Tsars and emperors vied for his culinary genius, his lavish Napoleonic banquets were the stuff of legend in every noble house in Europe. In this extract from his book Cooking for Kings, Ian Kelly explains why Antonin Carême was paid a fortune to cook for his wealthy clients

Paris, 6 July 1829, early evening A hired barouche rattles up the Champs-ElysÀes. Inside: a noblewoman so tiny her close-cropped wig is barely visible through the carriage's open window. Lady Morgan, travel writer, Irish radical and wit, is reflecting upon her dinner invitation, and upon food. 'You are going to dine at the first table in France - in Europe!' she had been told. 'You are going to judge, and taste for yourself, the genius!'

An invitation from the Rothschilds had incited both jealousy and awe at Lady Morgan's Paris lodgings, and not just because James and Betty de Rothschild were the richest couple in France. Their chef, known to everyone, was Antonin CarÀme. And all Paris, including Lady Morgan, wanted to eat À la Carême. She already knew all about him: the wedding cake he had made for Napoleon and his empress, the gargantuan banquets he had cooked for the Tsar, the elaborate pÀtÀs he had created for the Prince Regent in London (which she remembered being sold illicitly from the palace kitchens at exorbitant prices). She had even read Carême's books, his descriptions of life 'below-stairs' in Paris, St Petersburg and the Brighton Pavilion, and she knew the rags-to-riches tale of his life; of how an abandoned orphan of the French Revolution rose to become the chef of kings and king of chefs. Lady Morgan was in Paris researching the sequel to her 'best-seller', France in 1818, which would be titled, prosaically enough, France in 1829, and her subject that hot July evening was Carême, and a novel French cult: gastronomy. Apple Charlotte, Turbot À la Hollandaise, Potage À la RÀgence, Salmon À la Rothschild: Carême's recipes were on everybody's lips because food was the thing to talk about in France in 1829. This was the first age of gastronomy - when for the first time a chef became a celebrity.

6 July 1829, 12 hours earlier A slight, ashen-faced man, looking older than his 45 years, breathed with difficulty in the early-morning Paris fug; he was slowly dying from the poisonous fumes of a lifetime of cooking over charcoal. With his weakening left arm, Antonin pulled himself into his carriage, which then followed the same route that Lady Morgan's would take later that day to the Rothschilds' chÀteau in Boulogne-sur-Seine. For a man who had once fed 10,000 on the Champs-ElysÀes, this was small potatoes. Even so, work had begun the day before. Crayfish and brill, eel, cod and sea-bass, quails, chickens, rabbits, pigeons, beef and lamb had been ordered from Paris markets, along with specified offals: calves' udders, cock's-combs and testicles, and the best Mocha coffee and truffles. Isinglass (fish gelatine) and veal stocks had been prepared, cream supplied locally, and the chÀteau's ice-house restocked. The vegetables and fruit for the menu would come from the Rothschild gardens. Antonin had also already begun work, with his young assistant, Monsieur Jay, on the sugar-paste foundations of a table-length 'extraordinaire' in the form of a Grecian temple, the Sultane À la Colonne. Paris, Left Bank slums, 45 years earlier Antonin CarÀme was born in 1783. He seems to have been the sixteenth child and may have had 24 siblings. The last months of 1792 in Paris stand out for their horrors and turmoil. There were massacres - even of children - and heads and body parts were paraded on spikes through the streets. Crowds gathered daily at La Guillotine; thousands were arrested or displaced. Antonin's father took young CarÀme to the busy Maine gate of Paris and abandoned him with these words: 'Nowadays you need only the spirit to make your fortune to make one, and you have that spirit. Va petit! - with what God has given you.' Antonin was taken in by a busy cook who offered him bed and board in exchange for skivvying. It was the start of his career.

6 July 1829, 7am A hush descended on the chÀteau kitchens as Carême arrived. The scullery maids and female staff curtsied and then departed. Antonin took off the diamond ring from the index finger of his right hand, a gift from a grateful Tsar, and rolled up his sleeves. He put on a white toque, a fashion he had created himself. The evening menu consisted of seven services, rather than courses as we know them now, offering 18 choices of dish to the dozen guests. CarÀme catered to the tastes of his French employers for service À la franÀaise, where nearly all the food was presented on the table at the start of the meal, with only the soups and entrÀes literally 'making an entrance' hot. Service À la russe (plated courses in sequence) was a fashion too daring in 1829 for the socially ambitious Rothschilds who were paying 8,000 francs per annum (£125,000 in today's money) for Antonin's occasional services.

The roasts and highly dressed 'grosses piÀces' would adorn the table as the guests arrived, along with the side-dishes including the centre-piece dessert, the Sultane, which would remain on the table all evening. The kitchen day began with dessert. Antonin selected fruits for the puddings - a nectarine plombiÀre (ice cream) and oranges stuffed with layered jellies. It was a hot, close day, and he ordered that the windows of the dining-room be kept shut, but for the internal fountains to play; the best that could be done in terms of air-conditioning.

8am

Back in the kitchens the stoves were already stoked and the hob filling with pans of stocks. In the cooler confectionery room Jay bored holes into oranges with a root-cutter. Antonin arranged the two dozen hollowed oranges in a yard-diameter fruit colander filled with crushed ice. The cooling isinglass was brought from the kitchen along with blood-red cochineal, clarified syrup and the nectarine marmalade. Antonin poured the thickening isinglass alternately into the fruit juice and the almond milk. He added strained cochineal, drop by drop, and lemon juice to the orange jelly, and poured the creamy blancmange or viscous amber juice into alternate orange shells. Throughout the day he would return, adding more.

11am The kitchen resembled a field of battle. Quails lay in ordered ranks, headless and tied. There were flayed baby rabbits; pigeons, partridges and chickens were being chopped, washed, disembowelled and stuffed. The cock's combs and testicles were set aside for the vol-au-vents. Bones and feet were reduced to thicken glazing-stocks. Seven hours until dinner. Antonin called for more charcoal, and champagne.

Midday

Time for work to start on the columned sugar temple. Antonin selected two spouted copper pans. He took eight lumps of loaf-sugar for each pan and four tablespoons of Seine water, filtered three times and set them at the hottest part of the stove. Jay stood behind him holding a cup of cold water and a small tin box, in which were two tightly sealed compartments. As the sugar began to boil, forming diamond-paste bubbles, Antonin reached for calcinated alum and then cream of tartar to fling, a pinch at a time, into the sugar lava.

Freezing his hand first in iced water, Antonin then plunged it straight into the boiling sugar, and back into the cold. A kitchen-boy gasped - Carême's pÀtissier trick never failed to impress. He repeated the process, then took a knife, dipped it into the top of the sugar-lava and then into the cup of water. He brought it straight out, cracking the crystalline sugar clean from the knife and announced in his thick Parisian accent, 'CassÀ.' The sugar was cracked and ready to spin. Antonin stood back from the stove with the first spouted pan. He held the base mould at his waist and raised the pan to head height and started to pour. The thread of sugar fell towards the mould, like a perfect skein of hot wax, and Antonin laced it round in one continuous movement.

Next he spun sugar for the columns, rolling bundles of them together, seven inches high. From the malleable scrapings Antonin fashioned plinths column tops and pedestals. Later, Antonin would garnish his Sultane À la Colonne with meringues, choux glazed with caramel, chopped pistachios and small white pastries. He would add some fallen columns in the Romantic style, a little 'moss', made from almond paste dyed green with spinach, and, on the column which would be nearest the most honoured guest, write in royal icing her name: 'Lady Morgan'.

4pm The heat was intensifying in the kitchen. Antonin prepared the roasts on spits and the cauldrons for boiling meat and fish. He called for ice to keep the desserts cold in the confectionery room and the pastry room cool enough for the unbaked pastries.

6pm

In the dining room a white damask cloth covered the oval table, falling beyond the floor as was the fashion. A large, flat tablespoon only was laid at each place, on the right, for the soup; the Rothschild crest facing up, the spoon's head facing down. On the left, starched napkins were folded into the shape of water-lilies. Jay and two table-deckers, piloted by Antonin, manoeuvred the Sultane À la Colonne to the dining pavilion. A footman, feet bound in protective padding, stood on the table to guide it into position, the column dedicated to Lady Morgan facing her place.

6.30 pm Carême described the scene in the kitchens:

'Imagine yourself in a large kitchen before a great dinner. There one sees 20 chefs at their urgent occupations... moving with speed in the cauldron of heat. Look at the great mass of burning charcoal... for the cooking of entrÀes and another mass ... for the cooking of the soups, the sauces, the ragoÀts, the frying and the bains-maries. Add to that a heap of burning wood in front of which four spits are turning, one of which bears a sirloin weighing forty-five to sixty pounds, another a piece of veal weighing thirty-five to forty-five pounds, the other two for fowl and game. In this furnace everyone moved with tremendous speed, not a sound was heard, only I had the right to be heard and at the sound of my soft voice, everyone obeys. Finally, to put the lid on our sufferings, for about an hour the doors and windows are closed so that the air does not cool the food as it is being dished up. And in this way, I passed the best days of my life.'

7pm Lady Morgan took her place next to James de Rothschild. Amid the hubbub of German, Italian, English and French, the footmen entered with the two silver soupiers. As the soups were served, Lady Morgan later wrote, silence fell. In the kitchens, there was no such calm. Although the roasts and the grosses piÀces were already on the table, the meal proper was now about to begin. The fish were sent out with heated plates and a new set of cutlery: a knife and three-pronged fork to replace the soup spoons.

Here's one I made earlier

We compare the styles of famous cooks from chef Antonin Carême to trainee Kerryann Dunlop - and imagine how they might cook a simple oeuf

Antonin Carême
When: late 18th-early 19th century
Famous for: Napoleon's wedding cake
Signature dishl: his own invention: the strawberry soufflË
How might he cook an egg? With one hand, while fashioning a Greek temple out of spun sugar with the other

Mrs Beeton
When: 19th-century domestic icon
Famous for: high-calorie comfort food for chilly Victorian houses
Signature dish: jugged hare/suet pudding
How might she cook an egg? Beaten, and stirred into coffee grounds and milk for a 'nutricious' hot beverage

Philip Harben
When: 1950s. BBC's first TV chef
Famous for: beard/striped apron
Signature dish: fried nephrops' tails (today's scampi)
How might he cook an egg? Looking, if not always cooking, like a Frenchman

Fanny Cradock
When: bossed her sidekick husband Johnnie around our screens through the 1960s
Famous for: her love of franglais.
Signature dish: baked mushroom cups (Les Pousses Etes)
How might she cook an egg? in an evening gown

Galloping Gourmet (aka Graham Kerr)
When: 007 of the TV kitchen in the 1960s
Famous for: renouncing his calorific cuisine after a near-fatal car accident to become an expert on nutrition
Signature dish: chocolate orange marquise
How might he cook an egg? Kerr now substitutes eggs with egg whites and a dash of Irish moss. Mmmm

Keith Floyd When: TV star and best-selling cookery writer throughout the 1980s and 1990s
Famous for: giving his wine glass and his demonstrations equal airtime
Signature dish: handfuls of seafood broiled on a galley stove on a trawler somewhere off the coast of Spain
How might he cook an egg? 'First pour yourself a glass of plonk...'

Delia Smith
When: doyenne since the 1970s
Famous for: recipes that actually work
Signature dish: a minute-perfect roast lunch with trimmings
How might she cook an egg? 'First we must understand what eggs are and how they work'

Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Patterson
When: mid-1990s
Famous for: being two fat ladies
Signature dish: beef in pastry
How might they cook an egg? 'I remember coddling eggs for the Duke of...'

Ainsley Harriott
When: mid-1990s on Ready Steady Cook
Famous for: his vocal excitement about... everything
Signature dish: cheeky chicken tikka masala
How might he cook an egg? 'Hands up who likes eggs! Brilliant!' Something with a fun-to-pronounce name, like a frittata

Nigella Lawson
When: 2000 when she became the domestic goddess
Famous for: seducing a nation by sucking chocolate sauce from her finger: 'Now how easy is that?'
Signature dish: Turkish delight syllabub
How might she cook an egg? 'An egg is a supremely sensual object. Pluck it from the box and caress...until it bursts'

Jamie Oliver
When: 1998, the year he became The Naked Chef
Famous for: one scooter, one lovely wife, 15 trainee chefs
Signature dish: nice bit of salmon roasted in newspaper. Just add buffalo mozzarella and other clearly labelled treats from Sainsbury's
How might he cook an egg? 'Oi, Kerryann, I didn't invest £1 million of my own money for you to f*** up a simple omelette'

Kerryann Dunlop
When: 2002, as the skiving, moaning trainee on Jamie's Kitchen
Famous for: skiving and moaning. We love her. The real star of the show, she's now off to Nobu, New York.
Signature dish: 'Jamie, what's that?'
How might she cook an egg? 'I'm not f***ing doing eggs for no one'