Everything had to go right for entertaining la Marquess de Boildier. Louis had to make his baekoffe perfectly and if he was even slightly off form the baekoffe had to be sent back and made again from scratch while the Marquess waited for as long as she was willing to wait. She was known for abrading everyone from the masters to their servants to marching straight into the kitchen.
On the one hand, the Marquess was la grade dame among Paris grande dames, known for her social authority, generosity and politesse. To be graced by the Marquess de Boildier was to have every door of Parisian society open forever, to be out of her graces was to have to return to the provinces, where her reach was such where families she hated may not even be received in their towns of origin by lifelong friends. Families in her favor sat at the table of Kings and generals, and servants she noted for exemplary conduct were remunerated for years thereafter with monthly gratuities in the mail. But legends had grown round Madame la Marquess that if she thought one ingredient off in her meal she would march down to the kitchen and expunge her dish upon the executive chef's head.
We needn't have worried. La Marquess was so taken with the meal she repeated dipping her finger in the plates to savor the sauces of Louis's Baekoffe and the Tarte flambee. Louis will be overjoyed to learn he'd surmounted one of his greatest triumphs. She correctly guessed that the chef had been in Madame Bloch's service since her childhood in Strasbourg, and noted with an impressed gasp of Madame Bloch's lineage, which she'd traced back to the sixteenth century peaks of the Holy Roman Empire when her ancestor, Rabbi Yosel of Rosheim, was a chief advisor and financier to Emperors no less august than Maximilian I and Charles V.
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