World's Best Chef? Ernie picks his top 3

Like the hero of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity I’m a compulsive list maker. (Top five food-flavoured records: Booker T and the MGs’ Green Onions/Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant/Victoria Spivey’s Gimme a pig’s foot and a bottle of beer/The Band’s King Harvest/The Smiths’ Meat is Murder – this is probably Dennis Cotter’s number one!).
Having served on the judging panel for our restaurant awards back in August I reckon most of my fellow judges would agree that the task of deciding who should receive the accolade Chef of the Year was the hardest station of all. Chefs, coming in many shapes and sizes, are equally diverse in their personalities, food philosophies, signature dishes and culinary and organisational talents.
Draped in my armchair the other night, stimulated by a contemplative dram of Highland Park, I found it amusing to ponder “If there was an award for The Greatest Chef of All Time Everywhere, who would it be?”
Today’s maestri are, I’m afraid, not at the range despite my admiration expressed in print for Richard Corrigan’s boundless zest for living and Gordon Ramsay’s pithy epithets (I’m thinking of “save the pictures for the puddings” rather than “You brainless lazy f*XX*@!”). Not even Kevin or Guillaume could hold a candle to the old-timers for ingenuity, perseverance and dedication. Even Conrad Gallagher’s well-documented rise and subsequent headlong spiral pales into insignificance compared with that of Marcus Gavius Apicus, born about 25AD, who compiled a recipe book De re coquinaria libri decem (Cuisine in Ten Books) that was still in vogue in 14th century Britain, eat your heart out Delia and Darina. Apicus pioneered an early form of foie gras, force-feeding sows with figs. He devised recipes for flamingo, nightingales’ tongues and camel crubeen. He chartered a ship and sailed to Libya in search of some fabled jumbo squilla (Latin for Dublin Bay prawn). Famed throughout the Roman Empire for wilful extravagance, one fateful day Apicus looked at his bank statements and decided to top himself rather than make the necessary downward adjustment to a more modest lifestyle. Now that’s class.
Chefs have always been larger than life. Step forward Cyprien Ragueneau, pastry chef extraordinaire who confected wonderful almond tarts, marzipan cakes and musk-flavoured savouries at his café in the Rue Saint-Honoré, keeping open house for wannabe poets who paid him with verses. He was himself seduced by the literary muse, crafting a tragedy, Don Olibrius, but there were no takers to produce it. Eventually his business failed, surprise, surprise and off he went to join Molière’s theatre company. Alas Ragueneau’s thespian career never advanced beyond spear-carrier and candle-snuffer. At his death he left a legacy of 456 sonnets, 4 elegies, 63 odes, 19 plays and recipes too numerous to count. It was with great reluctance that I eliminated Ragueneau from my final three, but he remains an inspiration.
Necessity, the say is the mother of invention. Which is why my muster role of culinary heroes includes Choron, who invented elephant (not free-range but from the local zoo) bourguignon during the Siege of Paris. For sheer bravura what about Dugléré who prepared a seven course dinner for three emperors on one night, which they washed down with Roederer champagne, Latour, Lafite, Margaux and, allegedly, Château d’Yquem which I prefer to think was Yquem – quelle finesse! Or the endearingly myopic Marius Bise who told the young Cézanne “Cash only!” when the latter offered to pay for his dinners in paintings. I can empathise with Bise; reviewing records back in the sixties I gave the thumbs-down to ‘ A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Then there are the great innovators who moved the culinary art forward and the recorders who catechised the process for the benefit of their peers or successors. Among the latter are Taillevent who, in or around 1375, produced Le Viandier, the first book specifically written for professionals. The world viande, in medieval French meant not ‘meat’ but ‘foodstuff’ and it’s fascinating to see the inclusion of lamprey, eel, pike and carp alongside beef and pork, rabbit and wild boar, swans, peacocks and turtledoves. Eggs, milk and cheeses also featured. Le Viandier is as much a culinary history of the time as a ‘how to’.
But the three for the medals have got to be that bit extra-special. So for third place I’ve chosen Fernand Point, in the words of his biographer ‘the pharaoh of Le Pyramide at Vienne’. His cooking was French classical down to the last pinch of sea salt; his disciples included Alain Chapel, the Troisgros brothers and Paul Bocuse all of whom testified as to the master’s teaching skills. Though I’ve enjoyed poulet en vessie and his famous marjolaine I think the thing I relish most about Fernand Point is his aptitude for the mot sage. Two examples: ‘garnishes must be matched to a dish like a tie to a suit’ and ‘a meal must be as harmonious as a symphony and as well-constructed as a Norman cathedral’. What other statement so well epitomises the chef’s job, combination of art and craft?
Taking silver is the phenomenal Antonin Carême, a Paris urchin, in 1873 kicked out of home to live on the streets at the age of ten. At sixteen, he was apprentice to Bailly, one of the finest pastrycooks in Paris. Any spare time he had was spent in the National Library, copying architectural drawings on which he based his pâtisserie creations. Still in his teens, he was recruited by the patrician epicure Talleyrand, who went on to use Carême’s cuisine as a tool of diplomacy, carving up Europe as confidently as his chef carved a side of beef. You could say that, between them, they invented the business lunch. Carême served the Prince Regent, later George IV and Tsar Alexander I; introduced classic Russian dishes into western European cuisine, including borscht and koulibiac. He died at fifty ‘burnt out by the flame of his genius and the charcoal of his roasting spit’ – sounds familiar, though these days he’d maybe have delegated the cooking, opened a string of restaurants, secured a slot on ‘Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook’ and gone on to live to a ripe old age. He wrote several books including the five-volume L’Art de Cuisine au XIX siècle. Both the vol-au-vent and the large flat meringue are attributed to Carême. He redesigned utensils and re-styled chefs clothing, including the toque that’s become a Euro-symbol of quality. He invented the concept of the ‘mother sauces’. He never achieved his stated ambition to open the mother of all cookery schools but, even so, Carême’s eternal greatness is assured.
On my podium, gold medal around his neck, stands the awe-inspiring figure of Auguste Escoffier, probably best remembered for Peach Melba and his instruction “faîtes simple” – ignored by millions of restaurants during the recent era of tall, tortured food. He was a restless innovator; as chef de cuisine for the French army during the Franco-Prussian War he pioneered the technique of canning. With the hotelier César Ritz, whom he knew from training days in Monte Carlo, Escoffier took the London Savoy to the top of the culinary tree. Moving to the Carlton, he made that hotel’s restaurant famous throughout the world. At one point he got sacked for endorsing products, for lending his name to a jar of sauce – we’re talking the early 1900s here, truly a man ahead of his time. In his own time he was dubbed ‘the emperor of chefs’. A brilliant organiser and a prolific writer (Ma Cuisine, published in 1934 is well worth a read), Escoffier vetoed ostentatious displays and over-elaborate garnishes; emphasised the use of seasonal ingredients and advocated lighter sauces. He simplified the professional kitchen, culling the autonomous sections that made for excess waste and duplication of labour.
Escoffier’s logical approach to his craft became the framework for culinary training as soon as it became formalised. His influence persists through to the present day; every one of us who has ever stirred a sauce, penned a line, or raised a fork in the cause of creating, evaluating or eating food has been touched by it.