Life Is Meals. A Food Lover's Book of Days (with Recipes)

From the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author James Salter and his wife, Kay-amateur chefs and perfect hosts-here is a charming, beautifully illustrated tour de table: a food lover's 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 Year's Eve. Life Is Meals is rich with culinary wisdom, history, recipes, literary pleasures, and the authors' own memories of successes and catastrophes. For instance: .
The menu on the Titanic on the fatal night . Reflections on dining from Queen Victoria, JFK, Winnie-the-Pooh, Garrison Keillor, and many others . The seductiveness of a velvety Brie or the perfect martini . How to decide whom to invite to a dinner party-and whom not to . John Irving's family recipe for meatballs; Balzac's love of coffee . The greatest dinner ever given at the White House . Where in Paris Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter had French onion soup at 4:00 a.m. .
How to cope with acts of God and man-made disasters in the kitchen 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?"BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James Salter's All That Is.