In the kitchen, as in the theatre, the great novelist was master of all difficulties. He delighted to make a triumph of an opportunity of which others would only have made a failure. For himself he would have been content with a couple of eggs; but if, as he wrote, he heard the cook complaining, “What shall I do? There are twenty to dinner this evening, and I have only three tomatoes left for my sauce! It is impossible!” then the master would lift his head and cry, “Let me see what I can do!”
So saying, he would rush headlong into the kitchen just as he was in his usual working dress, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and calling everybody in the place round him to watch his prowess, he would labour among the stewpans for a good hour, ordering all those who had followed him to the kitchen to different menial tasks—one to slice the carrots, one to peel potatoes, one to chop up herbs—turning them all into scullions in fact.
The blustering, boisterous genius as easily dominated the kitchen as he did the literary world of the time. His cooking was energy and bustle personified. Meat and butter were mingled with fine wines in the saucepans, half a dozen sauces were being watched in the bain-marie, and all the while he was cracking jokes and laughing at them most loudly himself.
It was a wonderful and inspiring sight, and, as may be imagined, Dumas seasoned the conversation as well as the dishes with the spice of his wit and humour. No matter how serious his thoughts had been a few moments before, it seemed as if the atmosphere of the kitchen had the power to dissipate them. He forgot all his ever-present cares, and was radiant with grease and hilarity.
Then suddenly, without the slightest warning, he would utter a melodramatic scream and rush out of the kitchen to his study. He had remembered the final dénoûment of a scene he had left unfinished. He would reinstate himself at his writing-table and take up the thread of the story as if no interruption whatever had occurred. Many a dish that delighted his guests was cooked in this extraordinary fashion, between two thrilling chapters, and the wonderful part about his culinary work was that the very dishes and ingredients seemed in some unaccountable way to accommodate themselves to his casual and erratic manner. What would have been utterly ruined under any other chef seemed to succeed even extra well under his neglect.
Lacroix (le bibliophile Jacob) said of him: “Assuredly it is a great attainment to be a romancist, but it is by no means a mediocre glory to be a cook. Romancist or cook, Dumas is a chef, and the two vocations appear in him to go hand in hand, or, rather, to be joined in one.”
Dumas often said, “When I have time I shall write a cookery book.” This was to be the crowning work of his literary career. He was constantly enumerating the vast sums which he alleged had been offered to him by various publishing houses for the right to produce this magnum opus.
It is not generally known that in the agreement which he made with the brothers Michael Lévy, in connexion with the rights of reproduction of his works already written and those that he had contracted to write in the future, he made the single exception of the famous forthcoming cookery book.
The great work “La Grande Dictionnaire de la Cuisine,” of 1152 pages, was eventually written in 1869; the manuscript was delivered to the publisher, Alphonse Lemerre, in 1870, and whilst the book was in the press the author died and the Franco-Prussian War broke out.
Its publication was therefore delayed until 1873, when it appeared with a dedication to D. J. Vuillemot, a noted hôtelier, who had managed the Café de la France, and had then opened on his own account, in 1862, a restaurant near the Madeleine, which proved a most disastrous failure. He had been previously the proprietor of the Hôtel de la Cloche et de la Bouteille at Compiègne. Dumas had made his acquaintance when hunting in the vicinity, and was afterwards in the habit of taking refuge with him when he wanted to be undisturbed in his literary work.