Dates: 1930–2018
Role in AFLCR: early board member; fundraiser; lecturer on cuisine
Madeleine Kamman was a French-born chef, teacher, and restaurateur of international renown.. The author of seven cookbooks, her knowledge of the history, culture, and science of food was encyclopedic. She championed French women’s home cooking, and in the 1970s she was a trailblazer in promoting women’s place in the professional kitchen, which had hitherto been the domain of mostly male chefs. She was an exacting teacher of cooking, a “teacher’s teacher,” known for her rigor and high standards, her discerning palate, and her ability to balance flavors.
Madeleine Pin, born in Paris in 1930, learned to cook as a girl at her aunt’s two-Michelin-star restaurant in the Loire Valley. She studied modern languages at the Sorbonne and cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. In 1960 she married Alan Kamman, an American civil engineer; they would have two sons.
The family moved to Philadelphia, where Madeleine found the quality of American food depressingly low. To raise her own spirits, she took up cooking. Then in 1966 she started teaching in classic French cuisine to women who were homemakers. In 1968 the Kammans moved to the Boston area, where Madeleine opened the Modern Gourmet, a cooking school that followed her approach of melding French techniques with American ingredients. In addition, she created the restaurant Chez La Mère Madeleine, which was staffed by students from the cooking school. The restaurant received five stars from The Boston Globe, four stars from the Mobil Guide, and accolades from French chef Paul Bocuse.
By now Kamman was also writing cookbooks: The Making of a Cook (1971), Dinner Against the Clock (1973), and When French Women Cook (1976).
In 1980 she closed both Boston operations and returned to her native France, where she launched a restaurant and cooking school in Annecy. But high taxes and what she saw as the rampant sexism in France’s professional kitchens led her to return to the United States in 1984. She opened L’Auberge Madeleine, another restaurant-plus-cooking school, in Bartlett, New Hampshire.
Also in 1984 she was featured in Madeleine Cooks, a cooking show that ran on PBS until 1991. More cookbooks came in the 1980s: In Madeleine’s Kitchen (1984), Madeleine Cooks (1986), and Madeleine Kamman’s Savoie: The Land, People, and Food of the French Alps (1989).
In the late 1980s she moved to California’s Napa Valley, where she entered a partnership with Beringer Vineyards. She became their lead chef and created the School for American Chefs, “a finishing institute for already accomplished and high level cooks across the country,” as her son Neil described it to me. “Access was quite competitive.” She taught, among other things, kitchen chemistry and science, culinary history, and terroir. Her partnership with Beringer resulted in her “very robust and energetic third career.”
And it led in 1997 to The New Making of a Cook, an indispensable handbook that explains for the home cook the vast range of culinary techniques, complete with step-by-step line drawings. “For Madeleine,” wrote her publisher, “hand techniques still reign supreme over the machine; nothing can beat a cook’s touch for determining when a cake is ready or when a steak is done, or a sharp eye to perceive when a sauce has achieved the perfect consistency. Madeleine takes the time to provide all the descriptive cues necessary for the cook to use his or her own determination as to whether it’s time to move on to the next step.”
Madeleine Kamman received numerous awards over the course of her career, culminating in Lifetime Achievement Awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals and from the James Beard Foundation. The French Ministry of Culture bestowed on her a knighthood in the Ordres des Arts et des Lettres.
Vermont
In 2000 Kamman retired from professional cooking and moved to Vermont to be near family members. While here, she pursued a graduate degree in German literature at the University of Vermont with David Scrase.
She joined the AFLCR board and generously applied her fabled expertise to nurturing the fledgling organization. For several years, she benefited the Alliance by giving a lecture series on French regional cuisine, for which prepared representative dishes for everyone to taste. The first was about the cuisine of Savoie, about which she had written a cookbook. The following year it was Normandy, and the next year Alsace. When her fellow board member Tim Kahn gave a presentation about Basque shepherds at Saint Michael’s College, Kamman provided Basque-inspired fare.
One year as a fundraiser for the Alliance, Kamman proposed to host a dinner party at her spacious home in Williston. In advance of the event, she said, she would train 5 or 6 Alliance members to prepare the meal, which would center on Duck Confit. Several Alliance friends rose to the challenge: Anne Bataille, Monique Martin, Monique’s sister, Andrew Tangelos, Lisa Schamberg, and Marc vanderHeyden agreed to be trained.
Over the course of two weeks, they attended four classes, taking notes, while Madame Kamman “explained everything into the most minute detail,” Marc recalled. Anne, for her part, diligently commuted from her home in Montgomery.
During the training period, “we had several demonstrations, we learned about appropriate wines or vegetables to be served with duck,” Marc recalled. At the same time, Kamman “regaled us with great stories of her childhood and how she learned cooking from her aunts and all the women in her life. Also, her war stories were memorable.”
When the big day finally came, the team of trainees arrived early, ready to prepare the dinner. But to their surprise, Kamman “had invited one of her best students to fly in from California to help her make dinner,” Marc recalled. “We watched!”
Still, Marc had no regrets. “She was a tough instructor, and clearly by that time her reputation was on the line, she would not entrust that to a group of amateurs. She was right on that as well.” The fundraising dinner was attended by several dozen people, and the Duck Confit was “spectacularly good, for which Madame Kamman and her great assistant deserved all the credit.”
If anything, the Duck Confit dinner brought the participants closer. “I admire her still today,” Marc explained, “and cherish the fact that [his wife] Dana and I got to know her and her husband well.” He refers to Kamman as a “Grande Dame.”
After making these and other generous contributions, our Alliance’s very own Grande Dame retired from the AFLCR board. After a long and legendary career, she died in Middlebury at the age of 87.
Articles about Madeleine Kamman (in chronological order):
Wells, Patricia. “Chef-Teacher Starts a New Life.” New York Times, January 7, 1981.
Dosti, Rose. ““Madeleine Kamman: A controversial cooking teacher who says the next great chefs with be American men and women.” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1990,
O’Neill, Molly. “For Madeleine Kamman, A Gentler Simmer.” New York Times, January 14, 1998.
Fletcher, Janet. “A Grande Dame Steps Down / Madeline Kamman—controversial teacher, mentor and founder of School for American Chefs—conducts her final class,” SFGate, February 16, 2000.
N.a., “A Cooking Teacher Reveals Her Secrets”. Theculinarycellar.com. February 7, 2011,
Nguyen, Tina, “Lady Chef Stampede: Madeleine Kamman, The French Chef Who Battled Julia Child (And Survived).” Thebraiser.com, June 6, 2013.
Sandomir, Richard. “Madeleine Kamman, 87, Who Gave Americans a Taste of France, Dies.” New York Times, July 20, 2018.
—Janet Biehl
Photo courtesy of Neil Kamman, used with his permission. This article was updated on April 16 to include Marc vanderHeyden’s recollections of the dinner.