A Guide to Modern Cookery

Escoffier, Auguste. A Guide to Modern Cookery. [FIRST EDITION - UK] William Heinemann: London, 1907. 8vo (250x155mm) new burgundy morocco, gilt lettered, 5 raised bands, marbled eps, a.e green xvi,880pp. VG/Near Fine

ESCOFFIER, Auguste. [Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846 - 1935)]

A Guide to Modern Cookery.



London : William Heinemann, 1907. First Edition in English.  First published in 1903 in French  as 'Le Guide Culinaire'.  Printed by R Clay and Sons, Limited, Bread Street Hill, E.C., and Bungay, Suffolk.

Octavo (250x155mm) rebound new burgundy morocco, black ruled, decorated boards, 5 raised bands, gilt ruled, lettered and decorated compartments, marbled endpapers, all-edges green, heavy cream laid paper, xvi,880pp. Frontispiece monochrome lithographic portrait of the author lacks tissue guard.  Occasional neat professional marginal notes and corrections in ink and pencil; faint occasional foxing; some folded corners and occasional light soiling; small signs of kitchen use to a few pages.

This, the first English edition, was an abridged edition of the 1903 French edition, omitting a number of recipes.  A full English translation was not published until 1979. Here, a glossary is followed by 2,973 numbered recipes and twenty pages of menus.

Escoffier laid the foundation for the modern kitchen brigade during his time at the Savoy, the Ritz and then the Carlton Hotel by his organisation, management, the delineation of roles and the imposition of structure in the kitchen.  A Guide to Modern Cookery took Escoffier some 4 years to write, wherein he set out to provide a definitive and useful cookery book for the professional chef.  He was encouraged in the project by Philéas Gilbert and assisted by Emil Fétu (both of whom are acknowledged in the French edition but not here).¹ He codified his repertoire, which drew in part on the great chefs of the past such as Carême and Urbain Dubois, but also on his own dishes and menus over the past twenty years.  Each of the recipes included was carefully composed and written so as to impart clear instructions and to enable precision, without verbiage and thus to allow a dish to be reproduced accurately time and time again by a professional kitchen.² 

A Guide to Modern Cookery has gone into numerous editions, and has never been out of print in English.   It is the foundation and source for almost all of the culinary textbooks used to train chefs in the Western world over the past 100 years.

A handsome copy of one of the landmarks of gastronomy.

§   OCLC records 31 holdings this edition world wide, none in Australia.
§  Driver 364.1; Cagle 666; Bitting p.146 and Axford p.192, other editions, this edition noted;
¹  James, Kenneth. Escoffier: the king of chefs. London: Hambledon & London, 2002
²  Herbodeau, Eugéne from the introduction to the 1961 edition of A Guide to Modern Cookery.