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Let Us Feast on Carême’s Delicious First Season
We can have a bonkers little show about food-as-sex-as-politics as a treat!
She and Henriette — her lady’s maid as well as Antonin’s lover — sip Champagne and gossip until Talleyrand arrives to share the news of their latest political problème: In order to preserve civil divorce, one of the better changes wrought by the Revolution, they must cease living so scandalously and get married already. By the time episode three, “A Recipe for Disaster” rolls around, we see him inventing vol-au-vents at a party he caters, where he’s also tasked with creeping around Madame Germaine de Staël ’s (Juliette Almanet) apartment for an incriminating political pamphlet and disposing of seditious evidence from her illicit printing press that’s hidden behind empty casks of wine. The critic’s metal hand is a nod to the prosthetics Grimod wore throughout his life to conceal a genetic abnormality fusing his finger bones together, but that’s never explained, so viewers are left to imagine that he’s so fond of plucking tidbits out of simmering pans that he incorporates a bit of Knight of the Realm cosplay in his daily routine along with his New Romantics hairdo and eyeliner.
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