused to eat mushrooms my dad would dry them, then grind them up and put them into like sauces
and things and then I love them. So maybe he learned it from Escoffier, I don't know. Now in addition to the Prince of Wales Escoffier served many of the celebrities of the day including Sarah Bernhardt the actress, and the Australian opera singer Nellie Melba and he loved to kind of
collect these celebrities into his social circle and one way he did so was to name dishes after
them. Hundreds of these dishes are in his cookbook though most of them and the celebrities for which they're named have been forgotten but both Nellie Mela and peach melba are still remembered today.
She also had a sauce, Melba sauce, named after her as well as Melba toast but I find the peaches
especially interesting because he has about a dozen different peach recipes named after people in his cookbook and they're somewhat similar… Pêche Aiglon or Eaglet peaches were named after Sarah Bernhardt after she starred in a play called L'Aiglon and it's basically peach melba though
instead of a raspberry sauce it has spun sugar and crystallized violets on top, but then it's served
on a an eagle that has been carved out of ice. Though originally peach Melbourne was called
pêche au cygne, or peach with swan to commemorate Melba's swan entrance in the Wagner opera
'Lohengrin' and it was placed on an ice sculpture in the shape of a swan.
I guess it was a time before Instagram and he just kind of assumed that his famous clients wouldn't compare notes and realize that their one-of-a-kind dishes were very, very similar. Now unfortunately the glory
days at the Savoy Hotel had to come to an end when in 1897 he, Ritz and the head waiter all left
for personal reasons, or at least that was what the public was told and was the story
for 80 years. Only recently have documents shown a rather more ignominious reason for their departure. "By a resolution passed this morning you have been dismissed from the service of the hotel for among other serious reasons gross negligence and breaches of duty and
mismanagement I am also directed to request that you will be good enough to leave the
hotel at once." Personal reasons indeed. Seems that the trio had been taking kickbacks
from suppliers as well as other light embezzlement schemes and they were treating future business
partners to like fancy dinners that would not end in an actual bill and this led to an "astounding disappearance of over 3,400 pounds of wine and spirits in the first six months of 1897." Though
the headwaiter claimed that it wasn't nefarious it had just been drunk by the staff, a rather
drunk staff I'm thinking, but they all admitted their wrongdoing and made restoration and they were never charged nor did it ever become public knowledge, and that's good because it allowed César
Ritz to go establish the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and the Carlton Hotel in London and with him came
Escoffier and all of their distinguished clientele including Melba, Bernhardt, and the Prince of Wales as well as his mistress Lillie Langtry, and it was this period Escoffier's time at the Ritz and the Carlton Hotels that really turned him into a celebrity chef.
Even having Kaiser Wilhelm II tell
him, "I am the Emperor of Germany but you are the Emperor of chefs." This of course was before World
War I so the compliment carried some weight. It was also during his time at the Ritz that he wrote 'Le Guide Culinaire' with over 5,000 recipes and it's still used in many cooking classes to this
day. Making his claim that "Throughout my entire career I have sown some 2,000 cooks all over the world". A bit of an understatement but the bulk of the recipes are rather brief and definitely written for a professional chef in mind, case in point the peach melba recipe the one that we use
today is actually from a later book that he wrote but the one that is included in 'Le Guide Culinaire' simply says "Poach the skinned peaches in vanilla-flavored syrup.
When very cold arrange them in a timbale on a bed of vanilla ice cream and coat with raspberry puree." Definitely a recipe written
for someone who already knows a lot about cooking but next week we're actually going to talk about
a cookbook written around the same time period but with the amateur home cook in mind, Fannie Farmer's 'The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book' so make sure to watch next Tuesday but for
today that's all we've got. Honestly I could go on about Escoffier for a lot longer
but this episode would get to be really, really long so I'm going to cut it off right there
and get back to my peach melba. So after about an hour remove the peaches and the raspberry from
the refrigerator, cut the peaches in half and it's time to plate.
Now the recipe says to put
them in a silver timbale which can actually mean several things at the time period including in
his book he has several different references to this and they're all kind of different but really
it was it was like a silver cup about that big. You can't see anything in it so it's actually not
as not as nice as a glass so i'm going to use a glass dish, besides I don't have a silver timbale. So add vanilla ice cream, then the peaches, then the raspberry sauce and some almonds if you wish. And here we are Escoffier's peach melba from 1903. I have to say just the colors of this dessert are
just lovely.
You know just the the brightness of the raspberries and the sauce and the peaches.
It's just lovely. Let's give it a shot. I can't- it's already melting. Why does ice cream melt so fast? Here we go. Hm! Hm! Those nuts! There's a little
little crunch to the nut that is a crunch to the nuts that's
really- that's really nice. All right that was bad. I'm gonna have some
more here. That the raspberry puree really shines through. Melted ice cream or no those are delicious.
Perfect for summer. Is it world changing or innovative? Well not today because honestly I could see this on a menu too. I mean it is still on some
menus today and it hasn't changed all that much but it may have been new and innovative then
and it's absolutely wonderful regardless. One more interesting little Escoffier tidbit is
that while he was working at the Ritz Hotel in Paris he had lots of cooks obviously working
under him and according to some sources one of those cooks was named Van Ba. He had started
as a dishwasher and worked his way up to be a pastry chef or work under the pastry chef. And
later on in life that person would end up becoming the President of Vietnam, but by then he went by
the name Ho Chi Minh.
Now there are some sources that say that he didn't actually work under
Escoffier, that he worked in a different hotel at the time but he was definitely in the area
working as a chef during the time period. Just kind of weird that you know you can go from dishwashing to President of Vietnam. Never give up on your dreams kids. So thank you again to my Patreon patrons and make sure to follow me on Instagram @ tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and
I will see you next time on Tasting History.
