[2] The name was adopted by a French culinary magazine, La Cuisinière Cordon Bleu, founded by Marthe Distel in the late 19th century.

The magazine developed into the original Le Cordon Bleu that Distel and Henri-Paul Pellaprat established in 1895 in Paris, France.

[2] In 1945, after the end of WWII, Madame Elisabeth Brassart purchased what remained of the struggling school from a Catholic orphanage which had inherited it after Distel died in the late 1930s.

When CEC failed to find a buyer[6][9][10] it announced on 16 December 2015 that all 16 campuses in the United States would close by September 2017, giving enrolled students time to finish their programs.

[9][6] In June 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission requested documents and information regarding Career Education's fourth quarter 2014 classification of its Le Cordon Bleu campuses.

For example, American writer Kathleen Flinn's 2007 book The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, is the first insider's account of attending the modern Paris flagship school.