Le Guide Culinaire

The French 1903 original has precedence and is the true first. The first English edition — collected in its own right — is A GUIDE TO MODERN COOKERY, William Heinemann, London, 1907: xiii + 880 pp., an ABRIDGED translation of the 1903 text carrying a glossary, 2,973 numbered recipes and about twenty pages of menus; publisher's forest-green cloth lettered in gilt on spine and front board, photogravure portrait frontispiece with tissue guard, all edges green, marbled endpapers, publisher's advert on the verso of the half-title. First printing May 1907; a second impression followed in December 1907, so a Heinemann copy must be free of a later-impression statement. FIRST-THUS TRAP: the Cracknell & Kaufmann translation (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1979; reissued by Wiley 2011 as Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery) is billed as the first complete English rendering but translates the 1921 FOURTH French edition — it is a first thus, not a first of Le Guide Culinaire.