Louis Eustache Ude

Louis Eustache Ude (c. 1768 – 10 April 1846) was a French chef and writer who spent the majority of his culinary career in England.

After leaving an apprenticeship in the kitchens at the Palace of Versailles, Ude is thought to have tried numerous other occupations before returning to cooking and rising to the top of the profession.

[1] In a biographical sketch written in 1835 Abraham Hayward stated that Ude's mother was a milliner, who married a member of the kitchen staff at the Palace of Versailles.

According to this account Ude joined his father in the royal kitchens (he later described himself as "former cook to Louis XVI") but left to become apprenticed to, successively, a cheap jeweller, an engraver, a printer and a haberdasher, after which he became traveller for a merchant in Lyon.

After returning to Paris he was for a short while an actor in a small theatre, and then worked unsuccessfully in finance and the civil service.

[1] According to Hayward, and to Joseph Favre in the Dictionnaire universel de cuisine (1892), he remained in France throughout the revolution, returned to cooking and rose to become chef d'hôtel for Letitia Bonaparte, the mother of Napoleon.

[1] The book was a considerable success and went through fourteen editions over the next three decades, making the author a large amount of money.

The Standard reported on 25 October 1827: £1,200 a year was an enormous sum in the 1820s – the equivalent of more than £1m in terms of 2020 incomes[6] – although from it Ude had to pay all his assistant chefs and kitchen staff.

[1] The ODNB comments, "At a time when club food consisted chiefly of boiled fowl, mutton, and roast beef, Ude's more refined cooking put Crockford's on the culinary map".

[21] The ODNB gives examples of Ude's famous creations: "an entrée of soft roes of mackerel baked in butter and served with a cream sauce" and "a most delicious sweet made with fresh stoned cherries, and which he christened Boudin de cerises à la Bentinck".

[24] He continued to live in London until his death of fever at his house in Albemarle Street on 10 April 1846 at an age variously reported as 76, 77 and 78.

He condemned the unremitting hostility of England's doctors to good eating, and the indifference of its women to haute cuisine: E. Cobham Brewer, calling Ude "the most learned of cooks", attributed to him the authorship of a book called La Science de Gueule ("The Science of the Mouth").