"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Alexandre Dumas père was a terrible and a wonderful man. He fought in wars, hunted, traveled the globe, owned a theatre, dabbled in politics and revolutions here and there, and was bankrupted a few times after spending fortune after fortune on women and high living. And he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, in jail or out of it. With the aid of a number of assistants he was able to turn out over 600 books before the end. He was magnificently ugly, and, apparently, irresistible. Which actually, I don't doubt that for a minute.
Dumas was also a dedicated cook and the author of a fine book on gastronomy, the enormous Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. (That link takes you to the 1873 first edition, which is in French; I can recommend the 1958 English translation and abridgement by Louis Colman, a gentle and sensitive prose stylist who is also possessed of the requisite salacious edge.)
After emerging from under a series of crushing debts, Dumas set out to write this book "as a diversion" in the late 1860s. But then he got really into it, and wound up taking many months over the research and writing. In the dedication of the book to the novelist and critic, Jules Janin, he described his thorny legal troubles, and concluded: "In my contract with Michel Lévy, I had retained the right to write a cookery book and to sell it to whomever I pleased."
The Regency was a charming period in France. For seven or eight years one lived to drink, love, eat. Then one fine evening the Regent was talking with Mme de Falaris, his little crow, as he called her. His head was heavy, and he laid it on the shoulder of the beautiful courtesan, saying, "Do you believe in hell, sweetheart?"
"If I go, I hope to find you there," she said.
He did not answer. He was there already.
This anecdote is succeeded by an excellent recipe for salad dressing. "I made a salad that satisfied my guests so well that when Ronconi, one of my most regular guests, could not come he sent for his share of the salad, which was taken to him under a great umbrella when it rained so that no foreign matter might spoil it." Dumas makes the dressing right in the salad bowl; one hard-cooked egg yolk for each two persons, mashed with oil and mixed with chervil, crushed tuna, macerated anchovies, etc., "and my servant tosses it. On the tossed salad I sprinkle a pinch of paprika, which is the Hungarian red pepper. And there you have the salad that so fascinated poor Ronconi."
To the science of kitchen and table Dumas brought taste, scholarship, appetite, wit, sensuality, bragging, brazen inconsistency and the chatty, winning, urbane style that distinguishes his novels. The Grand Dictionnaire is made up of a zillion little vignettes arranged alphabetically, as the title suggests, but their titles are so capricious that the arrangement is no help at all if you're trying to find anything in there. That doesn't matter. The idea is to open the thing up and dive in.