OP: The Art of Cuisine
Crescent Books, New York, 1966. Hardcover. Very Good.
Artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a surpassing creative force. During his too-brief life (he died in 1901 at the age of 36), he pursued the culinary arts with almost as much energy and devotion as he gave to his pencils and his paints.
Toulouse-Lautrec regarded cooking and good eating as essential components of his portfolio—another, almost inseparable, form of discovery and expression. Along with Maurice Joyant, art gallery director and childhood friend, he pursued the best that the world of food had to offer—traveling, collecting ideas, cooking at every opportunity.
When Toulouse-Lautrec made a meal for his friends he invariably created a menu, and sometimes invitations, either with a new piece of art or else a reproduction of one of his paintings.
Over a number of years, Joyant carefully recorded Toulouse-Lautrec’s meals and saved what menus and other art he could. In 1930 he published, in a very limited edition, a cookbook, beautifully laid out with Toulouse-Lautrec’s artwork, La Cuisine de Monsieur Momo, Célibataire. It was only reissued, revised and retitled L’Art de Cuisine or The Art of Cuisine, in 1966
The American edition contains, in small type, tasteful and very brief notes prepared by Barbara Kafka to fill in some of the holes in Lautrec’s instructions and to make them cookable in a modern kitchen. A lovely book to hold, to turn through again and again, and, for those who choose to do so, to take a fine perch with anchovies, a beef marrow tart, cold fricassée of chicken, or perhaps “Grasshoppers Grilled in the Fashion of Saint John the Baptist.”
Ours is a later printing by Crescent Books in Very Good condition with a Very Good Minus dust jacket, showing some discoloration and shelfwear.
