The Passionate Epicure: La Vie et la Passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet [Paperback]

In the classic French novel The Passionate Epicure, Marcel Rouff introduces Dodin-Bouffant, a character based loosely on Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, an infamous bachelor and epicure dedicated to the high arts: the art of food and the art of love. This edition contains a Preface by Lawrence Durrell and a new Intro-duction by Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for Vogue magazine and author of the bestselling book The Man Who Ate Everything.“A little masterpiece.”
—from the Preface by Lawrence Durrell

“Some of the finest and most enticing writing about food you’ll ever find.”
—From the Introduction by Jeffrey SteingartenMarcel Rouff was born in Geneva in 1877. He is the author of The Psychology of Taste and had a distinguished career as a gourmet writer, poet, dramatist, essayist, literary critic, chronicler of rural as well as Parisian society, and historian, collaborating with such luminaries as Jean Jaurès. He died in Paris in 1936.From the Introduction
Jeffrey Steingarten

This delightful little classic was probably the first gastronomic novel ever written, printed in a tiny edition in 1920, then properly published in 1924. The charming translation by “Claude” is the only one into English. It was first published in London in 1961 and a year later in New York City, and has been out of print for a generation. We are very lucky to have it back.

Our hero, Monsieur Dodin-Bouffant, is a distinguished jurist, now retired and living with one servant in a small, comfortable house in his ancestral town. He has dedicated his life, every waking hour, to the refinements of cuisine, which is to say French cuisine–eating and cooking, thinking and talking about it. Though word oflÃ"