Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days

ISBN: 0375711392

Author: Salter, James

Condition: New

From the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author James Salter and his wife, Kay-amateur chefs and terrific hosts-here is a charming, beautifully illustrated food lovers companion that, with an entry for each day of the year, takes us from a Twelfth Night cake in January to a champagne dinner on New Years Eve. Life Is Meals is rich with culinary wisdom, history, recipes, literary pleasures, and the authors own stories of their triumphs-and catastrophes-in the kitchen.For instance:The menu on the Titanic on the fatal nightReflections on dining from Queen Victoria, JFK, Winnie the Pooh, Garrison Keillor, and many othersThe seductiveness of a velvety Brie or the perfect martiniHow to decide whom to invite to a dinner party-and whom not toJohn Irvings family recipe for meatballs; Balzacs love of coffeeThe greatest dinner ever given at the White HouseWhere in Paris Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter had French onion soup at 4:00 a.m.Sophisticated as well as practical, opinionated, and indispensable, Life Is Meals is a tribute to the glory of food and drink, and the joy of sharing them with others. The meal is the emblem of civilization, the Salters observe. What would one know of life as it should be lived, or nights as they should be spent, apart from meals?