Peach melba, as all the world surely knows, was invented in the early 1890s by Auguste Escoffier, the French chef of the Savoy hotel, for the superstar Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba. At a dinner thrown to celebrate her triumph in Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Royal Opera House, Escoffier presented Nellie with fresh peaches – her absolute favourite – served over ice cream; later, he would amend the recipe by adding raspberry puree. Even today, the Savoy still serves it in one of its restaurants (or at least, a variation of it), the dish sitting between the mont d’or cheese and the petits fours on its £175-a-head tasting menu.
But as the food historian Pen Vogler writes in her satisfyingly replete new book, Stuffed – how it lives up to its title, bulging temptingly with information like some broad-in-the-beam sandwich in a New York deli – in his own time, Escoffier’s strawberry puddings were as likely to cause a stir as those made with peaches. Fraises imperator, concocted for Kaiser Wilhelm II on his yacht the Imperator, began the rumour (untrue) that Escoffier had tried to poison the emperor in retaliation for his time as a prisoner of war in the Franco-Prussian war, while fraises Sarah Bernhardt, a confection of ice cream, strawberries marinated in sweet wine and pineapple that was named after the celebrated actor, was said by the Daily Mail in 1912 to be a veritable “poem” of a pudding, excelling even the heady delights of peach melba.
