An antique book by an author who laid the blueprint for modern restaurant dining is expected to cook up a good price at auction in Lichfield.
Published in 1871, The Household Cookery Book by Urbain Dubois sought to demistify recipes and bring good food to family homes on a budget.
It features such mouth-watering fare as artichoke bottoms à la Villeroi, galantine of turkey with aspic-jelly and sheep’s tongues with turnips.
Sweets include profiteroles with chocolate and surprise-apples, while in the drinks section is a recipe for Prince Albert’s bishop – a punch made with sugar, oranges and claret.
Published in London by Longmans, Green and Co and now long out of print, it is hoped that the book will fetch up to £600 at auction when it goes under the hammer at Richard Winterton Auctioneers on 3rd April.
Claire Simms and her husband John – a former chef classically trained in the French style – are selling the item.
“We believe the book was purchased at a stately home auction between 1952 and 1970. It was gifted to my husband as he has a love of old cookbooks by our lovely neighbours, who we lived next to for 20 years.
“They use to chat about cooking, old recipes and produce over the garden fence.
“The Dubois book is packed with exhaustive detail and must have been an indispensable resource for recipes in the kitchen of that big country house.
“In the back is a hand-written recipe for oyster sausages, which is especially evocative.
“We feel now is the time for someone else to appreciate the book and its heritage as we look towards the future and a new life in France in the next few years.”
Claire Simms
A publishers’ note on the author’s work at the end of the tome describes the household cookery book as the culmination of “a culinary series, the most comprehensive that has yet been published”.
Born 1818 in Trets, a town in the Aix-en-Provence district of southeast France, Urbain François Dubois is best known for his series of recipe books which became classics of French cuisine.
In addition, he is also credited with introducing the now conventional service à la russe – in which dishes are brought to table sequentially and served, instead of all at once – to western Europe.
