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431 pp. Stipple-engraved title page & frontis. port. of the author. Pictorially gilt-stamped purple cloth, gilt-lettered spine. First Edition.

Mark Thompson, in his wonderful book and blog on Vintage California Cuisine, writes, “In the crowded field of chroniclers of cuisine in California, Jules Arthur Harder may rank as the most pompous. He was chef de cuisine at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the 1880s, the latest stop in a glittering career cooking in all the leading capitals of Europe, when he started work on his magnum opus, grandly entitled ‘The Physiology of Taste: Harder’s Book of Practical American Cookery (in Six Volumes).’ Never mind that he never got past the first of the six, there wasn’t a hint of self-doubt in the preface to Vol. 1, which was published in San Francisco in 1885…It was an exhaustive achievement, 481 pages long, cataloging the cultivation practices and culinary uses of 300 different herbs, fruits and vegetables, from alecost to wormwood, listing a dozen or more specific varieties of many of them. Harder advocated buying vegetables when they are at their freshest. He went so far as to suggest that vegetables should be freely consumed only during the spring and during a shorter window of propitious growing weather in the fall. Writing in an era when many looked with suspicion on undercooked foods, Harder showed a glimmer of understanding that some vegetables are perfectly delectable when eaten raw."