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Robert Carrier OBE (born Robert McMahon on November 10, 1923 – died June 27, 2006 in France) was an American chef, restaurateur and cookery writer.
Biography
Born Robert McMahon, with Irish and French descent, he adopted the French surname of his grandmother, with whom he often stayed in upstate New York. She first taught him to cook, making biscuits and butter-frying fish caught in a nearby stream.
Post WW2
Carrier served in the United States Army during World War Two, where he choose to remain in Paris after the cessation of hostilities. He initially worked for a US forces radio station, and then edited a theatrical magazine. After the magazine was shut down in 1949 he moved to St Tropez to work in a friends restaurant, before moving to Rome, Italy to improve his cookery repertoire.
In 1953, he moved to London, working in the developing industry of public relations. With Oliver Lawson-Dick, Carrier wrote The Vanishing City, an historical perspective of London illustrated with reproductions of old engravings.
Cookery career
In 1957 Carrier wrote his first article on food, which he sold to Harper's Bazaar. He was soon writing regularly for the magazine before becoming a contributor to Vogue and then writing a weekly column for the colour supplement of the Sunday Times. This column brought him celebrity, which he used to promote his first cookery books and a set of recipe cards.
Assured of publicity, Carrier opened an eponymous restaurant in Camden Passage, Islington, in 1967, and then developed an international chain of cookshops. In 1971, he saw a full-page advertisement in Country Life for Hintlesham Hall near Ipswich, Suffolk and bought it, unsurveyed, for £32,000. He planned to renovate it slowly as a country retreat but, realising its vulnerability and near dereliction with rotten floors and ceilings, he decided to save it all immediately. He employed 60 people to restore the house and opened it as a hotel and restaurant in August 1972. He also revived the Hintlesham Festival.
A few years later, Carrier met a woman who lived near his Paris apartment. He thought her a remarkable cook but a poor business woman; so, when she got into financial difficulties over non-payment of tax, he offered to set her up as a cookery teacher at Hintlesham if she would learn to speak English. He invested about £300,000 converting the 16th century outbuildings into a modern school. The school had a double auditorium and two classrooms each with 12 cooking stations. The woman never learned English so he ran the school himself.
He presented beginners' and intermediate courses. The mornings were devoted to generic cooking skills and, in the afternoons, students cooked recipes from the Hintlesham Hall restaurant menu. The school attracted people from throughout the anglophone world, but Carrier was disappointed to find that many were attracted more by his celebrity than by an interest in cookery. He found the work onerous and dull.
In the late 1970s, Carrier began presenting a television series, Carrier's Kitchen, and, from this, flowed a substantial magazine partwork published weekly by Marshall Cavendish between 1981 and 1983. Carrier closed Hintlesham Hall in 1982, and then sold it to English hotelier Ruth Watson and her husband, and went to live in France and Morocco.
On January 19, 1983, Carrier was the subject of the United Kingdom television show This Is Your Life.
Carrier lived in Marrakesh for several months of each year and used his Moroccan experiences as the basis for another cookbook in 1987.
He lived in and died in Provence where he spent his retirement painting pictures.
Television
- c1975 Carrier's Kitchen
- 1980 Food, Wine & Friends
- 1994 The Gourmet Vegetarian
- 1996 Carrier's Caribbean, BBC2 12-part series
Bibliography
- Robert Carrier, The Robert Carrier Cookbook, (London: Nelson, 1965)
- Robert Carrier, The Connoisseur's Cookbook, (London: Random House, c 1965)
- Robert Carrier, Great Dishes of the World, (London: Sphere, 1967) ISBN 0-7221-2357-4
- Robert Carrier, Cooking for you, (London: Hamlyn, 1973) ISBN 0-600-37541-2
- Robert Carrier, The Robert Carrier Cookery Course, (London: W. H. Allen & Co, 1974) ISBN 0-491-01192-X
- Robert Carrier, Great Desserts and Pastries, (London: Hamlyn, 1978) ISBN 0-600-32014-6
- Robert Carrier, Food, Wine & Friends, (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980) ISBN 0-283-98555-0
- Robert Carrier (ed.), Robert Carrier's Kitchen, (London: Marshall Cavendish, 1981-1983) magazine partwork
- Robert Carrier, Robert Carrier's Entertaining, (1982)
- Robert Carrier, Robert Carrier's Quick Cook, (London: Hamlyn, 1984) ISBN 0-600-32232-7
- Robert Carrier, Cooking With Carrier , (London: Galahd Books, 1984) ISBN 0-89479-059-5
- Robert Carrier, Robert Carrier's Kitchen – Making the most of Lamb & Pork, (London: Marshall Cavendish, 1985) ISBN 0-86307-264-X
- Robert Carrier, A Taste of Morocco, (London: Crown Publishing, 1987) ISBN 0-517-56559-5
- Robert Carrier, Robert Carrier's Menu Planner, (London: Little Brown, 1988) ISBN 0-316-12977-1
- Robert Carrier, Feasts of Provence, (London: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993) ISBN 0-8478-1661-3
- Robert Carrier, The Best of Robert Carrier, (London: Bloomsbury, 1994) ISBN 0-7475-1980-3
- Robert Carrier, The Gourmet Vegetarian, (London: Boxtree, 1994) ISBN 1-85283-952-X
- Robert Carrier, Carrier's Kitchen, (London: Boxtree, 1995) ISBN 0-7522-1032-7
- Robert Carrier, Robert Carrier's Cookery Cards: Classic Carrier, (London: Boxtree, 1995) ISBN 0-7522-1002-5
- Robert Carrier, Robert Carrier's Cookery Cards: Carrier Entertains, (London: Boxtree, 1995) ISBN 0-7522-1076-9
- Robert Carrier, A Million Family Menus, (London: World Publications, 1996) ISBN 1-57215-194-3
- Robert Carrier, Great Dishes of Spain, (London: Boxtree, 1999) ISBN 0-7522-2492-1
Other sources
- 'Flashback', Daily Telegraph magazine, March 26, 2005, p. 98
- BBC "US TV Chef Carrier dies aged 82" 27 June 2006
- ^ {[citeweb|url=http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article680172.ece%7Ctitle=Robert carrier|publisher=The Times|date=2006-06-28|accessdate=2008-05-20}}
- "Ruth Watson". hattowendesign.com. Retrieved 2008-05-20.