Autumn 2022

Château de Mont Cristo
a hundred languages, and were eventually
transformed into over 200 films. The books
earned him enormous sums of money and
enabled him to indulge his love of sumptuous
living. He loved rich food and expensive
wine and was said to have more than 40
mistresses – despite being married. He was
a man of tremendous energy and enormous
self-esteem, described by peers as a giant,
both in mind and body. Dumas boasted, “If I
were locked in a room with five women, pens,
paper, and a play to be written, by the end of
an hour I would have finished the five acts and
had the five women.”
He also had a castle built which he called the
Chateau de Monte-Cristo, and in the grounds
a smaller castle which was his writing studio,
which he called the Chateau d’If after the
setting of The Count of Monte Cristo, a small
fortress island in the Bay of Marseille. Here he
hosted fabulous parties, serving up dishes he
created. The castle is now open to the public,
a legacy of Dumas’ fertile imagination.
The idea of writing a cookbook had been in
Dumas’ mind for years. He would begin it,
he said, “…when I caught the first glimpse of
death on the horizon.”
In 1869 he retreated to Normandy with his
cook. Six months later, his Grand Dictionnaire
de Cuisine was finished. Of his book he said,
“It will be read by wordily people and used
by professionals. In cookery as in writing, all
things are possible.” He called it his “pillow of
my old age.:
True to his vision, Dumas succumbed to a
stroke in December 1870.
Dumas’s epicurean tour of the alphabet,
from absinthe to zest, is a treasure chest
of hundreds of recipes, and reminiscences.
Written without measurements, it is a master
storyteller’s collection of consummate
prose, worthy of being read as literature. Le
Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine was published
posthumously in 1873 and remained in print
in its original form until the 1950s. In 1882 Le
Petit Dictionnaire de Cuisine was published
consisting of just Dumas’ recipes. In 2005,
Alexandre Dumas’ Dictionary of Cuisine was
edited, abridged and translated into English by
Louis Colman.
Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine is truly a
monumental work. Not only amazing for its
collection of old world recipes, stories and
historical facts, it creates a cumulatively
unique portrait of the man himself. Dumas
avowed he would not eat pâté de foie gras
because the ducks and geese “…are submitted
to unheard of tortures worse than those
suffered under the early Christians.”
And his description of the perfect number
of dinner guests within the parentheses
of ancient history still holds true today: “…
Varro, the learned librarian, tells us that the
number of guests at a Roman dinner was
ordinarily three or nine — as many as the
Graces, no more than the Muses. Among the
Greeks, there were sometimes seven diners,
in honour of Pallas. The sterile number seven
was consecrated to the goddess of wisdom,
as a symbol of her virginity. But the Greeks
especially liked the number six, because it
is round. Plato favoured the number 28, in
honour of Phoebe, who runs her course in 28
days. The Emperor Verus wanted 12 guests
at his table in honour of Jupiter, which takes
12 years to revolve around the sun. Augustus,
under whose reign women began to take their
place in Roman society, habitually had 12 men
https://frenchcountryadventures.com/
Dumas had a metro station on line 2 named after him in 1970. There is also a
Rue Alexandre-Dumas in Paris
and 12 women, in honour of the 12 gods and
goddesses. In France, any number except 13
is good.”
For Dumas a perfect dinner is also “a major
daily activity which can be accomplished in
worthy fashion only by intelligent people. It
is not enough to eat. To dine, there must be
diversified conversation which should sparkle
with rubies of wine between courses, be
deliciously suave with the sweetness of dessert
and acquire true profundity by the time coffee
is served.”
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