The Ritz Dining Room - The First Master Chef: Michel Roux on Escoffier

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"Escoffier is the best chef in the world, first and foremost. But it's about his cooking. It's his heritage of France. It's about the ingredients. It's about the complexity of the sources. It was the style, the panache of how they actually cooked.

He tried to get the English who were very conservative at the time to eat all kinds of things, but frogs' legs... he was very afraid that they would never touch and they would turn their nose up. So, one evening at very grand banquet, he actually put on the menu «Nymphes à l'aurore». And of course, everybody got up and said, 'This is one of the finest banquets ever! The first course was fantastic! What was it?!'. And of course nobody knew. So the next day, the reporters went around to his office and said, 'Tell us, tell us, this was so fantastic!' So he said, 'Well, it was frogs' legs. But you wouldn't have eaten them anyway, so I decided to call them nymphs!"
John Williams, chef

Michel Roux Jr explores the life and influence of his great culinary hero, Georges Auguste Escoffier - the man who turned eating into dining.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ypy02
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Cuisine
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