Food
Bee Wilson on how the Ritz failed to trickle down
Published 06 January 2003
The standards of the Ritz, like wealth, have failed to trickle down
Modern luxury was invented in the late 19th century by a Swiss peasant and a French locksmith's son. Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier set the standards to which super-rich people across the world have pampered themselves ever since. The night that Diana and Dodi died, they ate scrambled eggs cooked to Escoffier's recipe in the Paris hotel founded by Ritz.
Escoffier's slogan was "Faites simple". Ritz's was "The customer is always right". Both men were perfectionists and workaholics. Had they never met, they would still have been rated among the best in their chosen professions. Together, they were dynamite. At the Grand Hotel Monte Carlo, the Savoy and the Ritz, they established a new brand of indulgent living - English comfort plus French taste was the boast in the brochures. They also reinvented haute cuisine. Before Escoffier, posh food had meant excessively elaborate dishes, served all at once; after him, it meant many fewer dishes, served in successive courses, each dish refined to the fewest ingredients possible, all impeccably chosen. Before Ritz, restaurants had been places where men took courtesans. Other women felt uncomfortable there. After him, women could eat out as greedily as they pleased, without dishonouring themselves. Under Ritz's guidance, Escoffier made thin toast and peaches for Nellie Melba and calf sweetbreads with foie gras puree for Sarah Bernhardt.
A new biography, Escoffier: the king of chefs by Kenneth James (Hambledon, £19.95), celebrates the legacy of these two men. It concludes that the high-society luxury of Escoffier and Ritz "became aims for all, and their standards have filtered down into our ordinary lives. Because of Escoffier and Ritz, we live better." It would be nice if this were true, but I wonder? James's theory is the culinary equivalent of the economic trickle-down effect; and its plausibility is no less questionable.
For one thing, if Ritz's fantasies really were "aims for all", wouldn't this make our lives worse, not better, as we pressed our noses against the window and regretted our lack of silver teapots? "Faites simple" does not mean "make it cheap". As often as not, it means the opposite - "make it exclusive". A typical Escoffier meal consisted of the kind of expensive simplicity that Escoffier's own parents could never have afforded: perhaps caviar and blinis to start with, followed by a rich veloute soup, a fish course, saddle of lamb, the finest petits pois, buttered asparagus, a souffle made from the finest cheese, a fruit dish, some kind of light pastry, the best oriental coffee, and, to round it all off, champagne. This genre of cuisine, however desirable, can never filter down, as it depends on procuring the rarest, priciest foods, then not ruining them.
One exception would be Escoffier's wonderful ways with eggs, which could easily be imitated by society at large but, alas, hardly ever are. Escoffier honed his egg-boiling skills while cooking for soldiers during the Franco-Prussian war. Later, he would list no fewer than 370 ways of cooking eggs, but his favourite was one of the simplest: scrambled. The key was keeping the eggs "soft and creamy" and cooking them very slowly with a lot of butter (one ounce for every six eggs) with cream and extra butter added at the end. Visitors to the Savoy and the Ritz said that his scrambled eggs were the best they'd ever tasted. This is certainly a glorious legacy, but it's still hard to see how it has benefited the rest of us. Most scrambled eggs one eats, especially in hotels, have more in common with a stubborn and watery block of polenta than with Escoffier's buttery mass of curds.
Escoffier was indeed a genius. But let us not delude ourselves that anyone outside of the truffle-eating classes - that is, anyone born into the kind of households that Ritz and Escoffier themselves were - now lives better because of him.
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