Mix a little theme-park flavor with a taste for the history of the Old West, add a hearty appetite and the yen to cook, and you might come close to The Fort--after 40 years of business, more a Denver institution than a restaurant. It was Samuel P. Arnold who first built his home as a replica of Fort Bent, a Colorado fur-trading post, circa 1840. And it was Sam Arnold who invited the public to share his enthusiasm for a time long gone but not forgotten. The Fort Cookbook tells the whole amazing story, dishing up some of the restaurant's more memorable recipes. The meat recipes (elk, venison, buffalo, lamb, and loads of beef) are alone worth the purchase price, but don't think for a minute that Arnold focuses on historic relics that taste as though they might best be left in a museum. He's a man with a modern palate, an eye on Southwestern cuisine as it has developed over the last 20 years, and the good sense to take any and all modern ingredients into account.
From Library Journal
The author of this unusual, fascinating book is now well known as a food historian, and his restaurant just southwest of Denver has been thriving for 30 years, but he became a chef/restaurateur almost inadvertently. In the early 1960s, Arnold and his wife set out to build a re-creation of a 19th-century adobe-brick fort/trading post. But when it became too expensive to construct as their home, they made it into a 300-seat restaurant, too. After a disastrous beginning, The Fort has become its own landmark, and Arnold is now an authority on authentic Western food and regional history, with two other cookbooks to his name. The recipes here include lots of red meat, including buffalo, but there are also intriguing fish and game dishes (most chapters offer a selection "For the More Adventurous Palate") and a wide range of vegetables as well. And Arnold's text, ranging from the question of what to feed a tamed bear to more mundane matters such as the history of chiles, makes very entertaining reading. For most collections.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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