The Gentleman's Companion EXOTIC COOKERY BOOK & EXOTIC DRINKING BOOK ( combined volume I and II in one book) Author: Charles H. Baker Jr.
Number of pages: 220 (1st volume), 217 (2nd volume)
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group.
Charles Henry Baker, Jr. (December 25, 1895 - November 11, 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".
Baker collected many of those recipes in his two-volume set The Gentleman's Companion:
Being an Exotic Cookery and Drinking Book, originally published in 1939 by Derrydale Press. John J. Poister in 1983 wrote, "Volume II of The Gentleman's Companion, by Charles H. Baker, Jr., is the best book on exotic drinks I have ever encountered".
Condé 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".
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