OP: Les Menus Détaillés de la Ménagère

Comptoir Francais du Livre, 1937. Hardcover. Good Plus in Fair jacket. First printing.

Henri-Paul Pellaprat (1869–1954) cooked in some of Paris’s most distinguished kitchens and was one of the founders of L’Ecole du Cordon Bleu in Paris. Though known for his substantial, encyclopedic cookbook, L’Art Culinaire Moderne (1936), he published a number of other books during his lifetime. 

One of four in a series—all issued in 1937 and including La Cuisine Froide, Cuisine Végétarienne et Régimes Alimentaires, and Les Desserts—Les Menus Détaillés de la Ménagère is exactly what it promises to be—menus, arranged seasonally, that every French home cook worth their salt ought to know. Skipping over breakfast, the focus is on daily lunches and dinners, Sunday dinners, and, occasionally, dîners soignes.

Among the nearly 800 recipes, you will find a summer lunch of almond, gruyère, and ham beignets followed by sheep’s feet in white sauce with a side of peas and a dessert of apricots à la colbert (fried in rice flour batter). 

Or in the winter, perhaps a Sunday supper of anchovies à la Toulonnaise—stuffed with warm potato salad, served over hard boiled egg slices, and topped with olives. This followed by sauteed veal kidneys and a cheese and tomato risotto finished with truffles; jellied ham and a salad of beet, frisee, celery, and orange to the side; and flan topped with Swiss meringue for dessert.

Illustrated with color and black and white photographic inserts. An impressive survey of French cuisine for the ambitious and stalwart cook.