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Pastry Chef, Roland Mesnier

curls

By curls
in Food Media & Arts

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curls

curls

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Opened the Washington Post and learned that Chef Roland Mesnier has died. I never met him but have enjoyed baking from and reading two of his cookbooks. RIP.

 

https://www.whitehousehistory.org/roland-mesnier-in-memoriam-1944-2022

https://www.chefrolandmesnier.com/about/history-timeline/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/27/roland-mesnier-pastry-chef-white-house-dead/

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Alex

Alex

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What an amazing chef! It's a lovely obit in the Post. This is my favorite quote of his: 

 

Quote

"Most people run afoul of baking because they are too uptight when they bake,” he told the Baltimore Sun in 2007. “I used to have a glass of wine before I baked. It worked for me. And if all else fails, just finish the bottle of wine."

 

And this is my second favorite: 

 

Quote

Only once, he recalled to The Washington Post, did he bend firm rules of White House employment. It was in 1987, and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited President Reagan in Washington. Although it is standard that all food gifts sent to the White House be destroyed for security reasons, he could not bring himself to part with two enormous tins of Russian caviar that had come from Gorbachev.

 

“I looked at the other chef and said, ‘I don’t know about you, buddy, but I’m willing to die for what’s inside,’” he remembered. “‘So I’m taking one home, and you can have the other one.’”

 

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"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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heidih

heidih

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Yes writer captured his zest and passion for life in that obit. I had to laugh at Nancy "admiring" the pastries - like she ever allowed herself to eat one. 

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