Joseph Favre: Biography and Background

Joseph Favre (pronounced [ʒosɛf favʁ]; 17 February 1849 – 17 February 1903) was a Swiss chef who worked in Switzerland, France, Germany, and England. Although he initially only received primary education because of his humble origins, as an adult he attended science and nutrition classes at the University of Geneva, and eventually published his four-volume Dictionnaire universel de cuisine pratique, an encyclopedia of culinary science, in 1895.

As a young man, he enlisted in Giuseppe Garibaldi's army during the Franco-Prussian War and became an anarchist and a member of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), also known as the First International. He founded and wrote for various left-wing journals and a magazine for chefs, and also sponsored cooking competitions and exhibitions and launched a chefs' trade union. He would come to favour a more moderate socialism and, like other members of the IWA in Switzerland, eventually rejected anarchism, though he remained active in radical politics. The Bishop of Orléans described his cooking as "diabolically good".

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