The Gentleman’s Companion Being An Exotic Cookery Book by Charles H. Baker

Paperback

Volume One of Baker’s two-volume set “The Gentleman’s Companion: Being an Exotic Cookery and Drinking Book,” originally published in 1939 by The Derrydale Press. Volume One is concerned exclusively with food recipes. Volume Two, separately published by Martino Publishing, treats cocktails and other alcohol beverages. Charles Henry Baker, Jr. (1895-1987) was an American author best known for his culinary and cocktail writings. These books have become highly collectible among cocktail aficionados and culinary historians. Baker spent much of his life traveling the world and chronicling food and drink recipes for magazines like “Esquire,” “Town & Country,” and “Gourmet,” for which he wrote a column during the 1940s called “Here’s How.” “Conde Nast” contributing writer St. John Frizell wrote, “It’s his prose, not his recipes, that deserves a place in the canon of culinary literature … at times humorously grandiloquent, at times intimate and familiar, Baker fills his stories with colorful details about his environment and his drinking companions – Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner among them.