At the table and in the kitchen with Baron Pierre de Crombrugghe

To your taste buds! Five centuries of gastronomy – the most fabulous collection of its kind in French – are for sale on March 23 at Christie’s, in Paris. The Belgian Baron Pierre de Crombrugghe was an enthusiast who spent his life collecting books on the subject and also those on the vine, wine and other alcoholic beverages, since the 15th^e century. A corpus of nearly 15,000 works accompanied by editorial, historical or biographical comments, including a first choice of just over 200 works, was dispersed on March 23, for an estimate of around 1.5 million euros. All are in the original edition, in good condition, complete and divinely bound. A bibliophilic tour de force.

These works “suits us to a stroll through appetizing virtues: some 25,000 recipes gleaned from five centuries of culinary literature. There is the holy grail of any gourmet library, the mythical meat maker illustrated incunabula by Taillevent, escorted by a farandole of other delights»