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yourself” was her motto, and at Covent Garden she negotiated a singing fee one pound higher than Caruso’s at the height of his career. She dazzled audiences and critics at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and others across Europe and, using the media to her own ends, welcomed publicity no matter how unfavorable. Adored in Australia as a local girl who made good, she returned for seven triumphal tours and, finally, for her death at age sixty-nine from blood poisoning after a botched face-lift. Today, her face looks out from the Australian hundred-dollar bill. She probably would have preferred the thousand-dollar.

Peach Melba made its own debut at a dinner given in honor of Nellie Melba by the Duke of Orleans at the Savoy Hotel in London when she stayed there in 1893 while performing in Lohengrin. Escoffier’s first version featured a swan made of ice that held peaches on vanilla ice cream, garnished with spun sugar. Seven years later, when he served it at the world famous Carlton Hotel, he abandoned the swan, and the spun sugar was replaced by a raspberry purée.

Today it rarely appears on a menu but can be made with pitted peaches, peeled and poached in sugar and water with a vanilla pod. They’re served over vanilla ice cream and topped with a purée of raspberries and sometimes a scattering of slivered almonds.

BALZAC

1799. Honoré Balzac is born in Tours—the “de” that was added in late life was an invention of his own. Trained as a lawyer, he turned to writing, achieving his first success at the age of thirty. During the next twenty years, he created the stupendous edifice called La comédie humaine, a vast series of novels depicting French society in intense detail.

He regularly wrote feverishly from midnight until noon or even afternoon of the following day, subsisting on only black coffee, eggs, and fruit, but when periods of work were over, he dined lavishly. At one notable sitting, he feasted on a hundred oysters, a dozen cutlets, a couple of partridges, a duck, and a Normandy sole, as well as dessert and fruit.

During the marzipan craze, he owned a confectionary shop in Paris, and his novels contain a number of gourmets, one of whom, Père Rouget, was so discriminating that he believed an omelet was superior when the whites and yolks of eggs were beaten separately.

CHEF UNIFORMS

The uniform of a traditional chef is as recognizable as that of a military officer or a priest. The white jacket and the tall toque separate those who create the meals from those who do lesser cooking, serve, or clean up afterward. Toques were once made of fabric so heavy that it intensified the heat of the kitchen, with each of the many pleats representing one of the ways a chef can cook an egg. Complicated to launder, they’re now often made of viscose that can be thrown away.

Worn in one form or another for over four hundred years, the jacket and hat only became white about 150 years ago at the urging of the great chef Carěme, who wanted the color to signify cleanliness. He also redesigned the jacket to be double-breasted so it could be buttoned either way to hide stains.

SECOND WINES

The immense care taken in choosing the best of the grapes and blending the best batches of each vintage makes wine from the great châteaus of Bordeaux expensive. Wine, however, that for one reason or another falls slightly below the highest standard may be sold under a different name and called a second wine.

Some of the seconds are of very good quality and can closely resemble the grands vins they are related to. They are also more attractively priced.

The best seconds, as might be expected, are those of the outstanding firsts. Among them:

Carruades de Lafite (from Château Lafite-Rothschild)

Les Forts de Latour (from Château Latour)

Pavillon Rouge (from Château Margaux)

Bahans-Haut-Brion (from Château Haut-Brion)

Réserve de la Comtesse (from Château Pichon-Laland)

Clos de Marquis (from Château Leoville-Las Cases)

Les Fiefs de Lagrange (from Château Lagrange)

Hauts-Bages-Averous (from Château Lynch-Bages)

Le Petit Cheval