A FEAST TO REMEMBER
The culinary exploits of Xavier Marcel Boulestin, the 1930s
Bazaar columnist whose legacy lives on today
One of the joys of leafing through Bazaar’s archives is discovering the unexpected. For every Evelyn Waugh essay or story by Dorothy L Sayers, there is wit and wisdom from yet another authority of the day. During the 1930s, the Anglophile and chef Xavier Marcel Boulestin was on a glittering culinary trajectory as a writer of cookbooks and the fêted owner of an eponymous Covent Garden restaurant. His classic French cooking attracted an extraordinary array of diners, Virginia Woolf, the Sackville-Wests and Lytton Strachey among them. ‘He is rather proud, this Marcel Boulestin, with his quick eyes and expressive hands, of having a restaurant for the Intelligentsia,’ a 1929 edition reveals. But rather than drawing inspiration from his guests for his Bazaar columns, he shares tales of his gourmet travels, musing on the romance of eating en plein air or the dishes enjoyed in the small villages of France. ‘Let us start full of the spirit of adventure… The best hotel, the finest cooking, let the explorer find it!’ he urges his well-travelled reader in a July 1932 edition. The following summer, in the June issue, he meanders through the Midi, describing the quenelles of fish, gratins of écrevisses and hot pâtés of game ‘in which flavours are cleverly blended or harmoniously contrasted, aromas balanced – like notes by the ear of a musician or colours by the eye of a painter…’ Recipes are an exercise in lyrical brevity, where water is measured by the ‘portglassful’ rather than in millilitres. William Makepeace Thackeray poems are cited to illustrate which wine should be drunk with fish.
The legacy of Boulestin runs deep in Bazaar. He is the precursor to another columnist, who would join almost two decades later: Elizabeth David, an avid fan who quoted him in her cookbooks. Paying tribute to the chef ’s talent, the Boulestin restaurant, which opened in St James’s in 2013, will unveil a special menu to mark 90 years since he launched the original fine-dining establishment. Visit to feast on jambon persillé and duck confit, and join us in raising a glass to the chef whose culinary vision inspired so many who came after him.