The Italian edition of one of the most important works in the history of food. La Varenne is regarded as the founding father of modern, French-influenced cookery. Until his work La Cuisinier François, first published in Paris in 1651, cookery in Europe had been completely dominated by Italian Renaissance ideas. The grandfather of concepts that continue to characterize French cooking, la Varenne put emphasis on vegetables and herbs, butter, flavourful meat, hollandaise and roux, and an insistence on freshness and simplicity in highlighting the flavours of his ingredients that has carried through to the present day. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Julia Child owned two copies of this book, dating from 1712, that are now with the rest of her ample culinary collection in the Schlesinger Library.
La Varenne and his followers prevailed until the twentieth century, at which point other influences from the Mediterranean, the East and the New World began to dominate. This first Italian edition therefore represents a seminal moment in cookery, when the previously gastronomically dominant Italy began to import new ideas from France.
Provenance: Bookplate of Emma Sewell on the front pastedown, daughter of the major figure in gypsum mining, American Jerome Berre King. She married Horace Sewell (1881-1953) in 1916, the Jamaican-British decorated WWI officer who lived for a time in Tysoe Manor, where the bookplate is from. There is another French cookbook (by American Eliza Leslie) with her bookplate on it, as well as a Sandoz book illustrated by Salvador Dali—a rather interesting collection.
La Varenne’s works went through many editions and were heavily used by their owners, making any copies surviving, like this one, rare. This edition is extremely scarce, with only two copies listed in OCLC. Simon BG 470; Bitting p. 276.
