Curnonsky , Prince of Gastronomes
“La cuisine, c’est quand les choses ont le goût de ce qu’elles sont !”
“Cuisine, that is when things taste as what they are !”
The big ironist and gastronomist Maurice-Edmond Sailland, nicknamed Curnonsky, was born in Angers on the 12th of october 1872 and died in Paris on the 22th of july 1956.
Curnonsky is the author, co- author or the helper for more than sixtyfive literary works.
It was he who nicknamed “Bibendum” the little man of the Michelin tyres. When he was promised a livelasting income only to certify that margarine was the equal of butter, he refused and wrote, outraged. "Nothing," he said, "could ever replace butter."
As the oldest of the gastronomic writers of his generation, he intends as from 1919 the repair in honour of the regional kitchens and the promotion of “the saint alliance between tourism and gastronomy”. With his friend Marcel Rouff, he visits all the provinces of France to publish “La France gastronomique”, twenty eight guides to “culinary wonders and good inn’s”. His gastronomic publications follow each other in great numbers up to his joined recipes of 856 pages, published in 1953, “Cuisine et Vins de France”.
In 1928 Curnonsky founded with some friends the “Académie des Gastronomes”, furnished with the same statutes as the Académie Française. His popularity brings him in 1927, with the support of the inhabitants of Angers in Paris, the election to “Prince des gastronomes”. In 1947 he creates the revue “Cuisine et Vins de France”, which still is edited.
