Anatole
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- This article is about the P. G. Wodehouse character. There is also a fictional mouse named Anatole and a real-life poet named Anatole France.
Anatole, a fictional character in the works of P. G. Wodehouse, is a highly skilled yet temperamental French chef employed first by Mr and Mrs Bingo Little and later by Dahlia Travers, Bertie Wooster's aunt and chatelaine of Brinkley Court. He was born and raised in Provence, where he learnt his art.
Anatole, as described in Right Ho, Jeeves, is "a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type". The ends of his moustache reflect his mood, pointing upward when he is happy and drooping if he is not. He speaks limited English in an idiosyncratic mix of upper-class-twit and working-class Brooklyn, having learnt the language partly from an Irish chauffeur called Maloney while employed by an American family in Nice and partly from Bingo Little. When agitated, he tends to resort to colourful French or Provençal expressions, such as "nom d'un nom d'un nom", "burluberu" or "marmiton de Domange".
Everyone who tastes his cooking speaks forever thereafter in reverential tones of his culinary artistry, often referring to him as "God's gift to the gastric juices". He has an "impulsive Provençal temperament", which leads him to resign his post at the merest suggestion of criticism, causing his employers to expend a great deal of effort in pacifying him and inducing him to stay on.
Despite his brilliance in the kitchen, Anatole is very much a mercenary and owes little allegiance to any of his employers. In Clustering Round Young Bingo Aunt Dahlia poaches him from Mrs. Bingo Little (née Rosie M. Banks) by inducing her to hire a parlour-maid with whom Anatole had had a prior liaison. The loss of her prized chef causes Mrs. Little to refuse to submit her human interest piece, "How I Keep The Love Of My Husband-Baby", to Aunt Dahlia's weekly magazine Milady's Boudoir much to Bingo's relief.
Thomas Portarlington Travers, Aunt Dahlia's husband, suffers from terrible indigestion if he eats anything other than Anatole's cooking. Never a particularly generous-spirited soul, when Old Tom is thus afflicted he tends to become especially miserly, and is very unlikely to part with any money. This gives Aunt Dahlia another important reason to ensure that Anatole stays at Brinkley, though no less than three of her acquaintances – Sir Watkyn Bassett in The Code of the Woosters, Mrs Trotter in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, and Mr Runkle in Much Obliged, Jeeves – attempt to lure him away. Uncle Tom himself offers to trade him to Sir Watkyn for a silver cow creamer in The Code of the Woosters, and Aunt Dahlia bets him against a skilled kitchenmaid belonging to Jane Snettisham in "The Love That Purifies", but he always remains, thanks to an exorbitant salary, the most important member of the Travers household.
Dishes for which Anatole is renowned
- Ris de veau à la financière
- Nonettes de poulet Agnès Sorel
- Cèpes à la Rossini
- Suprêmes de fois gras au champagne
- Mignonettes à la crême d'écrevisses
- Timbales de ris de veau toulousaine
- Sylphides à la crême d'écrevisses