Pike in the Basement

Simon Loftus is a wine merchant, hotelier, restauranteur and writer of wine catalogs and two other food and wine books, Puligny-Montrachet: Journal of a Village in Burgundy and Anatomy of the Wine Trade: Abe's Sardines and Other Stories. This book is a collection of 16 essays, some describing visits to particular places, others exploring specific foods and their histories. Each essay is followed by a recipe for a related dish, some of them quite delicious, and each matched with a wine or an alcoholic specialty meant to enhance the dish. The text is nicely illustrated by 16 well done woodcuts. Some of my favorite topics include: -- frozen oranges with vodka in Asia Minor. -- catfish in Tennessee. -- the white truffles of Piedmont versus black, and inferior, truffles from France, and the pleasures of buying, storing and illegally exporting the truffles from Italy. -- a complex history of pigs and pork sausages. Loftus finds aromas evocative: "A fresh peach brings back a walled garden in Brittany, the smell of saffron recalls paella in Andalusia, and the succulence of a watermelon evokes a dusty afternoon in Isfahan." His recipes can be poetic; his favorite omelet in a French inn at harvest time: "The ingredients were well combined: fresh eggs, good butter and the pleasure of the harvest, with the sweet smell of new hay drifting across from the other side of that tiny valley." This book is great fun for folks like me who like food, wine and travel. Robert C. Ross 2007 2008