I would have loved to have met this cook ...

Eugénie is a pretty name for this baby face.
Brazier was his name.
Eugénie Brazier, a great name to remember for all those who love to cook and eat! 👩‍🍳

Her father rejected her, kicked her out, I'd even say: "You're unacceptable, my girl! At the age of ten, she was putting on her clogs to milk the cows and feed the pigs in the home of the farmers who had taken her in after her mother's death. Her belly was bulging under her apron for having been too close to a married man. Eugénie Brazier was a woman of character! 🤭

Even as a little girl, the dishes of Bresse were a delight to her. The rustic menus that are engraved in her memory and in her hips, struggle to camouflage the curves of her maternity. In the midst of the chaos of the First World War, Eugénie gives birth to a little Gaston, who, like her, will grow up far from his mother. 🍼

Her breasts swollen with milk, she was hired as a nanny by a bourgeois family. A few weeks after she joined the Milliats, their cook was unwell and unable to carry out her duties. Eugénie was given the opportunity to reveal her vocation: "I'll be a cook," she promised herself.

She moves up to Lyon as an apprentice and charts her course towards the stars of gastronomy. 🧇

She'll slip her chubby fingers delicately under the poularde's skin to slide in pretty bits of truffle. As gently as she would cradle a cherub, she will swaddle it with carefully detailed strings of the same length. In this way, she concocts the poularde demi-deuil as she had learned it from Mère Filloux.

Failing to feed her son, she became a mother in her own right: that's the name given to those women from poor, even destitute, families who became "top chefs". She imagined simple, authentic cuisine with a refinement like no other!

In 1932, Mère Brazier became the first woman to honor her two restaurants with three stars: her restaurant in Lyon, the "World Capital of Gastronomy" as Curnonsky called it, and her restaurant at Col de la Luère in Pollionnay. ⭐⭐⭐

Mère Brazier, a true entrepreneur who passed on everything to a certain Bocuse, was the figurehead of local eating and drinking, bringing incomparable flavors to French gastronomy from field to plate!