Literary indulgence

While some we know are skiing the Japanese slopes, attended by butlers bearing champagne, skiing alongside.

From aptly named authors Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray, comes The Decadent Cookbook: Recipes of Obsession and Excess. Not entirely a cookbook, rather an assemblage of decadent writing on food interspersed with recipes, the book enables the reader to re-create such meals as Caligula's dinner of Roast Dormice or the Marquis de Sade's preferred dessert (complete with recommended codes of conduct). One entry of note introduces the keeper of the greatest table in 18th century Paris Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reyniere. As the city's unequivocal host, his parties were the hot ticket, indeed his 'banquet burial', a dinner inspired by death, was attended not only by dining companions but also 300 invited spectators. Aware the reputation of a dinner party relies on scandal, Grimod de la Reyniere shockingly claimed a family member supplied the diner's pork. Though untrue, the false revelation of low social connections so humiliated his parents they had him exiled from Paris.