Word: chefs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pickled okra. Spinach soufflé. Double divinity. Et, mon Dieu, ze bar-bé-cue! Escoffier would have turned in his grave. Last week White House Chef René Verdon, who is only mortal, turned in his apron instead...
...onetime chef aboard the French Line's Liberté and later at Manhattan's perfectionist Carlyle Hotel, French-born René was hired by John F. Kennedy in April 1961. He made a memorable White House debut with trout cooked in Chablis as the entrée at a luncheon for former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The Kennedys' treasure later won international renown with such dishes as chicken in champagne sauce and an incomparable quenelles de brochet. But one President's meat is another's poisson, and under L.B.J. the mâitre soon...
...frozen foods (a "very lousy" thing in the White House, he complained). That was the beginning of the end. The end came ever closer when she also insisted on pointing out her favorite recipes in a well-thumbed copy of the Gourmet Cookbook. "I have a master pastry chef who has been doing these things for 40 years," muttered the disconsolate chef. "You just don't open the cookbook to page 40 and stick it under his eyes...
...Verdon's virtuosity, the new regime was not easy to stomach. What Zephyr cooked for the President's family upstairs, he shrugged, was their affair. But after a few Kaltman-coordinated state banquets, the chef protested that he had a certain reputation to maintain. "You just don't ask a chef to serve red snapper with the skin still on it and beets with cream all over them," he declared with grim finality after last week's dinner for Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan. And so, at week's end, he quit...
...cookout this summer included White House Chef René Verdon, former Colony Chef Jean Vergnes, former Le Pavilion Chef Pierre Franey, La Caravelle Chef Roger Fessaguet, and Jacques Pépin, former chef to Charles de Gaulle. On the beach, the fivesome whipped up a little barbecue that featured poached striped bass, grilled squabs and lobster farci, plus a bluefish au vin blanc. Inevitably, the recipes used found their way into his column...