U.S. #4922-26
2014 49¢ Celebrity Chefs
This set of five Celebrity Chefs stamps features men and women who introduced America to regional and international cooking. The stamps picture James Beard, Julia Child, Joyce Chen, Edna Lewis, and Felipe Rojas-Lombardi.
With the advent of televised cooking competitions like Iron Chef, Top Chef, and Hell’s Kitchen, “celebrity chef” has become a common concept. Where a handful of anonymous daily recipes were once featured in select periodicals, there are now countless magazines dedicated to various cooking styles and nutrition.
Today, there is an entire television channel devoted to the subject of food. Culinary personalities host their own shows and market cookware of their own design. But there have been “celebrity” chefs for centuries.
Guillaume Tirel, or Taillevent, head chef to royals, was a star in 14th- century France. His influence on medieval cuisine earned him status as a master chef. He is so well-known that restaurants are still named after him today. In the 15th century, Italian chef Maestro Martino recorded the transformation from medieval to renaissance cuisine in his book, The Art of Cooking. Called the “prince of cooks,” Martino is considered the Western world’s first celebrity chef. Parisian chef and confectioner Nicolas Appert gained fame as the “father of canning” with his new food preservation method in the 18th century. Marie-Antoine Carême, the 19th-century “Chef of Kings,” invented grande cuisine, or “high art” cooking, becoming one of the first internationally known celebrity chefs.
Despite the ever-changing celebrity status of master chefs, their culinary genius and innovation continues to influence the culture of fine food and dining worldwide.
Jason Seiler created the digital illustrations for the Celebrity Chefs stamps. The images were made to look like oil paintings.
49¢ Celebrity Chefs, issued to satisfy the first-class mail rate
Issue Date: September 26, 2014
City: Chicago, IL, as part of the Chicago Gourmet food and wine celebration
Quantity: 20,000,000
Category: Commemorative
Printed By: Ashton Potter (USA) Ltd.
Printing Method: Lithographed printing in sheets of 180 with nine panes of 20 per sheet
Perforations: Serpentine Die Cut 11 X 10 ¾
Self-adhesive