NAMES IN THE NEWS : Ugly Portrait of Gourmet Monet

The publication of Claude Monet’s cookery notebooks reveals the father of Impressionism as a tyrannical gourmet who could fly into a rage over a sauce.

“Monet’s Cookery Notebooks,” by Claire Joyes and published recently by Editions du Chene, is a look at the private life of the man who immortalized haystacks in the haze and water lilies floating under a quaint Japanese footbridge.

Monet’s cookbook--with recipes tested and adapted by award-winning chef Joel Robuchon--is an authentic record taken from family notes.

Joyes, an art historian, found the handwritten notebooks tucked among letters, photographs and other Monet archives inherited by her husband, Jean-Marie Toulgouat, a great-grandson of Alice Hoschede Monet.

The book is to be published in the United States in the spring by Prentice Hall.