Edouard de Pomiane (1875-1964) was one of the first great modern food writers and culinary personalities, a biologist by training who invented the field he called “gastrotechnology,” or the science of cookery. He was also known for his great mustache. Justus Oehler and his team in Berlin have rendered de Pomiane’s personal trademark in simple ingredients for the cover of a reissue of the 1930 classic Cooking with Pomiane, out now from Serif.
De Pomiane worked as a physician at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and in his writings, recipes and radio broadcasts often attempted to demystify cooking by explaining the chemical processes at work. His recipes were remarkable for their “hard-boiled” tone—directly addressing you, the reader, about what you should be seeing and smelling as you follow them—and for his general disdain for “traditional” elaborate French cuisine. (His other popular title was French Cooking in Ten Minutes, hardly Julia Child.) A photograph of the real Pomiane and his ‘stache after the jump.