The Man Who Made it All Possible

1836-1945  

“I am be the Emperor of Germany, but you are the Emperor of Chefs” -Kaiser Wilhelm II            

    George Auguste Escoffier was born on the 28th of October in the year 1836 in the village of Villenneuve-Loubet, located near Nice on the French Riviera.  Early years showed a great aptitude for the arts, and he was encouraged by his mother to pursue this natural inclination.  When he turned thirteen he took an apprenticeship at the Le Restaurant Français, under the tutelage of his uncle whom was the chef; but as he became of age the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 broke out and Escoffier joined the army as a chef.                

    With the end of the war and his time served Escoffier returned to the kitchen with a singular goal in sight; to improve on the already established methods of cooking and documenting recipes.  Escoffier had become disgusted with the way the majority of chefs carried themselves, largely a group of inebriated profane cooks (a trait that he would later abolish from his kitchen), and the fact that cooking was not a respected vocation.  Though he based most of his techniques on those developed by Antoine Carême, he found the recipes to be cumbersome, convoluted, and difficult to recount to others; so he began to expound a system of codification, but not only for recipes but the kitchen as  a whole.   It was Escoffier that gave us the brigade de cuisine, a system of titles based on military discipline that created a definitive hierarchy in the kitchen.  According to his dogma the kitchen was set up with the chef as the general and all other ranks bellow, each having a specific title and set of responsibilities; all said there are 26, starting with the Chef de Cuisine and descending down the food chain to the even designate who washed the pots and who took care of the knives.  The ideals behind the system are two fold.  First, to establish order in an otherwise malcontent environment; and second, to give every person a sense of dignity and pride in their job by giving them a title.               

    Escoffier wrote his celebrated book Le Guide Culinaire in 1903, with the first English translation appearing in 1907.  The current edition in use is the forth which was revised in 1921, but not translated till 1979.  His intention was for the book to not only catalogue recipes in a manner, which chefs could easily reference, but to provide a text for commis and students to learn from.  The book itself is seems daunting to many not in the culinary arts because it is written in a manner that presumes the reader to have a knowledge of cooking, and merely needs to reference a recipe.  For example, there are no weights and measures as are found in modern era cook books, instead it references that for so many kilos of an ingredient are used in a certain ratio of grams to another ingredient.  This book, paired with Le Répertoire de la Cuisine written by Louis Saulnier (a student of his), provide the backbone of the modern culinary discipline to this day.