Bidspirit auction | Auguste Escoffier

Auguste Escoffier - Auguste Escoffier - The culinary guides - The book of menus, 1924. Culinary guides. Aide-mémoire de cuisine pratique . and Le livre des menus. Indispensable complement to the Culinary Guide. With the collaboration of MN Philéas Gilbert and Emile Fetu . Paris, Flammarion (in the colophon E. Grevin Imprimerie de Lagny), 1926 and 1924. In 8°, vols. 2, with a folding plate; Editorial cloth binding with gold title on the spine and cover. Escoffier (1846-1935) was defined as “the king of chefs and the chef of kings”, he has the merit of having simplified the great culinary wisdom of Carême, of having reduced to the essential the complex structure of nineteenth-century haute cuisine, of having consented to the birth of a gourmandise and of having been able to reorganize the menu and the etiquette of modern bourgeois cuisine after a gestation that lasted more than half a century. In this sense, Le livre des menus, which Escoffier published in 1912, can be considered the basis of the modern lunch, at least until the great revolution of nouvelle cuisine.