Robert Carrier (chef)

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This article is about the American chef. For the Canadian politician, see Robert Carrier (politician).

Robert Carrier
Moroccan
Previous restaurant(s)
  • Camden Passage,
    Hintlesham Hall
Television show(s)
  • Carrier's Kitchen
    Food, Wine and Friends
    The Gourmet Vegetarian
    Carrier's Caribbean.
Award(s) won

Robert Carrier McMahon,

cookery
writer. His success came in England, where he was based from 1953 to 1984, and then from 1994 until his death.

Biography

Robert Carrier McMahon was born in Tarrytown, New York,[1] the third son of a wealthy property lawyer father of Irish descent;[2] his mother was the Franco-German daughter of a millionaire. After his parents went bankrupt in the 1930s Great Depression, they maintained their lifestyle by firing their servants and preparing their own elaborate dinner parties.[3]

Educated in New York City, Robert took part-time art courses and trained to become an actor. He had a part in the Broadway

New York. She taught him to cook, making biscuits and butter-frying fish caught in a nearby stream.[4]

Post World War II

Carrier volunteered to serve in the

cryptographer in General Charles de Gaulle's headquarters.[2]

Carrier chose to remain in Paris as a civilian after the cessation of hostilities, and dropped his surname McMahon: "It (Robert Carrier) sounds good in French and it looks well visually."

Gaullist publication, Spectacle, set up to support de Gaulle's RPF party in its failed bid for post-war power.[2]

After a theatrical magazine that he edited and partly owned was shut down in 1949,

St. Tropez to work in a friend's restaurant, Chez Fifine,[2] where he found relief from a bout of depression.[4] Starting to write about food as ration-restricted Europe got used to flavour again,[2] Carrier moved to Rome, Italy, to improve his cookery repertoire,[4] and take the role of a cowboy in an Italian musical revue.[2]

After a friend invited him to Great Britain for the 1953

cornflour, New Zealand apples and a vegetarian dog food.[2] With Oliver Lawson Dick, Carrier wrote The Vanished City, a historical perspective of London illustrated with reproductions of old engravings.[4]

Cookery career

In 1957 Carrier wrote his first article on food, which he sold to

/-, the present day equivalent of around £100, it sold 11 million copies.[2]

Assured of publicity, Carrier opened the eponymous restaurant Carrier's in 1966 in Camden Passage, Islington,[3] then developed an international chain of cookshops, with the first in Harrods in 1967.[1] His recipes were printed on wipe-clean cards (a convenient innovation), and were more specific in their quantities and directions than some of those of his competitor Elizabeth David; they made it feasible for an amateur to prepare food that would satisfy the eye and palate of even demanding dinner guests.[1]

In 1971, he saw a full-page advertisement in

Hintlesham Hall near Ipswich, Suffolk and bought it, unsurveyed, for £32,000. He planned to renovate it slowly as a country retreat but, realising its vulnerability and near dereliction with rotten floors and ceilings, he decided to save it all immediately. He employed 60 people to restore the house and opened it as a hotel and restaurant in August 1972. He also revived the Hintlesham
Festival.

A few years later, Carrier met a woman who lived near his Paris apartment. He thought her a remarkable cook but a poor businesswoman; so, when she got into financial difficulties over non-payment of tax, he offered to set her up as a cookery teacher at Hintlesham if she would learn to speak English. He invested about £300,000 converting the 16th-century outbuildings into a modern school. The school had a double auditorium and two classrooms, each with 12 cooking stations. The woman never learned English so he ran the school himself. He presented beginners' and intermediate courses. The mornings were devoted to generic cooking skills and, in the afternoons, students cooked recipes from the Hintlesham Hall restaurant menu. The school attracted people from throughout the anglophone world, but Carrier was disappointed to find that many were attracted more by his celebrity than by an interest in cookery. He found the repetitive work of teaching onerous and dull.[3][4]

In the late 1970s, Carrier began presenting a television series, Carrier's Kitchen, based on the cooking cards from his Sunday Times articles. After the more traditional British fare often presented by British TV cooking programme host

superlatives ("Gooorgeous… Adooorable… Faaabulous!"), he "attracted viewers as much for his drawling American vowels and shameless self-promotion".[2] His later followed this with three other series, titled Food, Wine and Friends, The Gourmet Vegetarian and Carrier's Caribbean.[6] From this greater publicity flowed a substantial magazine published weekly by Marshall Cavendish between 1981 and 1983.[1]

Retirement

By the early 1980s, Carrier's television style was considered kitsch and too old-fashioned, and his food too complex. Ejected from his television show and bored with the celebrity culture, Carrier closed the Michelin two starred Hintlesham Hall in 1982, and sold it the following year to English hotelier Ruth Watson and her husband.[7] After closing the also Michelin two starred Camden Passage restaurant, Carrier took a short stay in New York, and from 1984 went to live in France and at his restored villa in Morocco, regularly accompanied by his friend Oliver Lawson Dick.[2]

On January 19, 1983, Carrier was the subject of the United Kingdom television show This Is Your Life. He became popular in the United States in the 1980s, writing a weekly European food column for a popular US magazine. In 1984 he became the face of the British restaurant industry, arguing vigorously and vocally for changes to the licensing laws. His efforts were rewarded by appointment as honorary OBE.[1]

Having lived in

Nouvelle Cuisine.[1]

By 1994 Carrier had returned to London,

Press Association by Liz Glaze on the afternoon of the same day.[8]

Television

  • 1975 Carrier's Kitchen
  • 1980 Food, Wine & Friends
  • 1994 The Gourmet Vegetarian
  • 1996 Carrier's Caribbean,
    BBC2
    12-part series

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g "Robert Carrier". The Independent. July 1, 2006. Archived from the original on June 14, 2008. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "Robert Carrier". The Telegraph. June 28, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Barker, Dennis (June 28, 2006). "Robert Carrier". The Guardian. UK. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g "Robert Carrier". The Times. UK. June 28, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  5. ^ Robert Carrier, Great Dishes of the World, with drawings by Sophie Granval. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963). Back end-paper,
  6. ^ "Robert Carrier". New York Times. July 2, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  7. ^ "Ruth Watson". hattowendesign.com. Archived from the original on July 23, 2008. Retrieved May 20, 2008.
  8. ^ "US TV Chef Carrier dies aged 82". BBC News. June 27, 2006.

External links

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