Rarefied cookbooks, well done

If by chance you are looking for a copy of a handmade, high-end food art book called “La Conversation” and are willing to shell out $600, you should step into Le Sanctuaire, the culinary shop in Santa Monica. Go to the glass case: Although the shop has shelves of ordinary cookbooks, here is where the special volumes are kept. Just as owner Jing Tio collects vinegars, chocolates, fleur de sel, porcelain, truffle slicers and spices from all over the world to offer for sale, he is also an avid collector of books. For the right price, he’ll even part with some from his private collection.

“La Conversation,” first published in the U.S. in 2001, is a two-volume collaboration between chef Marc Meneau (of the Michelin three-star restaurant L’Esperance in Vezelay, France) and the food-obsessed Swiss photographer Hans Gissinger. It is self-published by Gissinger, who uses his own printing press, under the Woodstock Editions imprint. Gissinger printed only 500 copies, destroying the negatives to ensure a true limited edition. “La Conversation” is one of a number of extremely expensive, limited-edition, self-published food art or cookbooks that are becoming Holy Grails for a small segment of serious book collectors.

Gissinger, like world-famous and now self-published chefs such as Alain Ducasse (“Spoon Cook Book”) and Ferran Adria (“El Bulli 1998-2002”), is not producing his books to make money. Says Marty Weiss, the founder of Meter Gallery in New York, which carries much of Gissinger’s work (and through which his books can be ordered at metergallery.com): “Hans made these books because he felt like he had to. The economics make it terribly hard to make money on something like this.”

Rather, these often gigantic, gorgeous books are produced to preserve the author’s art, his thought, his food and his ideas for future generations.

Ducasse has his own imprint, Les Editions d’Alain Ducasse, which operates under a branch of his business that he calls “Knowledge Dissemination” (the other branches are “Restaurant” and “Hospitality”). In 2004 it published the lavish “Spoon Cook Book,” a numbered edition limited to 5,000 copies (a paperback version is also available). It has also published four volumes of a series called “Grand Livre de Cuisine d’Alain Ducasse.” According to Emmanuelle Perrier, Ducasse’s director of communications, “I see the publishing department as a new token of Alain Ducasse’s will to give his know-how, to transmit [it] to young generations.”

Perusing these new books provides a grand tour through the state of the art of food photography and cooking. Also on display are the outsized egos of our best-known chefs, garnished, sometimes liberally, with sublime pretentiousness.

The sheer size of the cookbooks -- the 10-pound Ducasse versus the gigantic “El Bulli” (a book that comes with a CD and a separate book, “a guide to this book”) -- suggests a contest between the Godzilla-sized chutzpah of two of the greatest cooks alive. They make Thomas Keller’s “French Laundry Cookbook” ($50), which in 1999 seemed an imposing tome, look like “A Child’s Garden of Verses.”

Chip Viering, who runs a DVD manufacturing company in Anaheim, describes himself as a foodie since the day in 1987 when he tasted lobster ravioli at Spago. He has collected 400 books, including “Spoon Cook Book” and “El Bulli 1998-2002.” “I consider them collector’s items because they immediately go up in value,” he explains. He tried reproducing a couple of the foam recipes from “El Bulli” (loved the bread foam, hated the bacon foam), but he finds it advisable to use these books more as inspiration than literal recipe guides.

Christopher Blobaum, a chef who will helm the Wilshire restaurant slated to open in Santa Monica late this spring, started collecting 20 years ago when he was studying at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. He now has about 2,800 food books going back to the 18th century. He keeps about 1,000 of them at home and, respecting his wife’s wishes, stores the rest.

Blobaum, formerly executive chef at Surf & Sand Resort in Laguna Beach, sees his book obsession as a tour through world cultures and history. His favorite of the newer books is the latest edition of “The Culinary Chronicle,” a series of eight books (so far), each one documenting the food culture of a different region of the world. But the older books are really his passion. “They are riveting lessons in history and in how people lived,” he says. “I have ‘A Family Receipt Book,’ published in 1819. You learn not only what they were cooking and how frugal they were, but also how to make a broom, how to change hair to a deep brown, how to make a fence.”

“La Conversation” stands apart from the other limited-edition cookbooks in two major ways. It contains no recipes. More importantly, it is composed of images usually shunned by the larger food world.

Inside the plain mustard-color covers, the chef and the photographer reveal what they see as the truth about cooking and eating. They aim to show how all the pretty images in food magazines have “modified our relations with food.” The authors’ idea, they explain in one of the two volumes, was to show “what should not be seen” and, in doing so, “force our eyes and mind to question themselves about human cookery.”

By “human cookery” they do not refer to cooking humans. They simply mean cooking. In any event, the many black-and-white photos are as arresting as the prose is thick. The authors note, as only they can: “A vanity, cooking is also a danse macabre drawing into its round the carcass of the dead animal.” And the book is full of often remarkable, sometimes unforgettable images that reek of animal mortality and guts and fur and blood. A whole pig’s head in a steaming caldron, a cow’s udder, a veal carcass hanging upside down -- these images so permeate the work that even the nonviolent pictures seem ominous. A rather cute live snail with its leathery neck and embryonic face poking itself out of its shell and looking around -- this image, too, takes on an aura of imminent demise.

Meneau and Gissinger take a clear delight in the macabre. One still life includes a chef’s hat and the heads of a calf, a duck and several other birds lined up in a row, representing the cook, the sous-chef and the line chefs. The calf wears an earring made of cherries. Gissinger has also published “Salami” (2001), 60 photographs of Italian salamis, some in extreme close-up. Hand-printed and fussed over by the photographer, the quality of the images and paper is exceptional.

The gritty realism of “La Conversation” contrasts vividly with the fantasy and beauty of most of the gargantuan cookbooks. At his famous restaurant in Rosas, Spain, Adria shows off both his skill and his whimsicality by transforming familiar foods to look like something else, be it another kind of food or an abstract painting. And the photos in both “El Bulli” and “Spoon Cook Book” favor the abstract. When you look at a photo of “tender roasted duck with peaches and fresh almonds” in “Spoon Cook Book,” you see not a plate of food but a composition of textures and shapes that is as vibrant and alive as a good painting.

In “El Bulli,” a stunning photo of “Cala Montjoi goose barnacles” is again more about texture, composition and delight than it is about conveying information. In fact, it turns out that these are not goose barnacles at all but an elaborate creation made of seaweed stock. In the text the authors explain that the locals of Rosas are in on the joke. They “know perfectly well that there are not goose barnacles in Cala Montjoi.” The rest of us may not be chuckling over the authors’ “new example of using the sense of humour as a resource,” as they say, but we will be struck by some gorgeous photographs.

Also in Tio’s glass case at Le Sanctuaire is “Encyclopedie culinaire du XXIe siecle,” a three-volume set by chef Marc Veyrat ($425); “Natures Mortes” by photographer Irving Penn ($125); and an English edition of “El Bulli, 1998-2002” by Ferran Adria and Juli Soler and Albert Adria ($250). There is also a wonderful 1971 book by Salvador Dali, “Les Diners de Gala” ($300).

Dali may be the progenitor of the current crop of chimerical food books. “Les Diners” includes 12 chapters on fantastical meals, complete with photos, drawings, paintings and recipes (most of them supplied by Lasserre, Maxim’s and Le Tour d’Argent, top Parisian restaurants at the time). The surreal, of course, pervades the book, but many of the recipes are quite workable.

“Les Diners” also treats us to Dali’s machismo -- a trait that apparently does not change in artists over time -- which delights in the details of what would make lesser men shudder. For Dali, a woodcock flambe “served in its own excrements, as is the custom in the best of Parisian restaurants, will always remain for me ... the most delicate symbol of true civilization.”

If only Gissinger had been there to work with him.