Hardback. Maroon cloth binding with gilt title on the spine and front board.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. Jack founded the Midsummer House, Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam. The Midsummer House experience is imaginatively curated to delight and amaze, so the surprise set menu changes regularly and is our playground to showcase our reverence for purity of flavour and natural seasonal ingredients.

Clients find the cookbook to be a comprehensive guide to Escoffier’s culinary knowledge and consider it good value for money. The recipes aspect receives mixed feedback, with customers noting it’s not itself a recipe book. The user-friendly aspect also gets mixed reviews, with one customer finding it easy to read while another describes it as non-user friendly.

Reviews:

• I must admit that I bought this little book on the basis that all professional chefs have this as required reading during their training and that a copy is always to be found in the top kitchens in the best restaurants in the world. Based on Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire I find it just as non user friendly and not much use in the kitchen. For interesting snippets, however, it is a must have. With continued use I expect familiarity would make it more accessible. You definitely get the feeling it has been written by or sourced from one of the old grand masters. Glad I have it and will delve into it as and when the opportunity arises but I would not recommend this as a cook book.
• This book has no recipes, so do not buy it if that is what you are expecting. What it is, is a glossary of French culinary names of dishes with the description in English. Great little book if you learnt the dishes but needed a reminder of what the name of that dish is. Think of it as a dictionary and not a cookbook.

Le répertoire de la cuisine is a professional reference cookbook written by Théophile Gringoire [fr] and Louis Saulnier and published in 1914; it has gone through multiple editions and been translated into multiple languages. It summarizes Le Guide culinaire by Auguste Escoffier, and adds a significant amount of Saulnier’s own material.

Georges Auguste Escoffier (28 October 1846 – 12 February 1935) was a French chef, restaurateur and culinary writer who popularised and updated traditional French cooking methods. Much of Escoffier’s technique was based on that of Marie-Antoine Carême, one of the codifiers of French haute cuisine; Escoffier’s achievement was to simplify and modernise Carême’s elaborate and ornate style. In particular, he codified the recipes for the five mother sauces. Referred to by the French press as roi des cuisiniers et cuisinier des rois (“king of chefs and chef of kings”—also previously said of Carême), Escoffier was a preeminent figure in London and Paris during the 1890s and the early part of the 20th century.

Alongside the recipes, Escoffier elevated the profession. In a time when kitchens were loud, riotous places where drinking on the job was commonplace, Escoffier demanded cleanliness, discipline, and silence from his staff. In bringing order to the kitchen, he tapped into his own military experience to develop the hierarchical brigade de cuisine system for organising the kitchen staff which is still standard in many restaurants today. He worked in partnership with hotelier César Ritz, rising to prominence together at the Savoy in London serving the elite of society, and later at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and the Carlton in London.

Escoffier published Le Guide Culinaire, which is still used as a major reference work, both in the form of a cookbook and a textbook on cooking. Escoffier’s recipes, techniques, and approaches to kitchen management remain highly influential today, and have been adopted by chefs and restaurants not only in France, but throughout the world.