Chef George Auguste Escoffier carries the distinction of
having revolutionized French cuisine. Born in 1846 in Villeneuve-Loubet,
France, Escoffier entered the professional kitchen at age 13, when he worked in
the restaurant of his uncle in Nice. He later moved on to work in restaurants
in Paris; Lucerne, Switzerland; and Monte Carlo, Monaco. While in Monte Carlo,
Escoffier made the acquaintance of the hotelier Cezar Ritz, who provided
Escoffier with an opportunity to make French food famous worldwide. In 1890
Ritz asked him to head the kitchen of London's illustrious Savoy Hotel.
When Ritz later opened the Carlton Hotel (also, Ritz-Carlton) in 1899, he again enlisted the famous chef to manage the hotel's kitchen, which Escoffier did until 1919. It was at the Carlton that Escoffier introduced the á la carte menu. Working with Ritz he raised hospitality to new heights, offering his refined but simplified food to an international clientele made up of the famous, rich, and powerful. It has been reported that Kaiser Wilhelm II told Escoffier, "I am the Emperor of Germany, but you are the emperor of chefs."
Escoffier is credited with having simplified the elaborate haute cuisine created by another great French chef, Marie-Antoine Careme (1784-1833). Careme is recognized as a founder of haute cuisine, that is, the art of preparing food with the best ingredients, utilizing proven techniques, and using as much time as needed to create the meal. A pastry chef and designer, Careme's cooking was quite decorative, as evidenced by his use of architectural drawings as the basis for his culinary creations.
His cooking was uniquely focused on elegance and decoration, and he sought to establish a school of cookery that would bring together famous chefs to "set the standard for beauty in classical and modern cookery, and attest to the distant future that the French chefs of the 19th century were the most famous in the world." Careme did set the standards for French cooking in the early 1800s, publishing several books, such as The Classic Cuisine, in which he described la grande cuisine française, detailing a wide range of classic French dishes and their sauces and recording them in an organized code. The grande cuisine became popular in the kitchens of the nobility and eventually gained acceptance in hotels and restaurants as well.
Escoffier built on Careme's work in systematizing the repertoire of classic French dishes. He also attempted to refine and simplify the cuisine further. An example of this can be seen in how Escoffier approached sauces, the backbone of French cooking. In A Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy, Andre L. Simon classifies modern sauces as either the Careme and Escoffier type. He notes that "Careme and his disciples produced sauces that were works of art; beautiful and delicious, but complicated," but that their sauces "killed more than they helped the flavour of the meat or game, fish or poultry with which they were served."
In contrast, Escoffier's sauces aimed to "help and not to hide the flavour of whatever dish they adorned." Escoffier's forward-thinking taste is evidenced by the fact that many modern chefs still adhere to his principles, such as lightening sauces and using fresh foods when seasonally available. Indeed, perhaps Escoffier's greatest contribution to classical French cuisine was his effort to respectfully simplify it. "Because it is simplified on the surface, it does not lose its value. On the contrary, tastes are constantly being refined and cooking must be refined to satisfy them," Escoffier is quoted as saying. He did away with the then popular highly wrought food displays and their inedible garnishes, thus forcing the dishes' flavors and textures to stand on their own.
He can also be credited with modernizing the menu, greatly reducing the number of courses served in a meal and systematizing the order in which dishes are served. Escoffier recognized that although the French middle class could afford the cost of dining, they did not have the requisite leisure time to consume the sort of meal enjoyed by the nobility. Responding to this problem he invented the culinary "brigade" system, which split the kitchen into areas that performed specific jobs, like sauce making or fish cookery. By allowing dishes to be cooked in quick succession, the brigade system speeded up the pace at which a meal could be served, thus moving á la carte dining along efficiently and rapidly.
In addition to refining and simplifying French cuisine, Escoffier made other contributions to the culinary world over the course of his 61-year career. His books, particularly Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1903, are still considered mandatory reading for cooks. Today's chefs can also thank Escoffier for the job's heightened status--his prestige moved the chef from the rank of laborer to that of artist, and he was a strong advocate of a humane working environment for kitchen staff.
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