February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The lowdown:
Handling the various cooking utensils on stage, Ian Kelly seems as if might be as skilled in the kitchen as he is a storyteller. In “Cooking for Kings” he recounts the life of Parisian Antonin Careme, the original celebrity chef, whose most famous client was perhaps the obese prince regent of England, the future King George IV.
“Celebrity” chefs dot the culinary landscape nowadays like cloves stuck into the surface of a Christmas ham, while names such as Wolfgang Puck, Julia Child, James Beard, Mario Batali and Paul Prud’homme are, or have been, as familiar to television watchers as those of the networks’ news anchors.
But, by all accounts, it wasn’t always thus. Antonin Careme, who began life as a Parisian orphan, managed to become one of the best-known names of the early 19th century, not only as one of the great chefs of Europe, but also as the inventor of the white baker’s cap called a togue, the souffl