DUMAS (Alexander). Great cooking dictionary. ... - Lot 41 - Ader

Lot 41
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DUMAS (Alexander). Great cooking dictionary. ... - Lot 41 - Ader
DUMAS (Alexander). Great cooking dictionary. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1873. - Grand in-8, 258 x 167: portrait, (2 ff.), VI pp., (1 ff.), 1155, 24 pp., 1 plate. Brown half-brown wedge-cut, smooth spine decorated with cold fillets (modern binding). Original edition of this famous book by Alexandre Dumas, written to the glory of gastronomy in collaboration with chef Denis-Joseph Vuillemot. Dumas warns the reader that "wherever man is born, he must eat; this is the great preoccupation of both the savage and the civilized man. Only, wild, he eats out of need. Civilized, he eats for the sake of eating. It is for civilized man that we write this book; wild, he need not be aroused to appetite" (pages 1 and 2). He further presents it as the "crowning glory of a literary work of four or five hundred volumes". The book begins with A Few Words to the Reader, where the author gives an overview of the history of gourmet food and gastronomy, followed, among other things, by a long Letter to Jules Janin. The dictionary itself offers more than 3,000 recipes, both French and foreign, taken from classic books on gastronomy and collected from "all the countries of the world". There are also "the most original and spiritual anecdotes about the cuisine of the peoples and about the peoples themselves" and "the physiology of all the edible animals and plants that are worth having". Dumas died some time after handing over his manuscript to the publisher and did not have the chance to see the book published. The edition is illustrated with a frontispiece portrait of Alexandre Dumas and an out-of-text portrait of Denis-Joseph Vuillemot, both engraved by Paul-Adolphe Rajon. Copy in modern binding, well preserved despite freckles.
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