Eating can be such an evocative experience. Memories of events or a version of your younger self can be locked up in the texture or taste of a mouthful of food. Other people can reside there too by association or in name, like a grandmother’s coffee cake or a dad’s lasagna.
“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” said the great French gourmand, food writer and lawyer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who died at aged 71 in 1826, having eaten and written his way around the greatest dishes of the day.
His phrase has made it to 2016 in the form of you are what you eat, but is there any room for the question you are who you eat? Don’t get upset, I’m not suggesting cannibalism. Rather, I’m thinking of the dishes that are named after people and the stories they carry with them.
Savarin himself had a number of dishes named after him, including the Savarin Cake, a heightened version of the boozy rum baba cake named after the author of The Physiology of Taste by Parisian pâtissiers The Julien Brothers in 1844.
A name familiar to steak enthusiasts is that of Francois- René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, another 19th-century French writer who captured stories from his adventurous life of oversea voyages, exile and brushes with Napoleon in his non-fiction and fiction works (though there are some critics say it was all mostly fiction). The chateaubriand steak is a dish made up of thick slices of juicy tenderloin, and is said to have been created by Chateaubriand’s personal chef, Montmireil.
Charles Ranhofer, thought to be one of the world’s first celebrity chefs, was a divil for naming dishes after famous people in a bid to draw attention to Delmonico’s, the New York restaurant where he was head chef in the second half of the 19th century. The Veal Pie à la Dickens was perhaps created to exploit the buzz around the English writer’s visits to the US.
Fiercely contested
Ranhofer is sometimes credited for creating Eggs Benedict, though the origins of this poached egg, ham and hollandaise breakfast remain fiercely contested. A recurring account says that Lemuel Benedict, a Wall Street stockbroker, staggered into the Waldorf Hotel uproariously hungover one morning in 1894 and requested the poached eggs, ham and a side order of hollandaise. The maître d'hôtel loved the idea so much that he put it on the Waldorf's menu.
However, Ranhofer published his renowned cookbook The Epicurean in the same year that Lemuel ordered the eggs, bleary-eyed. This cookbook includes a very similar recipe for eggs, supposedly first created especially for his Delmonico customers Mr and Mrs LeGrand Benedict. The story of Lemuel's Benedict's descendent Jack Benedict, and his quest to assert his family's ownership of the dish, is an interesting read and worth looking up.
Another New Yorker with their name on a dish is the “richest man in America” John D Rockefeller. Jules Alciatore combined an intensely rich sauce with breaded and baked oysters in 1899 in his father’s restaurant, Antoine’s, in New Orleans. Antoine’s is still open today, and is the oldest family- run restaurant in the US. Jules’ original recipe is still a guarded secret, though it is often emulated around the world.
Champagne is perhaps an even better accompaniment to oysters than Guinness, and you’d be doing well if you could get your hands on a glass of Veuve Clicquot. Translated from French, veuve means widow. This iconic champagne is named after the widow of Philippe Clicquot-Muiron who died in 1805, leaving his wine business to his 27 year-old wife, Barbe-Nicole. She was the first woman to take over a Champagne House. People thought she would fail but, thanks to her management skills and knowledge of wine, she died in 1866 leaving behind a highly respected Champagne House that garnered her the nickname ‘The Grand Dame of Champagne’.
The work of artists and musicians evoke dishes, such as Carpaccio, named after the painter Vittore Carpaccio’s use of the colour red. The work of the 15th-century painter Giovanni Bellini is said to have inspired the name of the pinky-peach colour of the cocktail first served in the late 1930s in Harry’s Bar in Venice, a hangout for the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles. Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova inspired the antipodean dessert in the 1920s, though New Zealand and Australia are still disputing the exact origins of this simultaneously fluffy and crispy meringue masterpiece.
Ice, ice baby
More recently, Ben & Jerry's released their Cherry Garcia ice-cream after a customer and Grateful Dead fan gave them the idea of remembering Jerry Garcia with a frozen treat. Back in the 1980s, Ben & Jerry's welcomed their customers to pin notes of their ideas for flavours to billboards in their shops. The idea for Cherry Garcia was left on an anonymous note that made its way to founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in their headquarters in Vermont. Soon after the flavour was launched in 1987, they received another message, in the same handwriting, saying "I'm glad you made the flavour."
This time it was signed by Jane Williamson, who was located and eventually contacted, and awarded with a year’s supply of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
