Life Is Meals

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. "e;The meal is the emblem of civilization,"e; the Salters observe. "e;What would one know of life as it should be lived, or nights as they should be spent, apart from meals?"e;BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James Salter's All That Is.