Le Guide Culinaire () is Georges Auguste Escoffier's 1903 French restaurant cuisine cookbook, his first. It is regarded as a classic and still in print. Escoffier developed the recipes while working at the Savoy, Ritz and Carlton hotels from the late 1880s to the time of publication. The hotels and restaurants Escoffier worked in were on the cutting edge of modernity, doing away with many overwrought elements of the Victorian era while serving the elite of society.

History

The first edition was printed in 1903 in French, the second edition was published in 1907, the third in 1912, and the current fourth edition in 1921.

Many of the recipes Escoffier developed while working at the Savoy in London, and later the Ritz in Paris.

An English translation of Le Guide Culinaire 4e – 1921, by H. L. Cracknell and R. J. Kaufmann, was published in 1979 as The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery: The First Translation into English in Its Entirety of Le Guide Culinaire, including "some 2,000 additional recipes" omitted from the more than 5000 recipes of the 1907 translation. The 1979 translation was subsequently republished as Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery (1983), and a revised second edition with new forewords was published as Escoffier: Le Guide Culinaire, Revised (2011).

Le Répertoire de la Cuisine, written by Escoffier's student Louis Saulnier and , and published in 1914, is considered a companion guide to Le Guide Culinaire by Escoffier.

References

  • Escoffier, Georges Auguste., Le Guide Culinaire, 4th edition. France: Flammarion, 1921 (renewed 1993).
  • Escoffier, Georges Auguste, Trans. anon., The Escoffier Cookbook. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1969.
  • Online text of Le guide culinaire : aide-mémoire de cuisine pratique (Escoffier, 1903, in French) from archive.org
  • Online text of Le guide culinaire (Escoffier, 1903, in French) from archive.org
  • Online text of Le Guide Culinaire (Escoffier, 1903, in French) from Google Books
  • https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb30405448c
  • https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65768837.r=.langFR.textePage

English

  • Online text of A Guide to Modern Cookery (Escoffier, 1907, in English) from archive.org
  • Online text of A Guide to Modern Cookery at Project Gutenberg, (Escoffier, 1907, in English, edited at William Neinemann, London), in E-reader formats, as UTF-8 plain text and HTML