My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs & Their Final Meals

[laurelm]

Time Magazine online has a photo essay of some of the chefs and their last meals from Melanie Dune's new book:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29...1673230,00.html

I think my last meal would include a lot of seafood. I like Ramsay's simplicity.

[Mikeb19]

I'm not famous (yet), but I am a chef...

Anyhow, I'd like my last meal to be a typical Ukrainian meal, like the ones I had all the time as a kid. A nice roast bird, vareneky, holubsti, borshch, rye bread, various kinds of pickles, cucumber salad, and for dessert, raspberry soup.

[kristin_71]

I saw this book in a local bookstore today so I start thumbing through it. Yea nice pic of Bourdain. Don't know what I am talking about, go have a look. It is pure Tony.

[jsmeeker]

I saw this book in a local bookstore today so I start thumbing through it. Yea nice pic of Bourdain. Don't know what I am talking about, go have a look. It is pure Tony.

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I've seen it. I got a good chuckle over it.

[Barry Foy]

"My Last Supper" is food porn at its porniest. Apart from general foodie-groupiness, there was (with a few exceptions) little reason to put these chefs under pressure to say profound-sounding things--after all, they're only cooks. The recipes in the back were largely filler, since only a few related directly to things the chefs had said. Overall, if this talented photographer wanted to put out a large-format collection of chef pictures, it may have been more honest to simply run the pix and skip the other stuff. But then the publisher would have had to put a lower price on the book, and that's not how these things tend to work. On perusing this huge volume, I have to say I came to regret the energy I'd expended in lugging it home from the library.

[MaxH]

Haven't seen the book, but I looked at some of the article. It showed current cooks and their projected last meals. I don't know if the book also goes into some extremely famous actual last meals. A couple of examples from France, with context, below. I wonder how many current chefs will be so well remembered 200 years after their time?

The Brillat-Savarins came of heroic stock and all died at the dinner-table, fork in hand. Brillat's great-aunt, for example, died at the age of 93 while sipping a glass of old Virieu, while Pierrette, his sister, two months before her hundredth birthday, uttered (at table) the following last words which are forever enshrined in the memory of good Frenchmen: Vite, she cried, apportez-moi le dessert -- je sens que je vais passer!

-- Lawrence Durrell, preface; 1962 English translation of Marcel Rouff, The Passionate Epicure (Itself a classic of 20th-c. food fiction and highy recommended.)

Food writer and theater critic A. B. L. Grimod de la Reynière died during a midnight feast, Christmas eve 1837. Leaving a recipe for an "unparalleled roast:" an olive stuffed with capers and anchovies, into a garden warbler, and on up to a pullet, a duck, a turkey, and beyond -- 17 birds in all, the recipe also an allegorical critique of some acting talent. Today in North America the recipe survives, simplified (minus 14 birds, olive, capers, anchovies, and allegory) as a "turducken."

Edited December 20, 2007 by MaxH (log)