Chronicle No. 55 · People

Eugenie Brazier: The Farm Girl Who Held Six Michelin Stars

An unmarried mother from the Ain went into service as a maid and ended up training the man who would define French cooking.

Eugenie Brazier was born on 12 June 1895 at La Tranclière in the Ain, and grew up working on farms. At nineteen, in 1914, she had a son, Gaston, and no husband. That should have ended the story.

Instead she went into domestic service in Lyon, first as a maid and nanny to the Milliat family, and moved to their kitchen.

In 1921 she opened her own restaurant at 12 rue Royale, in Lyon's first arrondissement, with 12,000 francs. In the late 1920s she opened a second, a converted chalet at the Col de la Luere in the hills outside the city.

When Michelin introduced the three-star rating in 1933, she was awarded three stars at each house. She held six stars simultaneously - the first person to do so.

She belonged to the meres lyonnaises, the tradition of women cooks who left service in bourgeois households to run their own kitchens and who, between them, built Lyon's reputation as the food capital of France. Their cooking was not ornamental. It was precise, seasonal, and repeated perfectly, night after night.

Her kitchen was also a school:

• Paul Bocuse trained under her at the Col de la Luere
• So did Bernard Pacaud, later of L'Ambroisie in Paris
• She was known for exacting standards and a total refusal of shortcuts

She died on 2 March 1977 at Sainte-Foy-les-Lyon, aged 81.

Brazier's own account of her craft is the least romantic thing ever said about French cuisine, and the most useful. Be organised. Remember things. Have some taste. Everything else in a professional kitchen is commentary.

“Cooking is not complicated: you have to be well organised, to remember things and have a bit of taste”

Lesson: Consistency and organisation, not invention, are what turn a good cook into a great restaurant.