Charles Ranhofer was one of America’s first celebrity chefs. He did not have his own TV show, and he did not license a line of kitchenware. But from the 1860s until 1896, he presided over the kitchen of one of the Gilded Age’s grandest restaurants—Delmonico’s in New York City. Ranhofer invented several new dishes and made others famous, such as Baked Alaska.
Born in France in 1836 and formally trained in Paris, Ranhofer served as the private chef for the Duc D’Alsace before travelling to the United States for a series of jobs. In 1862, Lorenzo Delmonico, an already well-established restaurateur, hired the talented, 26-year-old Ranhofer and aside from a three-year hiatus in the 1870s, Ranhofer would spend his entire career at the legendary Delmonico’s, until retiring in 1896.
The chef was a clever marketer as well as an extraordinary cook, naming new dishes (or renaming existing ones) after famous people or events. For example, he christened a potato dish “Sarah Potatoes” after the hugely popular actor, Sarah Bernhardt. “Peach Pudding a la Cleveland” recognized Grover Cleveland, the U.S. president from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to1897, and a man of prodigious appetites. And an elaborate frozen meringue dessert, known in France as “Omelette Norvegienne,” was retitled “Baked Alaska.”
Baked Alaska exquisitely illustrates Ranhofer’s gift for marketing culinary excitement. The very name Alaska possessed the cachet of a hotly debated topic. In 1867, facing a crisis in his royal treasury, Czar Alexander II of Russia opened negotiations to sell this “frozen frontier” to the United States. Secretary of State William Seward eventually agreed to the purchase price of $7 million, or just a few cents per acre. However, despite the rather small price tag, some political observers–including Horace Greeley, renowned editor of the New York Tribune–sneered at the proposed acquisition. Greeley wrote, “ Except for the Aleutian Islands and a narrow strip of land extending along the southern coast, the country would not be worth taking as a gift.” Others referred to the huge northern landmass as “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Refrigerator.” But after almost a year of rancorous debate in Congress, the U.S. formalized its purchase of Alaska in 1868, increasing the nation’s size by 20 percent with one flourish of a pen.
Taking advantage of the political controversy, Ranhofer’s newly named “Baked Alaska” promised mystery–something cold and possibly frozen, counterpoised with heat. In fact, Baked Alaska is exactly that: an ice cream-filled cake covered in meringue, which is quickly browned in a hot oven immediately before serving. It represents the aspirational, the luxurious and the flamboyant–all themes of dining at Delmonico’s, the epicurean centerpiece of the Gilded Age.
In the 1860s, creating Baked Alaska was no mean feat, since each of the building blocks of this “bombe” required significant time, elbow grease and hard-to-achieve temperature control. Rhode Islander Turner Williams patented the hand-cranked doubled eggbeater in 1870, a big improvement on the wire whisk but still not truly a labor-saving device. And of course ice cream machines were not electrified until the following century. Today, Baked Alaska is still a very impressive dessert, but more of an assembly project. In the Gilded Age, it required a highly skilled chef, a group of strong-armed kitchen workers and the latest in kitchen technology.
Dr. Libby O’Connell is HISTORY’s chief historian.
