Turning Point

Marcel Boulestin's 1923 Simple French Cooking for English Homes

Abstract

Although Xavier Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943) never trained as a chef, he was frequently described as one. He was also known as an epicure, ‘that eminent expert’, ‘the well-known authority on French cookery’, ‘that very distinguished culinary expert’, a restaurateur, even ‘the world’s greatest cookery expert’. How a middle-aged man – he was forty-two at the start of the 1920s – acquired and embedded this formidable culinary reputation in less than a decade would be noteworthy in modern times but was extraordinary a hundred years ago. This paper attempts to account for this.