This sumptuous blend of recipes with cultural history is a dinner invitation you won't want to pass up. Chances are you weren't invited to the wedding of Grace Kelley and Prince Ranier, or to Truman Capote's famous "Black and White" ball at the Plaza Hotel. But now you can experience those and other legendary celebrations in your own home, as well as learn about the historic and cultural moments they embodied. This beautifully designed book brings together twenty menus--both authentic and imagined--along with instructions for preparing each dish and recreating the dinners in your home. Each event is represented in multi-page spreads that feature contemporary photographs to help you recreate the meals in your kitchen, while archival images and entertaining essays provide important historical context. You may not live on the Cote d'Azur like Coco Chanel, but why not pretend with the perfect salade niçoise? Join the con artist Henry Gerguson and serve up some fabulous mid-century Noodles Romanoff. Feeling artistic? Serve your guests some roast chicken and borscht, the way Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner did, with vegetables fresh from their Long Island garden. From JFK's triumphant visit to Berlin to the White House reception for the Apollo 11 crew; from a Bloomsbury high tea to dinner with the famously private Audrey Hepburn, this fun and sophisticated mixture of culture and food will reside as happily on your coffee table as it will on your cookbook shelf.

All aboard for a delicious ride on nine legendary railway journeys! Meals associated with train travel have been an important ingredient of railway history for more than a century—from dinners in dining cars to lunches at station buffets and foods purchased from platform vendors. For many travelers, the experience of eating on a railway journey is often a highlight of the trip, a major part of the “romance of the rails.” A delight for rail enthusiasts, foodies, and armchair travelers alike, Food on the Move serves up the culinary history of these famous journeys on five continents, from the earliest days of rail travel to the present. Chapters invite us to table for the haute cuisine of the elegant dining carriages on the Orient Express; the classic American feast of steak-and-eggs on the Santa Fe Super Chief; and home-cooked regional foods along the Trans-Siberian tracks. We eat our way across Canada’s vast interior and Australia’s spectacular and colorful Outback; grab an infamous “British railway sandwich” to munch on the Flying Scotsman; snack on spicy samosas on the Darjeeling Himalayan Toy Train; dine at high speed on Japan’s bullet train, the Shinkansen; and sip South African wines in a Blue Train—a luxury lounge-car featuring windows of glass fused with gold dust. Written by eight authors who have traveled on those legendary lines, these chapters include recipes from the dining cars and station eateries, taken from historical menus and contributed by contemporary chefs, as well as a bounty of illustrations. A toothsome commingling of dinner triangles and train whistles, this collection is a veritable feast of meals on the move.

Bold. Majestic. Storied. Texas. The Lone Star State has many traditions, among them its homegrown cuisine, which Texans have always been justly proud of, and which has been gaining followers--and respect--all over the country. The Reata restaurants have an honored place in this emerging culinary story. Reata: Legendary Texas Cuisine tells the tale of one American family that, against the breathtaking backdrop of Texas, took risks, worked hard, and dreamed big. Today the pride of the Micallef family are its two Reata restaurants, the original location in the tiny West Texas town of Alpine, and its much larger sibling in Fort Worth. Reata pays homage to America’s cowboys and the values they have come to symbolize by promoting the traditional ideals of integrity, generosity, and hospitality with an easy ambience, exciting dishes, and exceptional service. The Reata menus combine familiar Texas fare with fresh culinary trends, including signature favorites, like the pepper-crusted tenderloin, the golden chicken-fried steaks, and the tenderloin tamales. Adventurous cooks will want to try the buffalo rib eye and the smoked quail, as well as some of the more surprising pairings, such as the boar ribs with a Thai-inspired spicy peanut dipping sauce. And no Reata cookbook would be complete without the fiery jalapeño cheese grits or the unrivaled “Giant” onion rings. So if you can’t drop by one of the restaurants and set a spell, Reata: Legendary Texas Cuisine will give you a taste of Reata that’s as big and bold as the state of Texas itself.

The rise of the American diner is the most savory of phenomenons, where classic architecture, a friendly face behind the counter, and some mean pie all combined to make these little roadside stops a treasured part of history. From the early days when Walter Scott brought his horse-drawn lunch wagons through the streets to the heyday of mass-produced chrome and neon diners in the 1950s, The American Diner offers a full blue-plate special of nostalgia for all those who loved the counter culture of these great eateries. More than 250 historical and bright colorful photographs help remind us of life before fast food, and generous helpings of classic advertisements, cool collectibles, and architectural highlights also highlight the era. Diners from coast to coast are featured, giving readers a trip to some of the best stainless-steel and neon diners that still dot the American roadways.

This is not a cookbook per se, but a memoir written for my children and grandchildren, recording what they have eaten under my roof, as well as the whys and wherefores that colored their existence before they were old enough to control their own destinies. It covers what I learned from a lot of people who influenced me, starting with my father, and consequently had a bearing on everyone I have cared for and influenced since. This has been something like a daisy chain; you help me and I’ll help somebody else, because there’s no way to repay you. It has been complied from scraps written down through the years because I did not want to forget. What has been joyous or painful, or strange or commonplace, seems to be significant today only because it was unusual in what turned out to be the last half of a millennium. It has been my lot to have been interested in a great many things: art, food, architecture, history, plants, travel, men, and my family. I’ve had ups and downs, survived and been a personal witness to the ability of the human spirit to overcome all sorts of unexpected blows. This book is for people who love to read about cooking, who know a little bit about it, and truly enjoy it as an indoor sport. It’s for people like my children and their spouses, who cook together, not always looking for the shortcuts, but always looking for the best. As Virginia Woolf so succinctly put it, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” I have led a wonderful life, enjoyed the best of this continent and Europe, never having been a star, a celebrity or wealthy, but claim only to have been a keen observer in a very interesting and unusual period in history. I’ve learned what is truly important in life, what is transitory, and I’ve tried to convey these discoveries to make other’s lives a little more productive and satisfying. The secret, the essence of the good life, in a nutshell, is productivity, and much satisfaction lies in serving one’s family. Children, especially the most promising, must be nurtured as only a mother can. Many mothers don’t see how important their roles are, and perhaps by talking about food enthusiastically, even romantically, I can get them to look on one aspect of housekeeping with new eyes, and find satisfaction where there was once drudgery. Enjoy.

Inspired by her beloved blog, dinneralovestory.com, Jenny Rosenstrach’s Dinner: A Love Story is many wonderful things: a memoir, a love story, a practical how-to guide for strengthening family bonds by making the most of dinnertime, and a compendium of magnificent, palate-pleasing recipes. Fans of “Pioneer Woman” Ree Drummond, Jessica Seinfeld, Amanda Hesser, Real Simple, and former readers of Cookie magazine will revel in these delectable dishes, and in the unforgettable story of Jenny’s transformation from enthusiastic kitchen novice to family dinnertime doyenne.

Collection of recipes suitable for a dinner party. Includes recipes for soups, main courses and desserts.

A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817. The author of the highly acclaimed Posthumous Keats, praised as “full of . . . those fleeting moments we call genius” (Washington Post), now provides a window into the lives of Keats and his contemporaries in this brilliant new work. On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosted what he referred to in his diaries and autobiography as the “immortal dinner.” He wanted to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate with his friends his most important historical painting thus far, “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” in which Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb (also a guest at the party) appeared. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolved into a lively, raucous evening. This legendary event would prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals. A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening regards the dinner as a lens through which to understand the lives and work of these legendary artists and to contemplate the immortality of genius. Winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

In this debut memoir, a James Beard Award–winning writer, whose childhood idea of fine dining was Howard Johnson’s, tells how he became one of Paris’s most influential food critics Until Alec Lobrano landed a job in the glamorous Paris office of Women’s Wear Daily, his main experience of French cuisine was the occasional supermarket éclair. An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means to be truly French. He attends a cocktail party with Yves St. Laurent and has dinner with Giorgio Armani. Over a superb lunch, it’s his landlady who ultimately provides him with a lasting touchstone for how to judge food: “you must understand the intentions of the cook.” At the city’s brasseries and bistros, he discovers real French cooking. Through a series of vivid encounters with culinary figures from Paul Bocuse to Julia Child to Ruth Reichl, Lobrano hones his palate and finds his voice. Soon the timid boy from Connecticut is at the epicenter of the Parisian dining revolution and the restaurant critic of one of the largest newspapers in the France. A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.