This collection includes original recipes, notes, and clippings from a notebook; two photographs; 17 letters of reference; 1 personal letter.
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Description or title of item, PSNCA.H.047: Charles Masse papers, Box #, Folder #, Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, RI.
Items in the collection are grouped by type, as they were donated, as photographs, recipes, and recommendation letters. When dates are known, materials are organized chronologically.
Charles Masse (sometimes written Massé), born June 8, 1895 in Cognac, France, served as chef de cuisine for several socially prominent and wealthy households in Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts the District of Columbia and New York between the 1920s and 1960s.
He began apprenticing with a chef in Paris at the age of twelve, and as a young man he served in the French Army during World War I, most likely as a hospital corpman, earning a Croix de Guerre. At the age of 24, in December 1919, he came to the United States to work as a cook, traveling from Bordeaux to New York on the Niagara. His sister Charlotte Carteau was already living in New York. Another sister, Gabrielle Vignaud, remained in Cognac.
After arriving in 1919, he served under Joseph Donon in the house of Florence Vanderbilt Twombly (1854-1952) in New Jersey during the weekends of May and June 1920.
From January to June 1922, he served as chef de cuisine for Mildred Barnes Bliss in Washington, DC, at which time he returned to France to see his ill mother.
In January 1923 he was back in the United States, working in the household of Vernon Carleton Brown and Katherine F. Brundige Brown. That October he left the employ of Mrs. Brown to go to France, where he married Marie Louise Duplessis (1900-1991). Louise was also a French immigrant, arriving in the United States from France in 1913. The 1925 New York State Census gives their address as 201 East 33rd Street in Manhattan, and the 1930 Federal Census notes that they rented a house in Queens. Their daughter Genevieve was born in 1928 in Washington, D.C. and their son Jean Charles in 1929 in New York. He later returned to his position in the Brown household.
From 1925 to 1928, Charles served as chef de cuisine for Ogden Livingston Mills and his second wife, Dorothy Randolph Fell, on Long Island. In October 1928 Charles began his long working relationship with Cornelius (III) and Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, for whom he would work off and on for the next two decades years, working at their New York house and traveling with them to their Newport house, Beaulieu, in the summers. Cornelius was the nephew of Charles’s earlier employer Florence Vanderbilt Twombley.
The Masses lived in France for several years in the 1930s, and their young children attended school there.
Letters of reference from Grace Vanderbilt give Charles’s periods of employment as October 1928-October 1930, November 1931-May 1933; September 1937 - April 1947. In New York during this period, the family lived on 88th Street, traveling with the Vanderbilts to Newport for the summers. Charles’s daughter Genevieve described his long working hours, and that her mother Louise did the cooking at home. Occasionally Louise assisted her husband with vegetables in the kitchens he managed. As he was ill in summer 1947, he did not go to work for Vanderbilts. When the Vanderbilt household was reduced in 1951, which seems to have eliminated his position, Charles traveled to France.
Returning to the United States by the beginning of 1952, Charles held several short positions with other prominent families: January to October 1952 with Frederica Berwind Porter in New York; April 1953 to May 1954 with Mrs. Carll Tucker in New York; July 1954 to March 1955 and ca. 1957 to June 1960 with Robert Walton Goelet in New York; February 1956 to March 1957 with Brooke Astor, Rhinebeck, NY; summer and fall 1961 with Elinor Dorrance Hill (later Ingersoll). During his employment with the Goelets, he took a leave of absence to travel abroad in March 1955.
After his retirement, he and his wife lived on Annandale Terrace in Newport, Rhode Island. He died in April 1968 and was buried in St. Columba’s Cemetery in Middletown. By this time his sister Charlotte had also settled in Newport.