DISHES OF SEDUCTION

Escoffier was convinced that women were the way forward for gastronomy. He wanted them in his dining rooms to complement the elegance of his cuisine. Crucially, he also named key dishes after women he admired. It worked. The fashionable and feminine rolled in.

Most celebrated of the dishes is pèche Melba, created for the Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba. Her performance of Lohengrin at

Covent Garden so impressed Escoffier that he created the peach, vanilla ice and raspberry purée in her honour. He served it on a swan carved from ice.

Crèpes Suzette was likely the result of the Prince of Wales being so excited by a pancake dish (mandarin, curaçao) that he insisted Escoffier name it after his dinner companion – the actress Suzanne Reichenberg (initially served non-flambéed). Meanwhile, Escoffier

underlined his friendship with France’s greatest turn-ofthe-century actress in fraises Sarah Bernhardt – strawberries in a preparation of curaçao mousse and pineapple sorbet. For Bernhardt’s only thespian rival, Gabrielle Réju (“Réjane”), the chef came up with a salad of rice, hard-boiled egg, grated horseradish, truffles and salted Chantilly cream. The salade Réjane apparently matched the actress’s own piquancy.

Back at the opera, Scottishborn soprano Mary Garden was making a vivid impression, not least in her collaborations with Debussy. She took the lead in his Pelléas et Mélisande, earning a dish of syruped pears, softened cherries, raspberry sauce and whipped cream: poires Mary Garden.

Sticking with pears, poires Belle Hélène (poached pear, chocolate sauce, vanilla ice) is said to be Escoffier’s tribute to Offenbach’s eponymous operetta – but other chefs claimed the creation. Escoffier was only 18 when the work was staged, so maybe he refined the dish later. Escoffier also created a chickenwith-crayfish dish for France’s foremost 19th-century female novelist; it comes to us as suprême de poulet George Sand. And he had turned his attention to

Cora Pearl, a successful courtesan.

Born in London as

Emma Elizabeth Crouch, she ended up in Paris, changed her name and seduced any nobleman to hand. Her earnings ran to several Parisian townhouses, a château and 60 racehorses. Escoffier acknowledged the grande horizontale’s rise to prominence with, fittingly, lamb tenderloin: noisette-d’agneau Cora Pearl.