The Chef They called the King : The life of France’s first kitchen superstar. It wasn’t all sugar and cream.

France, 1794: a seething stockpot of war, revolution and terror. In Paris, a pauper informed his youngest son that from that day forth, he would have to find his own way in the world.

Literally abandoned in the street at age 10, young Antonin Care^me survived by finding a job in a cheap restaurant. Five years later he graduated to a well-known pastry shop, where his talent was quickly recognized. Before he was 20, he was creating centerpieces for Napoleon’s table.

From then on, the world’s first superstar chef traveled strictly in the highest circles. For 12 years he worked for the diplomat Talleyrand, who exploited the kindly mood created by Care^me’s dinners to negotiate treaties favorable to France. This was quite OK with Care^me, who described his art as a natural foil to diplomacy.

But he was not getting rich. A guest exclaimed to Talleyrand, “Mon Dieu! You have given us such magnificent food--it must have cost you a lot of money.”

“Ah, madame,” Talleyrand replied, “you are very kind; it is not a well-paid job.”

For two years Care^me cooked for the future George IV of England. When the Prince Regent complained that he was gaining weight because he couldn’t resist Care^me’s cooking, Care^me gravely responded that the prince’s weight was no part of his concern. (He was not the father of spa cuisine.)

Then he spent a couple of years at the court of Czar Alexander I of Russia and bounced around the other aristocratic kitchens of Europe until he landed his dream job: cooking for the Baron de Rothschild in Paris.

“In this wealthy household,” he oncewrote, “I could spend as much as was necessary to prepare things as I wished. This is the only way a truly creative cook can fully profit from his talents.” He worked there until his death in 1833, finding time to write several cookbooks, two of which (“The Art of Cookery in the 19th Century” and “The Picturesque Pastrymaker”) were published after his death.

Since his time, Care^me has been the name to conjure with in French cuisine. He was the chef who made cuisine a leading matter of French national pride. Caring nothing for wealth but everything for glory, he personally created la grande cuisine.

The most famous thing about him is probably his statement, “The fine arts are five in number, to wit: painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture, whose main branch is confectionery.” He published scores of detailed diagrams of pastries and pieces montees, which do look like works of architecture--Egyptian, Greek, Gothic, Turkish or Chinese--in miniature. For that matter, he published a book of architectural designs intended to beautify Paris and St. Petersburg.

His culinary style embodied the high-flown Romanticism of the Napoleonic period, and in the first half of the 19th century every ambitious chef had to cook a la Care^me. But like all fiercely fashionable styles, it eventually became old hat. For more than a century, French chefs have been acknowledging Care^me’s greatness and then hastening to add that they themselves go for a simpler, more natural style.

The present-day consensus is that his dishes were too grand-looking. Not that grand appearance is bad in itself, as some of Care^me’s contemporaries felt (“the idle amusements of an outrageously luxurious lifestyle,” commented Baron von Rumohr, the great German cookery writer), but that it would take so long to ready the dishes for the table that the food would get cold.

In Care^me’s defense, it can be said that he was quite aware of the problem. For something that absolutely must be served hot, such as a souffle, he gave precise instructions for keeping it hot on the way to the table--at a time when kitchens were often several floors away from dining rooms. And most of his dishes were pastries and buffet food, which don’t have to be hot in the first place.

When it came to serving meat, Care^me often presented it in meat pies, to which most of the ornamentation could be applied before baking with the result going almost directly from the oven to the table. But it’s true that his roasts--arranged just so on their display stands, surrounded by numerous garnishes and pierced with ha^telets (ornamental skewers, themselves often holding additional garnishes)--look as if they couldn’t be much above lukewarm.

Still, the more you read Care^me’s books, the more the praise he receives today looks like lip service. Everybody reverently says he perfected sauce espagnole, but nobody follows his recipe: two thick slices of ham, a leg of veal and a couple of partridges stewed down with consomme to a glaze, thinned with more stock, thickened with a roux and simmered with herbs, shallots and mushrooms. Since the time of Auguste Escoffier (the superstar chef of his own day, who was born only 12 years after Care^me died), espagnole sauce has been brown stock simmered with roux, tomatoes and mirepoix (carrots, celery and onion).

The truth is that few of Care^me’s recipes have seen the light of day in this century. The closest thing to Care^me’s sort of cooking that most of us ever behold is the classic wedding cake: multiple stories of pastry frosted, swagged and garnished with dainty ornaments--some edible, some semi-edible (royal icing) and some totally for show (the wedding couple on top of the cake). Imagine a cuisine where everything aimed for the grandeur of a wedding cake and you pretty much have the Care^me style.

But what did it taste like?

It wasn’t just sugar and cream. His favorite dessert ingredients were apricots and pistachios, and among his preferred confectionery spices were fennel and star anise. In fact, he used herbs and spices more than French cooks do today--or at least than they used to before nouvelle cuisine. He put almost twice as many seasonings in meat pie as French chefs have been using for most of this century: bay, thyme, white pepper, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, mace and basil.

This taste for spices is a continuation of medieval French cookery, and although he is called the first modern chef, Care^me still gave some surprisingly archaic recipes. Sweet pastries made with meat, for instance. He had recipes for tourtes filled with sweet pastry cream flavored with hazelnuts and beef marrow or with pistachios and kidneys.

There’s more English influence in Care^me’s books than you’d expect--or than many a French chef would care to admit. Ga^teau de plomb, which literally means “lead cake” in French, is just a half-translated version of the English plum cake. (Care^me did not have enough of a sense of humor for “lead cake” to be a backhanded comment on English cookery.) He gave a surprising total of 21 recipes for English-style steamed puddings, not counting pouding de brede (yes, it was bread pudding). A tea cake he called solilemme was the English Sally Lunn.

Although Care^me claimed to be interested in an economical kitchen, we would certainly call him extravagant, as his praise of the Rothschild family’s generous budget suggests. He gave a recipe for court-bouillon, the well-known broth of herbs, vegetables and wine, and instructed chefs to poach a fish in it as usual. But this fish was not the one you served--it just flavored the court-bouillon so you could poach another fish in it. (The first fish, observed Care^me, could be fed to the servants “with a caper sauce.”)

How complicated could vegetable pie be? Here’s Care^me’s pa^te chaud de legumes a la moderne (in his usage, “a la moderne” generally indicates a particularly geometrical presentation): Bake a large pie shell and line it with eight heads of lettuce that have been stewed in consomme with bacon. In the center, arrange 12 stewed celeries and a boiled head of cauliflower.

When ready to serve, fill the pie by two-thirds with a hot puree of carrots, peas, cucumbers, asparagus points, three kinds of green beans, artichoke bottoms and bechamel sauce flavored with chicken stock and vegetable essence (itself reduced from 20 carrots, 20 turnips, 20 onions, four celeries and four heads of lettuce).

On the puree, arrange more concentric circles of cooked vegetables. Starting from the outside, they are cauliflower florets, Brussels sprouts, 100 glazed olive-shaped pieces of carrot (points upward), 30 glazed olive-shaped pieces of turnip and some mushrooms stewed with butter and lemon juice. On the cauliflower in the center, place an artichoke heart holding a cluster of green beans and carrots.

Care^me would not make such a pie by himself, of course. Whether in a restaurant or in a private household, he’d have sauciers making the sauces, pa^tissiers to bake pie shells, prep chefs to cut all those neat vegetable shapes and line chefs by the dozen to cook everything. And they’d all be working for a pittance because they’d all be like Care^me: poor kids grateful for a job where they knew they’d never starve.

Some of his recipes start out simple and then abruptly head north. Grey mullet a la Armenienne is a broiled fish served with sauce veloute a la civette and anchovy butter--and six dozen lobsters, 50 crayfish and three bottles of pickled mushrooms.

On the other hand, some of his ideas are truly simple. His “apple pie” (pa^te de pommes) was filled with apples, raisins and sugar with a little lemon zest. It had a top crust of puff pastry and no bottom crust at all, making it really a sort of French cobbler.

And his fruit croquembouches are practically minimalist. The usual croquembouche is a pyramid of cream puffs, but Care^me also gave recipes in which slices of peeled oranges or peaches were dipped in hot caramel syrup (about 300 degrees) and arranged along the bottom and sides of a buttered mold. When you overturned the mold on a plate, you’d have a delicate hollow structure of candied fruit (which had to be eaten fairly soon, Care^me warned).

You’d never guess that the casserole au riz was structurally similar. For this dish, you cooked rice (Care^me specifically called for South Carolina rice) to a paste and formed it into a loaf on a baking sheet. Then you fluted the surface with a knife and baked it until the high points in the pattern browned, creating a color contrast with the rest of the surface.

Finally, you’d carefully remove this delicate ornamental rice crust, mix some of the rice underneath with a rich sauce and replace the crust over it. Care^me remarked that for a dinner of eight, this was preferable to a hot pa^te or a vol-au-vent--high praise, since the latter was Care^me’s invention.

Clearly, this was a very grand cuisine. You can see how people went for it in Napoleon’s day.

It’s even grander when you consider the conditions Care^me had to work in. It’s true that he had more assistants than a modern restaurant chef (to say nothing of a home cook), but they were all, Care^me included, working in poorly ventilated kitchens where everything had to be cooked with troublesome charcoal fires. Instead of “Turn down the heat,” as a cookbook would say today, Care^me’s recipes sometimes instruct, “Throw ashes on the fire.”

These technological difficulties are never far from the surface in Care^me’s books. It was obviously from bitter experience that this lifelong perfectionist wrote: “The oven is naturally a deceiver; it never waits, but proceeds always in its own course, and should the cook forget for two minutes only, the process will be sealed by its stamp of darkness.”

What would he have done if he’d had a modern gas oven or a microwave? Something spectacular, that’s for sure.

* Careme for a day: Recipes from the master that can be made in the home. H8.

* Perry is the co-author of Joachim Splichal’s “Spuds, Truffles and Wild Gnocchi: The Patina Cookbook” (Collins; 1995). E-mail address: Charles.Perry@latimes.com