Books
Carême, Talleyrand’s Chef
Many may have discovered the figure of Antonin Carême (1783-1833), “le chef des rois, le roi des chefs,” through the Apple TV+ series. But this chef whose specialty was making pastries inspired by architectures he found in tomes of the royal library was well known in France, where several monographs on him have been published, including the catalog of the 1984 exhibition. This wealth of bibliographic material was the source for the talk given at the Institut de France in 2023 by the architect, critic, and historian François Chaslin, who now offers an exquisite small book containing over a hundred illustrations, many taken from the treatises of confectionery architecture that Carême published, which presented works classified as ‘pittoresques,’ ‘royales,’and ‘parisiennes.’
In Talleyrand’s service for most of his career, this cook – posthumously declared national pâtissier – deemed that of the five arts (architecture, painting, sculpture, music, poetry), it was architecture that had pastry-making as a main branch, and his books full of pictures of edible constructions had their heyday. Chaslin looks for echoes of pastry architectures in Flaubert and Proust, confirms the term’s ill repute among the avant-gardes, and reminds us that Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia was censured for being a cake in a salad of styles, but does not fail to quote the Dalí who in 1933, in Minotaure, wrote: “Beauty will be edible, or not at all.” Carême’s surname means ‘Lent,’ but the fasting of this liturgical time produced the opposite effect in his excessive edible constructions.
