A Food Memoir

A friend remembers her father's classical training and the foods of childhood....

Nothing to Scoff at! by Kayakigirl

Bangers n’ mash, mince n’ tatties, bubble n’ squeak, bachelor’s buttons, welsh rabbit….. my father did most of the cooking in our house, typical British fare with very silly names, it seemed. Actually that last one is Welsh Rarebit, not really made of rabbits at all. As a child, my father’s explanations about the food we were eating piqued my curiosity. Strangely enough, I came to discover that this pedestrian food was being cooked by an Escoffier-trained chef. Escoff-i-who?

Often called the greatest chef of all time, Escoffier left behind a legacy still enjoyed by professional chefs, home cooks, and gastronomes in France and abroad. He wrote several cookbooks, invented some 10,000 recipes, and culinary institutions around the world continue to teach his methods. Escoffier helped to raise the esteem of a profession that had once been regarded as lowly and coarse.

What does this French dude have to do with my dad? Well, prior to WWII, my dad was a professional chef in London, England. Specifically he trained at the Carleton Hotel (now known as the Ritz Carleton), where the greatest chef of all time, Georges Auguste Escoffier, had been the Director of Kitchens a couple of decades earlier. The intensive Escoffier training was not just for the chefs either. Did you know that to get a job serving as a waiter in a fine London hotel at that time, you had to memorize and pass a test on Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, not just the recipes but the food preparation techniques as well?

After sustaining a superficial wound during the early days of the war, my dad was posted to Gibraltar as the chef for the Royal Scots Regiment. He must have put his Escoffier training to good use because somebody noticed he could cook! When the King of Norway was anchored nearby, my dad was ferried out to his ship to cook a feast fit for a king.

Escoffier techniques and recipes were quoted to me at random intervals throughout my childhood, after all, his book was the “bible” of the culinary world. So, in addition to the silly named British dishes referenced above, my dad taught me about Peche Melba, how to make a roux, why Ox Tail soup was worth making, how to make Béchamel sauce and about the joy of chocolate anise truffles (how many kids know what anise is?).In my opinion, that’s nothing to scoff at!

You can download Escoffier’s cookbook for $7.00. Check it out!
http://www.escoffier-online.com/