If the smiling face above looks familiar, you've probably seen Elisabeth on your TV screen. She appeared on the 2018 series of Masterchef: The Professionals and impressed throughout the competition, only going home after an unfortunate incident with a cherry mousse. Her classical sensibilities stood out among a host of meticulous, faffy, modern British plates – her food had the soothing quality of old-fashioned French cuisine, but with exciting modern touches. A roasted pigeon, for example, came with the smoothest of chicken liver pates and a Madeira sauce, but also with pistachio popcorn biscuits and lingonberries. It even managed to drag a smile out of the usually stony-faced Marcus Wareing.
Those modern touches have been acquired over the course of a career that has taken Elisabeth through some prestigious kitchens; her CV includes Pierre Koffmann at The Berkeley, Claude Bosi at Hibiscus, Helene Darroze at The Connaught and Helena Puolakka at Aster, among others. The foundation of her cooking, though, starts in France (specifically in Paris), where she grew up. ‘My dad is a chef – I didn’t cook at all as a kid because he was always cooking,’ she explains. ‘I was just eating and enjoying! But then he started to teach me the kitchen basics when I finished school – how to prep a chicken, how to make a bechamel, all the French basics – and I realised that I wanted to cook more.’
Elisabeth got her break in the kitchen with Lenôtre, a famous Parisian catering company. ‘They do a lot of competitions,’ she explains, ‘like the Bocuse D’Or and things like that.’ She worked alongside 2013 Bocuse D’Or winner Thibaut Ruggeri and helped him with kitchen prep, before jetting off to London where a friend helped her get a job at Bar Boulud in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
‘I didn’t want to limit myself to the Parisian style,’ she explains. ‘I wanted a change. Bar Boulud was great for that – my background was French but the kitchen was French-American, so it opened my eyes to other ways of doing things.’ This first lesson would form the foundation of Elisabeth’s own approach to food; taking the reliable, comforting, satisfying side of French cookery, but tempering it with lessons learned from other cuisines and cultures.