A guide to modern cookery

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This is Escoffier's 1909 guide to modern cookery, a foundational professional reference by the chef credited with reshaping French cuisine for the restaurant era. Drawing on twenty-five years of practice, Escoffier organizes the immense repertoire of turn-of-the-century haute cuisine into fundamental elements (stocks, sauces, jellies, forcemeats) followed by chapters moving through hors-d'oeuvres, eggs, fish, meats, poultry, game, vegetables, pastry, cold and hot sweets, ices, drinks, and preserves. The book retains French titles for most dishes, which Escoffier explains in his preface as often untranslatable, and it numbers its recipes consecutively into the thousands, reflecting both its scale and its intent as a systematic technical manual rather than a casual household book. Readers will find extensive attention to technique: the making of consommes and veloutes, the classification of sauces, the handling of forcemeats and garnishes, and the elaborate presentation of poultry, fish, and game dishes bearing the names of contemporaries and patrons. It is a document of professional kitchen practice in the Belle Epoque, aimed at cooks who already possessed foundational skills, and it remains a key primary source for understanding how formal French dining was codified for a new era of restaurant service.

The book is arranged in numbered chapters beginning with a preface and glossary, then Part I on fundamental elements of cooking (stocks, sauces, aspics, forcemeats) in sections 1 through 6. It proceeds through soups and their classification, core meat cooking methods (braising, poeling, sauteing, roasting, grilling, frying), vegetables and garnishes, then hors-d'oeuvres and egg dishes. The middle of the book is organized by protein and course: fish (salmon, sole, turbot, lobster, cod), then relevés and entrées of beef, veal, mutton, lamb, pork, and ham, followed by an extensive poultry chapter, then game (duck, pigeon, venison, hare, pheasant, partridge, and other birds). Later chapters cover roasts and salads, vegetable cookery in depth, potatoes and farinaceous dishes, savouries, then entremets (sweets) including pastry fundamentals, hot and cold desserts, ices, drinks and refreshments, and stewed fruits and jams. The book closes with an alphabetical index. Recipes throughout are numbered consecutively across chapters, reaching into the high 2000s and beyond, and headings frequently mark named subsections by ingredient or dish category.