Born in rural France in 1895, EUGÉNIE BRAZIER entered domestic service at 19 when her father kicked her out for being pregnant and unwed. With little formal education, she cooked for her employers, using the skills she learned from her mother as a child. Her creations with this wealthy family led to an introduction to a restaurant owner in Lyon, where she trained in the kitchen.
After WWI, she worked in the kitchen of Mère Filloux with an all-female staff. By 1922, she’d saved enough money to open her first restaurant and quickly made a name for herself with dishes such as crayfish in mayonnaise. She then opened a larger restaurant, the famous La Mère Brazier—still in operation today, and by 1928 had opened a second restaurant that included a farm and cooking school. It was at the school that she instructed some of France’s most renown chefs and received her nickname as the mother of French cooking.
Brazier made her name by creating simple dishes that rejected the elegance and complicated recipes haute cuisine is known for. Instead, she insisted on using locally sourced ingredients for simple, yet hearty dishes. Quality meals above all else. And her gamble paid off. In 1933, she was the first person to have earned six Michelin stars, a feat that wouldn’t be matched until 1997. It would 56 years before another woman would reach this achievement.
WWII did not see Brazier succeed. She angered the Nazis by complaining—to them!—about how their rationing policies were ruining her dishes. Not surprisingly, her restaurant closed during the war and she was imprisoned, although no one knows exactly why she was arrested.
After WWII, Brazier reopened her restaurants and earned her second three-star Michelin rating in 1949. Brazier died in 1977, leaving behind a granddaughter to continue her legacy. Shortly after her death, 300 of her recipes were collected into a cookbook, Les secrets de la Mère Brazier. In 2014, an English translation was printed for the first time, La Mère Brazier: The Mother of Modern French Cooking. If you happen to have this book, please share pics of the dishes you’ve created…or better yet, invite me over for dinner. After all, as Mère Brazier said, “Cooking is not complicated: you have to be well organized….”
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