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

From the PEN/Faulkner Awardwinning author James Salter and his wife, Kayamateur chefs and terrific hostshere 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 triumphsand catastrophesin the kitchen.
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 partyand whom not to
John Irvings family recipe for meatballs; Balzacs 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.

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?