The three-part profile of jazz great Duke Ellington written by Richard O.Boyer for The New Yorker in 1944 isn’t just one of the greatest musical portraits ever written for a magazine. “The Hot Back” is a classic in food and travel writing, too, a tell-all from a then 45-year-old legend who liked to eat it all and was always worried about keeping his weight down.

“Duke”, wrote Boyer, “may announce that he intends to eat nothing but Shredded Wheat and black tea. When his orders arrives he looks at it glumly, then bows his head and says grace. After he has finished his snack his expression of virtuous determination slowly dissolves into wistfulness as he watches [Billy] Strayhorn eat a steak. Duke’s resolution about not overeating frequently collapses at this point. When it does he orders a steak and after finishing it he engages in another moral struggle for about five minutes. Then he really begins to eat. He has another steak, smothered in onions, a double portion of fried potatoes, a salad, a bowl of sliced tomatoes, a giant lobster and melted butter, coffee, and an Ellington dessert – perhaps a combination of pie, cake, ice cream, custard, pastry, Jell-o, fruit and cheese.”

Here’s Duke describing his favourite burger:

At Old Orchard Beach, Maine, I got the reputation of eating more hot dogs than any man in America. A Mrs Wagner there makes a toasted bun that’s the best of its kind in America. She has a toasted bun, then a slice of onion, then a hamburger, then a tomato, then melted cheese, than another hamburger, then a slice of onion, more cheese, more tomato, and then the other side of the bun. Her hot dogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate 32 one night.

Ellington divulges the dining highlights of his American and European tours, from the chow mein with pigeon’s blood at Johnny Cann’s Cathay House in San Francisco to the 84 kinds of hors d’oeuvres at The Café Royal in the Hague to the mutton at Monseigneur’s in London. I’m not sure where I’d take Ellington to dine in London were he alive today, except that I know it wouldn’t be a tapas bar. I might bring him to St John with the understanding that he could order the whole roast suckling pig feast , a £355 set menu designed to feed 14-to-16 persons, and not be expected to share so much as an anecdote.