Who is escoffier

For six years, Escoffier worked under Ritz during the summer season at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo and during the winter at the National in Lucerne. And when Ritz was hired to run the Savoy Hotel after it opened in London in , he asked Escoffier to take over the kitchen. It was a wonderful collaboration. Ritz was brilliant at his work; he knew the front of the house to the last detail, for instance, keeping women in mind when he studied designs for lighting and grand staircases.

Escoffier knew the kitchen, which could make or break a hotel. Inventive, artistic cooking was mandatory, within the narrow possibilities of the classical style. Escoffier was at his height at the Savoy. He realized, as all great hotel chefs do, that logistics are as important as the cooking. He insisted that customers be served hot food quickly.

He streamlined and made sweeping changes. He pared down menus to a degree; he simplified presentations, eliminating borders of noodle dough and other uneaten embellishments.

Above all, he made the kitchen a cohesive unit. Until then, each station had been autonomous, producing everything necessary to a dish in its charge. Under Escoffier, to eliminate duplication and save time, each station provided its specialty to the rest of the kitchen.

The garde manger butchered and portioned all the meats and fish, the sauciers provided all the sauces, etc. And Escoffier made other changes. He banned the drinking of alcohol in the kitchen, substituting a refreshing malt-based beverage devised by a doctor. Cooks were entreated to wear jackets and ties on the way to and from work. Swearing was prohibited and so was screaming.

But in the midst of their success, Ritz and Escoffier left the Savoy. Most people today have no clue as to how food in the past was prepared and served for the traveler, or just hungry diners with money, home or away from home.

The professional trained chef is relatively recent in the historical scheme of things. The development of the restaurant as we know it only occurred at the end of the 18th century in France. Instead of one menu for everyone, this new innovation called a restaurant produced numerous dishes for different diners at different times of the day.

In much of Europe, and France in particular, food preparation outside aristocratic households was done by various guilds, who had a monopoly on certain kinds of preparations. One preparation was a "restorative," highly flavored and rich soups or stews. In fact, the word restaurant comes from the French word restaurer , meaning to restore. Their original purpose was to restore strength and vigor. Taverns and inns typically served food prepared by these guilds. Food was not the main focus of these establishments: drinking and a place to sleep was.

Food was an afterthought, and there was a very limited selection. Food was prepared at the guild and brought in. Diners would share a common table and eat family style.

The first restaurant opened in Paris in when a tavern keeper, Monsieur Boulanger, hung a sign advertising his restorative: sheep feet in white sauce. After winning a lawsuit brought by a guild who thought they had the monopoly on soup and stew preparation, the restaurant went on to prosper. Boulanger's innovation was to focus on food , offer a selection of prepared food instead of just a preselected, limited menu, and the food was prepared on site as you waited.

Since it was a restorative, it had a kind of medical application. As time progressed, this medical aspect was dropped in favor of a diverse selection of ordinary food. During the French Revolution the guilds were abolished, as well as the aristocracy. Their private chefs and kitchens were scattered, but some of the well trained, sophisticated chefs started restaurants.

His innovation was to offer food service during fixed hours as well as a printed menu. A wait staff was impeccably trained and patrons sat at small tables instead of a communal table. By the middle of the 19th century, several large, grand restaurants in Paris were serving elaborate meals which recalled the days of grande cuisine of the aristocrats.

Cuisine had become an art form. There were not, however, just restaurants serving grande cuisine. Some restaurants combined grande cuisine with cuisine bourgeoisie to create a simpler menu. In the late 19th century, hotels offered the finest restaurants. He allied with August Escoffier to make the hotel restaurant a destination, the showpiece of his hotels. Restaurants were now shaped into the form we are familiar with today.

Ritz wanted to make the Savoy's restaurant a magnet for London society, not just the luxurious appointments of the hotel. When they arrived, women seldom dined out. Highborn women would instead dine at their estates.

Even for the men, dining out was mostly done at one's club, not a restaurant. Ritz worked to change that. Women did not dine out in public, nor was it proper to dine out on Sundays. Ritz started a campaign for dining in the evening after an evening of the theatre. He enlisted the help of Lillie Langtry , former mistress of the future Edward VII and stage superstar who helped to get the liquor licensing regulations changed so liquor could be served until in the morning. Gradually, it became more chic for men and women to be seen at the Savoy Restaurant than in their own homes.

But Escoffier's stoves were a key attraction in making the hotel restaurant a fashionable place to go. Sunday night dinners after the theatre, with society dressed to the nines, became the event of the week. So, Auguste Escoffier, one of the greatest French chefs in history, had a hand in getting women out of their homes and into public restaurants in England.

Our series on the influence Auguste Escoffier had on modern cooking continues with his classification of the five mother sauces. Let's start by defining just exactly what a sauce is. A sauce is a thickened liquid used to flavor and enhance other foods. A good sauce adds flavor, moisture, richness and visual appeal. A sauce should compliment food. It should never disguise it A sauce can be hot or cold, sweet or savory, smooth or chunky.

A mother sauce is the base or starting point for making other secondary sauces. Three of the mother sauces use roux, or flour and butter, as a thickening agent. Each sauce has a different flavored liquid as its base. Here are Escoffier's five mother sauces. Clarified butteris the preferred fat to be used. Clarified butter is heated butter where the milk solids and water are poured off, resulting in a translucent golden butter fat.

The sauce is then flavored with onion, cloves and nutmeg and salt, then simmered until it is creamy and velvety smooth. Again, the liquid is thicken with a roux. Espagnole Sauce , also known as Brown Sauce , is a more complex sauce. It starts with meat stock which was prepared with beef bones that were browned in the oven. This roasting adds a deep brown color and more flavor than if you just put the bones in water to make a stock.

A mirepoix is a mixture of finely chopped onion, celery and carrots. Roasting this vegetable mixture first adds even more flavor. Since Espagnole sauce simmers for a long time, the vegetables have time to release their flavors. Hollandaise Sauce does not use a roux as its thickening agent. It is an emulsified sauce where the liquid is hot clarified butter and the thickening agent is egg yolks. An emulsion is a mixture of two liquids that would ordinarily not mix together, like oil and vinegar.

In the case of Hollandaise, it is the lecithin in the egg yolks that acts as the emulsifier. Lecithin, a fatty substance soluble in both fat and water, will readily combine with both the egg yolk and the butter, essentially holding the two liquids together.

Classic Tomato Sauce is the fifth mother sauce. In the kitchen, Escoffier's innovations again tended toward simplification. As head chef at the Carlton he faced the challenge of having to prepare superb dishes quickly for the hotel's high-powered clientele, and he found many inefficiencies in the organization of the standard restaurant kitchen.

In Escoffier's day, the restaurant kitchen was composed of separate units in which groups of chefs worked on their own, often duplicating each other's tasks and creating more work than was necessary. Escoffier insisted on unifying and streamlining the restaurant kitchen, so that his staff of about sixty chefs could work together seamlessly and quickly, serving as many as dishes at a typical Sunday dinner at the Carlton.

The working conditions of kitchen laborers also begged improvement, and Escoffier recognized and answered these needs. In the French chef's day, the atmosphere of the kitchen—loud, chaotic, overheated with wood- or coke-fired stoves, and rife with powerful cooking odors—created working conditions that were sometimes intolerable, and chefs often took to drinking while they toiled.

Escoffier aimed to curb these excesses, which often compromised the health of kitchen workers; he even hired a doctor to help concoct a comforting and healthful beverage, made with barley, that cooks could drink in place of alcohol. Through these and other improvements, Escoffier helped to raise the esteem of a profession that had once been regarded as lowly and coarse.

The turn of the century brought some changes for Escoffier. His partnership with Ritz came to an end in , when Ritz fell ill with a nervous breakdown. Yet some happier changes came in the following years, when Escoffier began publishing his culinary works, opening a new avenue in his career.

His first book, Le Guide culinaire , was an exhaustive resource, including about 5, recipes and garnish preparations. Le Guide, known to English speakers as The Escoffier Cook Book, remains an invaluable reference for contemporary cooks.

An energetic and inexhaustible man, Escoffier took the time to begin new endeavors in addition to his work at the Carlton and his manuscript preparations. In a German shipping company, Hamburg-Amerika Lines, invited the French chef to plan a restaurant service to be offered to passengers on its luxury liners. Called the Ritz-Carlton Restaurants, the service was unveiled in amid great fanfare.

Yet Escoffier did not concern himself only with the lifestyles of the wealthy and privileged clientele of posh restaurants and cruise ships. A humanitarian at heart, Escoffier took a strong stance in fighting against poverty. In addition, he started the first fundraising dinners for charitable causes such as helping retired chefs in need. Escoffier continued his leadership role at the Carlton Hotel until retiring in He helped found the World Association of Chef Societies in and became the first president of the organization.

On February 12, , days after the death of his wife, Auguste Escoffier passed away in Monte Carlo at the age of Auguste Escoffier was not just a visionary during his time period, but his techniques and methods continue to be relevant today. Posted May 12, in Culinary Arts. Enjoyed this article?