Hardback. Rebound in maroon patterned cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

• Note: This book carries a £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list

For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean extremely 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 our surprise set menu changes regularly and is our playground to showcase our reverence for purity of flavour and natural seasonal ingredients.

Jack purchased two signed copies of this great book, both of which he had rebound. Library of Culinary Art, (1912).Rare first edition and much sought after. Illustrated with a large service table in a large kitchen. 

Le Livre des Menus (1912) is a French cookbook by Auguste Escoffier, published as a companion to his Guide Culinaire. It compiles menus for elaborate meals served to celebrities, royalty, and at grand banquets at locations like Buckingham Palace and the Carlton Hotel. The book, also co-authored with Philéas Gilbert and Émile Fetu, showcases Escoffier’s celebrated skill in creating symphonic progressions of taste for spectacular events. Author: Auguste Escoffier Co-authors: Philéas Gilbert and Émile Fetu

Content: The book features menus for various events, including those held for royalty, state banquets, and functions at prestigious locations such as the Carlton Hotel. 

Significance: It is considered a companion to Escoffier’s other seminal work, the Guide Culinaire, and demonstrates his genius in designing and organizing elaborate, high-profile menus.

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.