Was Carême a spy? The true story of the world’s first celebrity chef

From his beginnings as an abandoned child on the streets of Paris, he rose to the kitchens and banquet halls of the European elite. Known as the ‘chef of kings and king of chefs’ – cataring for the likes of Napoleon, the Prince Regent, Tsar Alexander of Russia, and the mercurial Talleyrand – his culinary mastery earned him fame and fortune, while his bestselling cookbooks secured a lasting legacy.

Now, history’s first celebrity chef has become the centrepiece of a new Apple TV+ drama, Carême. Starring Benjamin Voisin, the eight-part series offers a charming and seductive portrayal of this virtuoso superstar, suggesting his achievements go beyond his elaborate creations in the kitchen and into the murky politics of Napoleonic France.

Was Marie-Antoine Carême really a spy?

There is no evidence that the real Carême ever engaged in espionage.

In his lifetime, rumours swirled that the celebrity chef was using his position to spy on the rich and powerful of Europe, perhaps picking up secrets whispered at the banquet table.

He was, after all, employed for many years by France’s mercurial foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and invited into the exclusive residences of British and Russian royalty.

In Russia, especially, where he briefly worked for Tsar Alexander I, suspicions surrounded Carême that he was there to do more than cook.

Yet while these rumours persist to this day – and form a central strand of Carême’s character in the Apple TV+ drama – the facts to support these claims are as light as one of his delicate pastries.

Who was Marie-Antoine Carême?

Thought to have been born in either 1783 or 1784, Marie-Antoine Carême was the 16th child of a poor family in the Parisian slums.

Given that his surname meant ‘Lent’ (the time of fasting and so foregoing the temptations of food) and his parents naming him after Marie Antoinette, less than a decade before the fall of the monarchy, he seemed destined to leave his start in life behind.

The young Antonin, as he became known, was abandoned by his parents around the time that the French Revolution began, a dangerous time to be left on Paris’s streets. Before he was 10, he was carrying out menial jobs in a chophouse kitchen in exchange for shelter.

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At this time, cuisine was going through seismic changes in France. Restaurants flourished – set up by the chefs of the aristocracy, having found themselves suddenly out of work – and gastronomy (the ‘art of good eating’, as described by the Académie Française) was on the rise. Patisseries, in particular, were extremely popular, and this would prove life-changing for Carême.

At around 15, he began an apprenticeship with the famous pâtissier, Sylvain Bailly. He quickly showed an aptitude, and love, for the craft of making delicate pastries, as well as ambition.

When not working long hours, he spent his time at the Bibliothèque Nationale reading books on his other passion, architecture, and concocted ideas of how to combine his two interests.

The answer was the pièce montée, a decorative table centrepiece made from confectionary. These were great sculptures of pastry, sugar and marzipan several feet high, which took days to assemble and were designed to resemble architectural marvels.

“I believe architecture to be the first amongst the arts,” Carême once claimed, “and the principal branch of architecture is confectionary.” He made miniature, sweet versions of ancient Greek ruins, Roman temples, Egyptian pyramids and Chinese pagodas.

Bailly started showing off Carême’s pièce montées in his shop window, to the delight of passersby. And given the shop’s location near the Palais Royal, Carême’s name was known amongst high society.

How Carême became the world’s first celebrity chef

The intrigues that bind Carême to Talleyrand in the Apple TV+ drama are all acts of fiction.

The chance encounter in which Carême saves Napoleon’s life, his refusal of Napoleon’s reward to work for him at Tuileries and the subsequent arrest of his mentor Sylvain Bailly as punishment are all the result of hefty dramatic licence.

• Read more | Napoleon’s chance: why the French Revolution was Bonaparte's big break

In the real history, it was Carême’s confectionary centrepieces that caught the attention of Talleyrand, the cunning foreign minister of first the revolutionary government and then the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Talleyrand was so impressed that he invited Carême to work for his household. He accepted, and ended up working for Talleyrand for over a decade. At the same time, he set up his own patisserie on the rue de la Paix.

During this period Carême married Henriette Sophy Mahy de Chitenay, though we know little about her background. He also had a daughter, Marie, born to another woman named Agathe Guichardet, but details are scant since his family life always came second to his career.

While in the kitchens of the Hôtel de Galliffet and Château de Valençay, both used by Talleyrand for diplomatic functions, Carême learned to be more than a master pâtissier; he became a chef. He plied his trade at high-society banquets, and developed a style of his own where the presentation of his meals mattered just as much as the taste.

His kitchen resembled a military operation. Preparations began days before any food was eaten, with an army of helpers carrying out meticulously timed and delicate procedures all under his command. “To do justice to the science and research of a dinner so served would require a knowledge of the art equal to that which produced it,” commented one diner of a Carême-catered banquet.

What was Carême’s relationship with Talleyrand like?

The successful professional relationship between Carême and Talleyrand was strengthened by their shared attributes, be it their personal ambition or their love of food. Talleyrand became something of a mentor to Carême, still just in his 20s, perhaps advising him on how to navigate the political landscape.

They met each morning to discuss that evening’s meal, with a clear aim of making Talleyrand’s table the finest in France. Once, he issued a challenge for Carême to devise a new menu every day for an entire year, using only local and seasonal produce. He succeeded.

As the elite of Europe were invited to dine with Talleyrand – he could hold banquets several times a week, each with dozens of guests – Carême’s reputation only grew. He once said, with his typical touch of hubris, “My cooking was the advance guard of French diplomacy.”

What was Carême’s relationship with Napoleon and Joséphine like?

Though Apple TV+’s Carême paints the chef as having fateful encounters with Napoleon, and his empress, Joséphine de Beauharnais, Carême’s real-life contact with the imperial couple was much more scant.

That said, Talleyrand would recommend Carême’s services, on a freelance basis, to his rich and powerful acquaintances, including the emperor of France himself. Napoleon cared little for cuisine himself, but Carême was involved in catering his brother Jérôme’s 1807 wedding to great acclaim.

Three years later, in 1810, Napoleon married the Habsburg archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, and Carême was hired to making the wedding cake. He was then given the responsibility of the confectionary for the baptism of Napoleon’s son.

Though many of Carême’s recipes have survived, Napoleon’s wedding cake is not among them. Perhaps Carême did not feel the need to record it, as Napoleon had been overthrown by the time the chef reached the height of his fame; indeed, Carême was among those cheering Alexander I as a ‘liberator’ when the Russian Tsar entered Paris at the head of his army in 1814.

How Carême became the chef of kings

Far from damaging Carême’s career, Napoleon’s fall from power in 1814 presented even greater opportunities. He was involved in feasts to celebrate the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy; he published his first book, Le Pâtissier royal parisien; and from 9-11 September 1815, he catered a massive military ceremony after the battle of Waterloo.

In 1816, he accepted an invitation to be the chef for the food-loving Prince Regent, the future George IV. He was offered £2,000 a year (around £250,000 today) and would be working in the fabulous, modern kitchens of Royal Pavilion in Brighton.

It seemed to be the ideal job for Carême’s talents – he once created a menu of 120 dishes for a feast celebrating the visit of a grand duke of Russia – yet he only stayed for eight months. He despised the English weather, didn’t get on with the rest of the staff, and grew intensely homesick.

Returning to France in 1817, he found himself much in demand with a reputation not really seen before: that of a celebrity chef. Among his short-term employers were the British ambassador to Austria, Lord Charles Stewart, and his wife, who Carême adored.

In 1818, another offer came: to work for Tsar Alexander I in Russia. Alexander had already experienced Carême’s cooking a handful of times, his first experience coming while staying with Talleyrand in the aftermath of Napoleon’s downfall.

Initially Carême demurred, only deciding to travel to Russia in 1819. the reality did not match the promise. Arriving after an arduous journey, Carême found that the tsar was not even there, and he quickly lost heart in the venture. His time was not wholly wasted, as he fell in love with the city and wrote a book on the city’s architecture, Projets d'architecture dédiés a Alexandre 1. He followed it up with a second volume, this time for Paris.

Carême’s last years

Back in Paris once again, Carême had several more high-profile employers, including a Russian princess, Catherine Bagration, and the banker James Rothschild, the richest man in France.

Rothschild and his wife Betty were desperate to ingratiate themselves with high society, and once they had Carême on board, they hosted lunches and dinners constantly. Among the guests were Les Misérables author Victor Hugo, the novelist Honore de Balzac, the designer of Crystal Palace Joseph Paxton, and composers such as Chopin, Liszt and Rossini.

Carême also published two more bestselling books during the 1820s, which would add to his already vast wealth. By 1832, he was receiving as much as 20,000 francs a year in royalties alone.

But his career had taken its toll. Carême’s health began deteriorating rapidly and he was forced into retirement. He spent his last years compiling his most ambitious book yet, L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle, a five-volume encyclopaedia of thousands of recipes and a step-by-step guide to haute cuisine. Only three were completed before his death, the rest finished years later.

What was Marie-Antoine Carême’s legacy?

Carême died on 12 January 1833, not yet 50 years old, and was buried in Montmartre Cemetery. It is thought that the countless hours spent in unventilated kitchens with his head over charcoal fires resulted in carbon monoxide poisoning.

More than just a celebrity chef of his day, Carême left a legacy in the world of cuisine that is still seen – or more accurately, tasted – today.

The vol-au-vent, soufflé and mille-feuille are just some of the foods he either created or perfected. In his cookbooks (his last book was finished by others after his death) he established the idea of the ‘mother sauces’, foundational sauces in French cooking on which all others are based. What he didn’t invent and name, however, was caramel – his name is simply a close coincidence.

Carême was instrumental in growing France’s reputation for cuisine and establishing the codified, hygienic standards of haute cuisine. And he introduced perhaps the most famous icon of the chef today: the toque hat.