To drink and to eat | Guillaume Long

The only cookbook that provides hours of reading and laughter. Les Inrockuptibles. This book brings together the essential content of the first three volumes of "À boire et à manger." FOREWORD My father, who regularly complains about not appearing in the pages of À boire et à manger, collected almost all the Franco-Belgian comics of the second half of the 20th century in his youth. I fell into it when I was little, and I imagine that it is thanks to him that I became an author in turn. I remember reading and rereading these thousands of pages with a fierce appetite, a question coming back regularly: why did the drawing sometimes change in the middle of a series? It was only later, when I became interested in the legal notices written in very small print in books, that I understood: years separated albums that I could read in a single day. Twelve years have passed between this "complete formula" and the first pages of ABAM... That's why my drawing sometimes appears a bit different from one story to another. With M. Gallimard, we sorted and reorganized all these culinary adventures written over nearly a decade. At the very beginning of this adventure, a few days before opening my blog on "lemonde.fr," I remember hanging two notes on the wall of my workshop, where it was written: "give people the desire to eat well" and "the simplest way to eat well is to cook." Since then, many things have happened! But these two sentences have remained the guiding thread of À boire et à manger. Today, there are stories that I rediscover, those that make me nostalgic, and those that I particularly cherish. There are also recipes that I have improved, those that I make less often, and those, like the Brocolounge or spaghetti alla carbonara, that have become classics at home. I still take as much pleasure in writing my stories as in cooking... I see a rather obvious parallel between these two disciplines: in a story, there are characters, a narrative, and hopefully, readers. In a recipe, there are ingredients, a progression, and in the end, food lovers. Besides, don't we say that we "devour" a book? I have often been asked if my recipes work and are edible... the answer is yes! As soon as I like a recipe, I take care to transcribe it as faithfully as possible, knowing that it is never extremely precise. Then, I wait to find a good story to develop it. That's why I haven't written half of the recipes I cook daily yet. Especially since a good story requires a certain amount of imagination. I rely on the reader's common sense, whether it's about knowing if chard is toxic (page 255) or if I really pulled a peacock feather to stick it in the backside of a stuffed badger (page 298). One of these statements is indeed true. Finally, I must tell you that the publication of this complete edition delights me immensely! But the adventure does not stop there, on the contrary: at least two more volumes will be published in the coming years, one of which will be co-written with my mother and titled "My Mother's Cake." Guillaume Long