Around the Table: Easy Menus for Cozy Entertaining at Home [Hardcover]

Most of the menus are tailored to fit a particular situation. Cold weather menus fit situations like TV viewing, a small Thanksgiving gathering, Christmas, `home with a cold', New Years Eve, Super Bowl Sunday, Valentine's day, and a hearty breakfast. Warm weather menus fit a Bridge party, and engagement dinner, the Fourth of July, a teenage date dinner, a dinner outside on the grill, and a menu suitable for preparation by an inexperienced cook (the daughter?!).

Reflection on this lineup leads me to think that the book may not be as useful to the frequent entertainer as it may appear on first blush. Most of the menus are more appropriate to very specific functions and not to general entertaining. This book is much more specialized in it's audience than, for example, Martha Stewart's famous first book `Entertaining'. The audience most interested in this book may not be the frequent entertainer of friends and business colleagues as the person with an active family life around the home.

There are two sure signs that the best audience is the large home centered family. First, there are few alcoholic beverage recommendations. If this book were oriented toward adult guests, this is a serious oversight, especially in the matter of wine. I have no knowledge or serious interest in wine and food pairings, but I do know that this is an important dimension to dining and entertaining. The author doesn't even mention the subject of wine. The few mentions of alcoholic beverages I found were recipes for Pimm's Cup, Bloody Marys, and Margaritas. Second, most of the recipes are relatively simple with a generous use of prepared ingredients from the supermarket's freezer case and cake mix aisle. A much more valuable use of space in this book would have been to remove the mixed drinks recipes and add recommendations for wines and simple references to mixed drink names.

Since the book presents recipes in menus, where most menus have a salad and a dessert course, you are getting more salad and dessert recipes than you would in the more conventionally organized book. For this imbalance, you are getting important information on putting together interesting menus.

I am not overly impressed by the distribution of ingredients by warm weather and cold weather menu. It is more accurate to say that the recipies are selected to fit the occasion than the season. Otherwise, the selection of recipes is fairly broad, covering classic American fare such as franks and beans and chili, to imported classics such as pasta Puttanesca and Gaspacho. None of the recipes violate any major culinary practices and the sidebar tips help you to make the best of your ingredients, but there is little there which an experienced cook does not already know.

The photographs in the book are all very good. The irony is that the photographs do as good or better job of highlighting the author's day job of decorator than they do of featuring the food. Serving plates, table decorations, and tablecloths get as much attention as the food. A perfect example of this is one photo which features not one wit of edible material. In the place of the food is a recent `New Yorker' cartoon flanked by elegant serving ware, napkins, and tablecloth.

I am always interested in influences on the author and I am pleased to find this writer refer more than once to the solo work of Simone Beck rather than Ms. Beck's more famous colaborator, Julia Child. Ms. Wright also refers with reverence to an association with James Beard. All this indicates that Ms. Wright is a very talented person for which home entertaining (and this book) is a sidelight, for which she has taken one or more short classes with old school culinary celebrities such as Beard, Child, and Madhur Jaffrey.

If you do a lot of entertaining and are an only modestly skilled cook, this is a worthwhile book. It gives good ideas and it will not take you into deep culinary waters.

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