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France’s contribution to the world of cooks and cooking is rich and legendary, its famous chefs a rollcall of some of the most brilliant personalities of the last three centuries. A stand-out figure in the starry cast, and one with a far-reaching but often overlooked connection to Britain and British eating habits, is Antonin (Marie-Antoine) Careme, born in Paris in 1783.

Often referred to as the world's first 'celebrity chef', Careme‘s rags-toriches life story reads like a Hollywood film script. And what a film it would be! How we can imagine the scene where Britain's rotund Prince Regent lured Careme across the Channel to cook for him in his new show-palace Pavilion in Brighton. And later, while cooking at the Rothschild residence in Paris, where Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Ingres, regularly enjoyed his food, the composer Rossini being asked on what condition he would tour America, and promptly replying 'on the condition that Careme comes with me!' The era had no shortage of remarkable people. So what made the so-called 'King of Chefs' stand out?

At a time when birth and status in life still counted, Careme's origins did not augur well. One of twenty-five children in a poverty-stricken family, he was abandoned at the age of eight by his father at the gates of Paris. Careme's fairy-godmother came in the shape of a cook who owned a cheap restaurant who took him in, in return for help. The eating scene of post revolutionary Paris was shifting. Deprived of their wealthy employers, under-employed cooks were flooding the capital, looking for new outlets for their metier. Many were opening restaurants and the renown of Paris as world centre of gastronomy was about to be born. The young Careme's talent was meanwhile being developed by the best pastrymaker in town, one Bailly, the owner of a fashionable pastry shop near the Palais Royal who gave him an apprenticeship and free rein to develop his unique theory of pastry as a sort of architecture in miniature. Already showing a feel for the visual impact of food that was to become his trademark, Careme began to spend his free time in the Bibliotheque Nationale, which, since the Revolution, was open to the working man for the first time, studying engravings of the great structures of the world – temples, pyramids, and ruins, all of which he assiduously reproduced in marzipan, sugar and pastry. Some measured several feet high and took him days to complete. They weren't intended to be eaten but to serve as a dramatic centrepiece, or piece montée, on the table.

It was when Talleyrand, took Careme under his wing that his career began to develop for then, Talleyrand was Napoleon's right-hand man, as well as a known gourmet. Association with him was an excellent seal of approval for an aspiring chef. Talleyrand was well aware that, in politics, wining and dining could be an important persuasive tool, and that no one would want to turn down dinner cooked by the most talked-about young chef in town. With great single-mindedness, Careme hired himself out to other employers, carefully choosing his work where he could cook alongside and learn from the capital's greatest chefs. By 1803, he was able to set up his own business, 'Careme's' pastry-shop, whose shop window became one of the must-see sights of Paris, and where that now slightly outmoded yet ever-versatile buffet staple, the vol-au-vent, as well as the 'gros meringue', the predecessor of today's pavlova, was born.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Careme's thirst to develop his art took him to England, where, in 1816, he was lured into the employ of gourmet and Francophile, the Prince Regent. Careme's first book, Le Patissier Royal Parisien, had just been published and we can imagine the Prince Regent, very much becoming the 'fat friend' that his erstwhile sparring partner, Beau Brummel, famously called him, licking his lips in anticipation. To run the royal kitchens Careme was offered £2,000 per year - around £120,000 in today's money. None of the Prince's other staff were paid so well. No wonder his diary hints that he wasn't popular.

Careme furnished some of the most memorable dinners for the Prince, notably, in January 1817 with a hundred-item banquet in honour of Russian Archduke Nicholas' visit. This took place in Brighton's Royal Pavilion, whose modern, light, airy kitchen, specially completed for Careme, must have delighted him. The menu, still on display in the Pavilion's Kitchen today, boasts such dishes as skylark vol-au-vents, glazed wings of fatted chicken with chicory, and breast of woodcock, royal style.

Despite the new technology, a bottomless budget and a royal employer who appreciated him so much that he once controversially ate dinner in the kitchen 46 alongside his own servants, Careme's time in England was short and not particularly sweet. The winter of 1816 was severe and miserable. Waterloo was a recent memory and we can imagine Careme, who once said 'my soul is utterly French' smarting to find himself pleasuring the tables of the friends and acquaintances of the Duke of Wellington.

Although Careme found much to admire about England and its cooking - the choice of charcoal for cooking instead of wood, for example, and the excellent quality of the meat, he criticised the English habit of overboiling and adding too much pepper. Almost two hundred years before today's top celebrity, Gordon Ramsay, caused uproar by suggesting that women can't cook as well as men, Careme was already proclaiming his disapproval of women in the kitchen!

As well as influencing a generation of the English well-to-do, Careme is credited with changing the way in which people ate meals on formal occasions in this country. Before Careme, 'service a la française', i.e. all courses, hot, cold, savoury and sweet, being placed on the table at the same time, prevailed. Careme replaced this with the much more logical 'service a la russe', dishes being served course by course to the table, which is still the preferred method of eating today.

Careme's next employer was Charles Stewart, the British ambassador to Vienna, in whose kitchen Careme was to pioneer one of his most enduring contributions to the world of cooking - the chef's hat! The traditional, floppy hat worn previously in kitchens was, according to Careme, 'suitable only for the sick-bed.' He began to wear his own with a stiffened rim, giving birth to the raised hat - the 'toque' - worn by chefs today and, in one stroke, adding dignity and a certain glamour to his profession.

Although Careme was happy with his employers and was later to travel to England a second time to work for them again, he couldn't resist an invitation in 1819 to the Russian Imperial Household in St Petersburg. Although, or perhaps because, the czar's long absences left him somewhat under-employed, Careme managed to write an illustrated book, Projects for the Architectural Embellishment of St Petersburg. A published edition, sent later as a gift to the czar, was tragically lost in a shipwreck.

The banking family, the Rothschilds, were, in 1823, Careme's last employers. Again, he was enjoying the success of a new book, Le Maitre d'Hotel Français. Part recipe book, part autobiography, the two-volume work codified new foods and cooking methods and presented his new idea that all sauces derive from four basic ones, sauce allemande, sauce espagnole - credited with introducing the tomato to popular cookery - sauce bechamel and sauce veloute. Here, Careme was feted by poets, artists, musicians and the beau monde and was even an occasional feature in the Parisian gossip sheets.

Perhaps this wasn't quite the happy ending for the boy from the gutter as it sounds. The long days spent, from the age of nine, in the hazardous environment of dark underground kitchens with poor light and noxious fumes, were catching up with him. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, sensing his health worsening, Careme concentrated on finishing his final work, the monumental five-volume L'Art de la Cuisine Française au 19eme Siècle, a virtual encyclopaedia of recipes and techniques still studied by student chefs in France today. Passionate about food to the end, Careme died in January 1833, his last words, directed to his daughter’s fiancé, concerned the seasoning of fish.

Careme left a legacy that food lovers should be thankful for. Not only did he bequeath more than two thousand recipes, he pushed the boundaries of cooking to make his opinions about nutrition, table decoration, service, and even chef’s clothing impact on the way we eat today.