Sex and vol-au-vents: the scandalous story of the world's first celebrity chef

Telegraph

27-04-2025

More than 20 years ago I visited the Brighton Pavilion. Anyone who's done the tour there will know that you're taken to the Great Kitchen and there you're told that 'this is where the great Carême cooked for The Prince Regent'. (You're also told that this is where he invented caramel, which is useful in learning how to pronounce his name, if, disappointingly, untrue.)
Not long after that, I was travelling through France and I stopped off at Château de Valençay in the Loire. I was only really there for lunch but, again, I took the tour and was told that 'this is where the great Carême cooked'. A little while after that I was filming in Russia – I'm an actor, as well as a writer and historian – and at Peterhof and Pavlovsk, and the palaces at Tsarskoye Selo, if you go around and you go to the kitchens, the Russian guides would say, yes, 'this is where the great Carême cooked'.
Marie-Antoine Carême, known as Antonin throughout his career, seemed to be everywhere.
His was a story I needed to find out more about, and so I went to the British Library, assuming I could look up a biography and turn it into an epic piece of cinema or television. But there was nothing in English. That set me on the path to my first book, published in 2004, Cooking for Kings. It was a biography of Carême that has now, more than two decades later, been turned into a drama for Apple TV+.
Television, I have learned, needs time to come to the boil. But Carême's life and work have always been perfect for the screen. Played by Benjamin Voisin in this version, Antonin Carême was the world's first celebrity chef. He rose from humble beginnings in Paris in the early 19th century to the height of culinary stardom in Napoleon's Europe. In our story, he dreams only of becoming the most famous chef in the world, but his talent and ambitions attract the attention of renowned and powerful politicians and women, who use him as a spy for France. It's like War and Peace … from the chef's point of view. And it is garlanded with glamour, royalty and vast historical panoramas.
So the life of Carême is epic, but in biography, you talk about the life as well as the argument for the life. Here is where food comes in: food is such a brilliant way to tell stories. Food is our first experience of love and caring, but food becomes power, it becomes sex, it becomes social history, an act of communion – it is the metaphor that keeps on giving. I was convinced that the world around Carême, what it was to actually be a professional chef – at the point the idea of being a 'chef' at all takes off – was compelling.
Although Carême would never have been described as a celebrity in his time, because the word didn't exist in its modern sense, he's the first chef to become rich and famous writing cookbooks (he published dozens of volumes between 1815 and his death in 1833). So there is that simple issue about what it is to be iterated within the world of fame.
It is sometimes argued by food historians that Carême might not have been so much an innovator as just lucky – someone who was a brilliant self-publicist and the first person to link glamour and food, put it in a book and get classic recipes in print. Because, of the three founding fathers of French gastronomy – Brillat-Savarin, Grimod de La Reynière and Carême – it's only Carême who actually cooked for a living. Although there had been relatively well-known court chefs in the past, and indeed there had been cookbooks before him, there had been nothing like him, the so-called 'Napoleon of the kitchen'.
The TV show hails from my biography but it is obvious when you watch it that it is not a documentary. I'm a dramatist, I'm a playwright, I'm a screenwriter. But I'm fascinated by social history masquerading as biography. The character is formed by the world around them, so as a dramatist you get to go on the informed, hopefully, imaginative journey of that which we cannot quite know. You can speculate and create.
The intention with Carême was always to let it rip and have fun. But the wonderful thing about the real man is he was a Forrest Gump/Zelig sort of character. He just kept on turning up. Whether it was with Napoleon or the Tsar, or Talleyrand or the Prince Regent – he was absolutely, definitively there in the background. His recipes have these little memoires et souvenirs, noting who he met and cooked for, so we know he was there. As a writer I thought, 'Let's have fun with that. And then let's knit it all together and make sure that the food is central to everything'.
For Carême, food was drama – that's what he does. One of his gifts to modern food practice is that he helped bring in the new style of eating, service à la russe, which is to eat in a series of courses. But he grew up in a world where they practised service à la française. That was all about food presentation, where it's laid out on the table as you walk in, like the banqueting room at the Brighton Pavilion. There is quite a lot of architecture to compete with, and the food was meant to hold its own.
And so for him, it was all about creating spectacle, from huge pyramids (in episode one, we show Carême creating such a structure based on Giza, to woo the British ambassador who is dining with Napoleon), to whole ships made of pastry and icing. He created and named the vol-au-vent and took mille-feuille to (literal) new heights. He loved telling a story with food, and that was a great opportunity for us when making this series. Obviously, there have been fabulous dramas set in kitchens, but with Carême you are putting drama on a plate, because he's literally building stage sets in pastry and sugar and then setting fire to them or slashing them with swords. He was like a Heston Blumenthal figure, pushing the technologies and investing food with a story and a theatricality.
Creating that kind of culinary spectacle on screen is, it goes without saying, not easy. Back in the day when I would knock on doors and beg TV and film executives to take this idea seriously, there would sometimes be a little bit of teeth-sucking and the question: 'Have you any idea how expensive this is?' In terms of television production, you're taking on board the most preposterous rider in the history of Hollywood. 'How many versions of that dish?' I would be asked.
The main problem with filming food is actually when it's being eaten, or semi-destroyed and then it has to be recreated for new takes. But a lot of the Carême story is purely food theatre, where the food is simply meant to be looked at, admired, salivated over or marvelled at in preparation.
This, I happen to know, makes life easier for the actors. My first ever job as an actor was the Merchant Ivory film Howards End. Just a small part, but it was a dinner party, and I made the vast mistake of digging into the jelly, first day, first take. And then, of course, you've got to be doing it every take that follows. I learned my lesson on that. You have to pace yourself.
Although it's not what Carême would have advocated.
Having called Carême a celebrity chef, it encourages comparison with those of today. People often ask me whether he was more Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver, Marco Pierre White or (more recently) Carmy from The Bear. I can happily evade that difficult question by saying that, yes, Carême was sexy as all hell, a sort of rock 'n' roll celebrity chef … but that there could never be anyone actually like Carême. That's the point. That's why you can't take your eyes off him.