Of Carème it is necessary I should say a little before he proceeds to tell his own story. If you believe him (see passim the six volumes of his culinary works) he was the Homer and Virgil, the Corneille and Dryden, the Pope and Boileau, the Byron and De Béranger of cookery. Every other art, noble or ignoble, every other superiority, literary, legal, histrionic, saltatory, medicinal, modistical, may be contested with the Gauls; but great and little of all nations, peers and pork-men, boyars and butchers, graffs and gastronomers, of whatever land, all by common consent agree in shouting, in loud cosmopolitan acclaim, the glories and the greatness of Carème. “He was a man,” says one of his disciples, “whose tension and activity of mind were never exhausted; the more tedious and difficult were his duties, the more brilliant he emerged from them.” The greatest men in ancient and modern times have written their own history. Plato in his choicest dialogues gives us an insight into his own character; Cicero, in his work “De Oratore,” paints himself under a feigned name; Caesar writes us an account of his own exploits in his “Commentaries,” as the Duke of Wellington does in his “Despatches;” Montecuculli penned his own Memoirs; and Napoleon laboured at the “Mémoriel de St. Hélène;” why, therefore, should not a greater man in his own estimation than any one among them all, reveal his own precious history and the mysteries of his science, and lay patent to the public the simple grandeur of his batteries de cuisine? Ay, why not? Open the pages of his instructive Memoirs and Autobiography, and see whether there is any one of the Useful Knowledge Society heroes who have gone so far in the pursuit of knowledge under imminent and impending difficulties, as that really noble fellow Anthony Carème? Did he not abandon the first families to write his cookery and the practice of some great contemporaries? for, observe you, Carème is not always peering a Brobdignagian I under your nose, or flourishing the flaunting motto of “Ego et Rex Meus” before your perplexed eyes. No, this good savoury Samaritan cook has some bowels, some thoughts of others, some kindliness for the absent and the departed. He seems always with the modesty of real merit to say, though of the strongest in his generation, “Vixere fortes Agamemnona.” But his virtues were not merely negative, they were of the most positive kind. He would only accept places “where his taste for study would not be interfered with;” for his ambition was “serious and elevated.” Then he felt, poignantly felt, “the misery of living among men destitute of education.”
Rousseau, in that most eloquent of books, “The Confessions,” tells us under what circumstances certain of his writings were composed. The gruff Sam. Johnson, the delightful debt-contracting Oliver Goldsmith, the ingenious and fantastic William Hazlitt are equally communicative; but, maugré this copious sincerity, what are these men to Carème? Is there any one sentence in all they have ever written equal to the following? “From the time I arranged the sideboard of the Saxon ambassador, the thought of the ‘Pâtissier Royale,’ and the ‘Cuisinier Parisien,’ entered my head.” Cause and effect are here beautifully, lucidly transparent. Dr. Brown and Dugald Stewart, and all the Scotch mystifiers, might have written on the subject till the crack of doom, and left the darkness more dim, and the subject more perplexed; it is only Carème who has made, in throwing off this bright sentence, the doctrine quite plain.
“It was at the little inn at Llangollen,” says Hazlitt, “after a supper, that I wrote such a sketch” (which he names). See how great geniuses fall on the same style and method. “It was in the night,” says Carème, “after a short sleep, that I lately dictated to my daughter my most recent chapters.”
“In the busiest period of my service with Alexander,” says this ingenious maker of sauces, “I never once abandoned my evening notes.” Admirable, glorious man! who will not think in reading this of the parallel passage in the life of Fox, who, in the busiest conflicts of party, left the blaze and bustle of the Commons to read Aristophanes, as the other great performer left the blaze and bustle of the kitchen to compose his evening notes. It was owing to these “viginti annorum lucubrationes”—it was owing to the “severe studies of the empire,” that he was at length, after wrestling with difficulties unheard of, enabled “to seize on sugared entremets as his domain in fee.” He had, too, all the independence of mind of a great genius, “the surveillance of Russia appeared degrading to him, and he promptly left the land of the tyrant and the slave. Nor was this all: such was the profoundness of his ennui in this work-a-day world of ours—in this heavy, muddy, manufacturing England—that he was forced to leave the service of George IV. to resume the composition of his works.
These works are collected in six volumes; and, as one great genius may be permitted to speak of another, “they are,” says William Hall, cook to Thomas Peere Williams, and “conductor” of the parliamentary dinners of Viscount Canterbury,—“they are the productions of a man whose imagination greatly enlarged the variety of entrées and entremets previously practised, and whose clear and perspicuous details render them facile, not only to the artist who has already an advance in his profession, but also to those whose knowledge of the higher code of the kitchen has been necessarily limited.”
The cooks of Rome and Athens stood in the market-place with aprons on, waiting to be hired for the occasion, and, after they had done the day’s service, were ignominiously dismissed out of doors; but the cooks of our day are the friends and familiars of the great. “I conversed for more than an hour on gastronomy with Prince Esterhazy,” says Carème, “and it is astonishing what a knowledge of the art he displayed.” How different, however, is the fate of different authors! Corneille died in an unknown corner, in forlornness and distress; Goldsmith was always in want of a guinea; Samuel Johnson was often sorely pinched; glorious John Dryden laboured hard for the day’s dinner; Fielding was often in the hands of bailiffs, and Savage and Otway lived and laboured in misery and distress: but Carème, unlike these, gained not only immortality, but money; not only praise, but good solid pudding. “My works,” says he, “created me, exclusive of places whose emoluments I sacrificed, a yearly income of more than 20,000 francs.”
The most amusing of these works is undoubtedly an autobiography, which he did not live to finish. As it has not appeared in an English dress, I give the gem in a translation made at the time it was published.
“Although born of one of the poorest families of France, of a family which counted amongst its members five-and-twenty children—although my father, to save me, literally flung me into the street; Fortune, nevertheless, rapidly smiled on me, and a good fairy often took me by the hand, to lead me in the right way. In the eyes of my enemies (and I have many) I have more than once appeared the spoiled child of Fortune. I have accepted and refused, at various times, the finest places; I have abandoned the first families in Europe to write my practice of cookery and that of some great contemporaries gone to their account, whose principles and practice were engraved in my memory.
“I have only accepted good places, however, in families where my taste for study, and the views which I early entertained as to eminence in my profession, would not be interfered with. In the rapid passage to all these places heaps of money were offered me half a score of times, but I have not been over-desirous of mere wealth. My ambition was serious and elevated, and very early in life I desired to elevate my profession into the dignity of an art. It is precisely in this road that I have encountered the greatest obstructions. I have everywhere found idleness and envy—that miserable disposition of mind made wretched by every superiority, and above all by that of a comrade. But I have had more success than I desired, though the exceptionable position in which I have been placed has never diminished the misery of often living among men destitute of all education. For some years I have sought the means to give these men a moral culture (l’éducation du cœur); but I could not very clearly see my way, for this self-education in the midst of an active life is the most difficult of acquisition. The example of a family is necessary to educate our soul.
“Here and there I have some remembrance of seriously disagreeable passages, owing to the low rich (vilains riches); but I ought, on the other hand, to recall to mind the good, the excellent conduct of gentlemen of truth, noble seigneurs that I have served. I have never had to complain but of the conduct of a parvenu, a name which the fellow decorated himself with without tact. It was under the Empire that I was most employed; it was, above all, at this era that my studies were severe; “c’est surtout à cette époque que j’ai fait des fortes études.” My researches were made in good time; they were continuous; they were serious. At M. de Talleyrand’s I was under Boucher, chef des services of the prince. I there perfected myself in one of the principal parts of cookery, which I afterwards developed. Some years previously I had executed many parts of the beaux extras. A little later I had the management of the charming little dinners given by a distinguished and lofty-minded man, M. de Lavalette. I also cooked the dinners and arranged the sideboard of the Saxon Ambassador. It is from that period that the first decided thought of the “Pâtissier Royal” and of the “Cuisinier Parisien,” first entered my mind. I now acquired the excellent habit of noting down in the evening, on returning home, the modifications that I had made in my labour, each day bringing some change. With pen in hand, I set down the reasons which had determined my mind. That which then particularly occupied me was the finer parts of the oven’s produce, and the cold sugared entremets. This labour is the most delicate portion of the art of the pastry-cook. I invented much in this branch—the foundation, the execution, the form—all these parts became easy to me, and I seized on them as of my domain in fee.