"Looking back to the earliest days of my youth, I remember the chestnut sellers at the corners of the Paris streets, close to the wine shops at the onset of winter.
"'Hot chestnuts! Hot chestnuts!' cried the Auvergnat with the fur cap as we passed in groups on the way to school, and later to the lycée. The richest among us bought a sou's worth -- in those days, seven chestnuts -- and, when it was very cold he lent a couple to one or two of his comrades, who put a chestnut in each pocket to warm their hands. On arriving at school we gave them back to the 'rich' boy. We had benefited a little from his opulence, and we didn't resent it. In those days humanity was perhaps, in some ways, better than now." -- a memory from Cooking with Pomiane, page 177
At the start of World War I, a medical researcher at the Institut Pasteur in Paris named Edouard Pozerski took leave from his research to be a military doctor, working in an ambulance company that treated front-line troops. In the course of his duties, he saw many young men who were poorly nourished. When he returned to his research in 1918, he also began to expand his professional interest in the chemistry of digestion with an interest in cooking. His scientific career is summarized in a biographic sketch published by the Institut Pasteur.
In 1923, Pomiane began to broadcast a weekly radio show about food and nutrition. Radio was very new, and the process of broadcasting regular programming was just becoming established. Pomiane's show became very popular. From this point he became a well-known personality and expert in cooking -- an accomplishment added to his prestige after more than 20 years as a scientist at a major research laboratory.
Sometimes he described his life as a boy in Montmartre, as in the example at the top of this post. And he gave recipes for a wide variety of dishes. Transcripts of his radio presentations were collected in two volumes called Radio Cuisine, published in 1933 and 1936. These transcripts were also used by the compilers of Cooking with Pomiane, a translation that's still in print.
In his broadcasts he described various aspects of his background as a Polish-Frenchman. Edouard Pozerski de Pomiane was born in Paris on April 20, 1875, and he grew up in Montmartre, then a poor neighborhood. His parents belonged to a community of Polish expatriates, many of whom had, like them, fled from Poland because they had been involved in its struggles for independence, especially in the large uprising of 1863. His mother's cooking was an influence on him: she often cooked Sunday dinner for groups of these friends -- dinners that included many Polish dishes.
Both French and Polish traditions contributed to his repertoire, along with recipes collected from his travels. He gave recipes for dishes such as pierogi and borscht; his methods of cooking vegetables come from both French and Eastern European traditions. Sometimes he made comparisons: for example, in one episode transcribed in Radio Cuisine, he describes a very elaborate preparation for fois gras. The recipe used a 900 gram whole fattened goose liver. I'm sure his listeners were thinking just as I did when I read this: who could afford such a luxurious piece of meat? Fois gras has always been expensive: today in France 900 grams of it would cost upwards of 160 euros/$225. However, after describing the preparation, he proceeds to explain that as an alternative, one could make a delicious but much less costly Polish-style dish from pork liver, as his mother did in the old days when they lived on his beloved Butte Montmartre. (Radio Cuisine, pages 202-204)
As well as his first cookbook, Bien manger pour bien vivre, essai de gastronomie théorique, in 1922 he published a technical work titled Hygiène alimentaire, under the name Pozerski. In 1924 he published Le Code de la Bonne Chere, translated in 1932 as Good Fare -- dust jacket of the translation is shown at left. In it he presented his ideas on scientific cooking and how to plan meals for better health, as well as a large collection of recipes.
I wrote about it here.
By 1927, Pomiane was widely recognized as an authority on cooking, as reflected in a contest where 5000 chefs and gourmets voted to choose the "Prince of Gastronomes." Pomiane was a runner-up in this competition, along with the famous chef Escoffier. The winner was the cookbook and guidebook writer: Curnonsky. (Though he sounds like another Polish immigrant, Curnonsky was pseudonym of Frenchman Maurice Edmond Sailland).