Customer Reviews

The Opera Lover's Cookbook: Menus for Elegant Entertaining

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The connection between opera and food is such a natural that food historian Francine Segan has a field day with the lavish format of her eminently entertaining cookbook. Each chapter reflects a specific operatic work or theme (e.g., Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess", German opera) or the overall work of a legendary composer like Puccini and Mozart. From that basis, Segan offers the appropriate menu, whether it is a casual brunch, a formal five-course dinner, or in the case of Mozart, a collection of delectable sweets like Figaro's Orange Cake or Linzertorte Music Bars. The tastiest-looking recipes include the tapas inspired by Bizet's "Carmen", including Serrano Ham with Drunken Melon and Melty Manchego with Spicy-Sweet Tomato Jam, and the down-home, "Porgy and Bess"-inspired dishes like Maple Buttermilk Biscuits and Butternut Squash "Hash" with Southern Comfort.

There are over 125 recipes included, all meticulously chosen for their compatibility with the music, and Segan offers such relevant facts as how Mozart's Don Giovanni offers tapas-like nibbles throughout Act I as a means to divert attention from his philandering. In true Food Network fashion, she also provides entertainment and presentation tips to complete the picture. Moreover, to fortify the opera connection, she enlisted world-renowned soprano Renée Fleming to write the foreword and baritone Gerald Finley to act as a wine sommelier for some of the recipes. There is also a nice collection of archived photographs from past Metropolitan Opera performances to see the specific inspirations for the food, as well as loads of trivia and historical facts about the operas themselves. Mark Thomas provides the stunning culinary photographs. This book is obviously most ideal for opera lovers who aspire to become the next Martha Stewart.

This book was given to me as a gift by a friend who knows that I love opera and food. I'm going to have to pass this book on, however. The recipes are impractical, goofy, and have a kind of playing-with-the-food quality to them. Every chapter starts with a long series of cocktail recipes. You get the feeling that this book is really about drinking. And these are STRONG cocktails, from the look of the recipes!
Many of the ingredients for the recipes might be hard to find even in a big city (I live near Washington, D.C.).
To give you some idea - I have a Michel Richard cookbook, and even though this great chef requires a huge amount of slicing and reorganizing of ingredients, his cookbook is more practical and realistic than this one!
But the pictures are nice, both the food pictures and the opera photos.

With chapters arranged around operas, this book is a practically a series of dinner parties in one book. Gorgeous enough to grace your coffee table, it's filled with fun trivia about famous shows and lists everything you need from pre-dinner cocktails through dessert to have a themed party based around your favorite shows.

If you're not an opera fan, it's still worth paging through the suggestions for some unique and decadent recipes. Some of the ingredients are hard to find or quite expensive, but there are plenty of recipes anyone can do. If you're looking for something different, this is a great choice!

This book is so gorgeously photographed, you want to eat IT. I want to make the cake on the cover!