On the CBS TV show The $64,000 Question, Marine Captain Richard McCutchen plunged in where no previous contestant had dared. He went for the big prize and risked losing all but a new Cadillac. Asked to describe seven recondite gastronomic items-Consommé aux Quenelles, Filet de Truite Saumonée, Petits Pois à la Française, Sauce Maltaise, Corbeille, Château d'Yquem, Madeira Sercial-he had the answers and won $64,000.
The dishes Captain McCutchen described were part of the bill of fare at a celebrated Buckingham Palace dinner in 1939. Two nights after his TV triumph the captain was at the Brussels restaurant in New York a guest of LIFE, he proceeded literally to eat prizewinning words by polishing off the full nine-course royal dinner. The most famous French chef in America, 70-year-old Louis Dial, emerged from retirement to supervise its preparation. Three and a half hours after he sat down the captain finished dinner and announced it was a meal worth more than the prize money. "I've died," he muttered, "and I've gone to heaven."
The nine course dinner through which Captain McCutchen sturdily inade his way was a meal fit for--and once eaten by--a king. On March 21, 1939, the British Empire's monarch, George VI, entertained the president of the French Republic at a royal banquet in Buckingham Palace. The menu was published, and the world of gastronomia took notice. To recreate the meal for the young Marine, his wife, his parents, his in-laws, along with Hal March, Lynn Dollar and Bergen Evans of The $64,000 Question show, Chef Louis Diat was required to make one educated guess: how, precisely, the Mignonnette d'Agneau Royale was prepared?
The chef for the royal banquet was René Roussin who, like Diat, has since retired. Into retirement with him he took this succulent secret. The show's producers went so far as to ask the British Foreign Office to help recover the missing formula, but it was unable even to locate the chef. Roussin was finally turned up in Wimbledon, England the day the captain sat down to the big meal in New York. But he still firmly declined to elaborate on the mignonnette McCutchen, after the course, was ecstat. ic about Diat's guesswork version. "Next to the commandant of Marines," he pronounced loyally, "Monsieur Diat is the man I admire most."
.jpg)
Social Plugin