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A Surgeon With 300% Mortality Rate From a Single Operation and Other Historic Screwups

Khalid Elhassan October 11, 2020 32 min

Robert Liston - Surgery — Dr. Robert Liston operating. Wellcome Images

14. Minor Mistakes Drive French Chef to Melodramatic Extremes

French chefs having fits of histrionics might be a cartoon and comedy cliché. However, there actually have been histrionic French chefs who, on an overwrought drama scale of one to ten, took things up to eleven. Once such was Francois Vatel, who after a series of minor mistakes and misunderstandings surrounding a banquet, took the melodrama to an extreme by killing himself.

Francois Vatel (1631 – 1671) was born Fritz Karl Watel in Switzerland. In his youth, he headed to France, where he apprenticed as a pastry cook, then went to work for Nicolas Fouquet, who became King Louis XIV’s finance minister. Vatel became a celebrated master chef, often credited (inaccurately) for inventing Chantilly cream. He was not just a chef, however: Vatel rose within Fouquet’s household to become his majordomo – the highest-ranking employee in an aristocrat’s household.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.