The Awl discusses it, by way of Alexandre Dumas.
From the piece...
Alexandre Dumas père was a terrible and a wonderful man. He fought in wars, hunted, traveled the globe, owned a theatre, dabbled in politics and revolutions here and there, and was bankrupted a few times after spending fortune after fortune on women and high living. And he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, in jail or out of it. With the aid of a number of assistants he was able to turn out over 600 books before the end. He was magnificently ugly, and, apparently, irresistible. Which actually, I don't doubt that for a minute.
Dumas was also a dedicated cook and the author of a fine book on gastronomy, the enormous Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. (That link takes you to the 1873 first edition, which is in French; I can recommend the 1958 English translation and abridgement by Louis Colman, a gentle and sensitive prose stylist who is also possessed of the requisite salacious edge.)
After emerging from under a series of crushing debts, Dumas set out to write this book "as a diversion" in the late 1860s. But then he got really into it, and wound up taking many months over the research and writing. In the dedication of the book to the novelist and critic, Jules Janin, he described his thorny legal troubles, and concluded: "In my contract with Michel Lévy, I had retained the right to write a cookery book and to sell it to whomever I pleased."
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