"A unique feast of biography and Regency cookbook, Cooking for Kings takes readers on a culinary tour of the palaces of Britain and Europe in the ultimate age of gastronomic indulgence, when, for the first time, chefs became celebrities and the modern restaurant was born." "Drawing on the legendary cook's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Antonin Careme's meteoric rise from a child abandoned on the streets of revolutionary Paris 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 - when emperors, kings, and princes wielded Careme's gastronomy as a diplomatic tool." "Careme was much more than the inventor of the chef's hat, the vol-au-vent, and the souffle. He had an unfailing ability to cook for the right people in the right place at the right time. He knew the foibles and the favorite dishes of the Romanovs, the Rothschilds, and Rossini. He worked for the gourmet-king George IV, the Viennese court, and even made Napoleon's wedding cake. But Careme's reputation rested ultimately on a novel idea that changed cooking forever: by marrying food and glamour in his books - which transported readers to the tables of the famous households for whom he cooked - he was the first chef to become rich and famous by publishing cookbooks."--Jacket.
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