Veloute(Chicken Veloute + Cream)Georges Auguste Escoffier
Born on 28 October 1846 in Villeneuve-Loubet, France
Died on 12 February 1935 in Monte Carlo, Monaco
As far as is possible to tell from the records, Escoffier, the king of chefs, was a calm and equanimous chef de cuisine who spent a good 60 years of his life at the stove.
1859 | Started his apprenticeship at the age of 13 in the kitchen, table service and buying of produce in the restaurant belonging to his uncle. Then first jobs as a chef at the Hotel Belleveue near Nice and in the Petit Moulin Rouge in Paris.
1866 | Chef de cuisine in the French general staff, among others during the Franco-Prussian War (1870 to 1871). Prisoner of war.
1872 | Return to Nice as the chef de cuisine at the Hotel Luxemburg.
1873 | Then to Paris, as the chef de cuisine at the Petit Moulin Rouge.
1876 | Opening of his own restaurant Le Faisan doré in Cannes.
1878 | On 28 August marriage to Delphine Daffis, with whom he had three children Paul, Daniel and Germaine.
1879 | Took over the management of the Maison Chevet at the royal palace in Paris.
1880 | Chef de cuisine in the Casino in Boulogne-sur-Mer and in the Restaurant Maire in Paris.
1884 | César Ritz recruits Auguste Escoffier as chef de cuisine. First attempts to rethink traditional French cuisine.
1890 | Took over the management of the kitchen at the Savoy Hotel in London, where important creations such as the Homard à l’américaine, Poire Hélène or Pêche Melba were developed.
1897 | Disputes with the owners of the Savoy. Escoffier leaves the Savoy with the majority of his team and returns to Paris where he was recruited by César Ritz for the reopening of the Ritz on the Place Vendôme for the organisation of the kitchen. The European gourmet community already follows him everywhere.
1899 | Reorganisation and management of other kitchens on behalf of César Ritz, among others that of the Ritz in London. The arrangement to manage the kitchens of the hotels in London and Paris for César Ritz lasted until 1920. Escoffier works on his culinary guide, the «Guide Culinaire».
1903 | His work Guide Culinaire, a culinary guide, is published.
1919 | Escoffier is appointed an Knight of the Legion of Honour by the French President Raymond Poincaré. In the same year, Escoffier, who is now 73, writes his memoirs «L’aid-mémoire culinaire». The first edition appears in 1923.
1920 | Escoffier retires with his wife.
Guide Culinaire
The content of the culinary guide, or to give it its original title in French «Guide Culinaire», still appears very simple, streamlined, extremely contemporary and above all timeless, even today. Even more than a hundred years after the first edition, the content and language of every teaching manual of the present is based on Escoffier’s culinary guide. Even if the basics already existed back then, the culinary foundations were still an unordered pluralism of styles at the end of the 19th century. Ordering structures were not defined; there was an extensive lack of clarity and ease of understanding. As the initiator of the Grand Cuisine and as the créateur of diverse dishes still used today, Auguste Escoffier left an indelible mark on French cuisine, even though he did not of course invent the cuisine. Work techniques, production practices, types of basic preparation and the most important dishes and creations already existed. The ingenuity of his work lay in the way he merged, straightened, streamlined and structured the existing processes and brought a new, heavily simplified and easy-to-understand order to them. Escoffier was not only a brilliant chef, he was also very obviously an outstanding organiser with exceptional management qualities. He not only reorganised the traditional cuisine with all its national and international styles and influences; he also restructured kitchen organisation with all its work processes into the form that we know today, with its brigade system and allocation of duties at specific locations. It was probably hardly an accident that Escoffier’s work was done at precisely the time of developing classic modernism. At the beginning of the 20th century, a variety of new artistic styles starts to develop that, although they are based on the past, nevertheless revolutionise the present. Cubism, constructivism, Dadaism and surrealism develop. Expressionism, the new objectivity and Bauhaus develop. And behind all of it the striving to comprehend the reality behind things. Escoffier’s work is basically the fundamental disclosure of the logical structure of French cuisine. Its simplicity was and is so ingenious that the Guide Culinaire constitutes both the formal and the practical basis for the Western world’s cuisine because it describes the fundamental reality that underlines a chef’s art.
Bouillon de Viande / Bouillon a l’Os (Meat Broth / Bone Broth)
Ingredients for 1 l (1 3/4 pt or 4 1/2 U.S. cups)
800 g (1 lb 12 oz) beef brisket bones, roughly
