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A Little Taste of Chinoiserie and Food – Marie-Antoine Careme’s Chinese Pagoda (in pastry)

Posted: March 13th, 2013 | No Comments »

I recently read Steven Poole’s You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture – I liked this book, I’d been waiting for this book, I am giving this book to people as essential reading because I am not a foodie, don’t like foodies and think the whole food obsession as manifesting itself these days in the west rather silly. Poole, hilariously, punctures the whole bubble of food as religion – buy a copy and read it and you’ll never go near dodgy celebrity chefs or anyone offering “foam” again. I know some people don’t agree – I saw one rather earnest American author fire off at Poole in a fit of rage in Australia recently violently objecting to him mocking foodies just proving he is needed more than ever.

Still, he did put me on to one rather luscious example of food Chinoiserie – which he got, to be fair, from ridiculous chef Heston Blumenthal. Blumenthal is a great admirer of a celebrity chef in the early nineteenth century, Marie-Antoine Careme (apologies, I can’t find the “accents” button to add in the correct Frenchy bits) and apparently invented the daft and pointless toque, or chef’s hat. Anyway, Blumenthal tells of a dinner given for 40 people by the Prince Regent at the Brighton Pavilion (a building of course at the apex of Chinoiserie architecture and interior decoration) – a first course of 48 dishes was followed by eight Careme creations including something called a “Chinese Hermitage” and another dish entitled “The Ruin of a Turkish Mosque”.

There is though some disagreement – others recall eating a specially created “Dutch Hermitage” and (even better) a “Chinese Pagoda”. This may be more accurate as there is indeed a recipe for the latter in Careme’s 1815 best selling cookbook Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien. Careme described all of these themed dishes of his as “pièces montées. And, I don’t believe Poole includes this in his many silly things self-important chefs have said over the centuries but, Careme’s comment that “Architecture is the first amongst the arts, and confectionery is the highest form of architecture” is worthy of inclusion.

And here’s thw disappointing ending to this post – despite searching the internet I can’t find an image of the Careme’s Chinese Pagoda in pastry. I have his Russian Hermitage and Athenian Ruin (both below) but no Chinese Pagoda – anyone got one??

hermitage-pastry

ruins-pastry

 



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