Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carme, the First Celebrity Chef

A unique feast of biography and Regency cookbook, Cooking for Kings takes readers on a chef's tour of the palaces of Europe in the ultimate age of culinary indulgence.

Drawing on the legendary cook's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Antonin Carme's meteoric rise from Paris orphan 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.

Carme had an unfailing ability to cook for the right people in the right place at the right time. He knew the favorite dishes of King George IV, the Rothschilds and the Romanovs; he knew Napoleon's fast-food requirements, and why Empress Josephine suffered halitosis.

Carme's recipes still grace the tables of restaurants the world over. Now classics of French cuisine, created for, and named after, the kings and queens for whom he worked, they are featured throughout this captivating biography. In the phrase first coined by Carme, "You can try them yourself."