I love France and I love food. So what can be better than a book devoted to both. This book is a collection of essays written over the past sixty years for Gourmet magazine and so many are a delight. A person has to be soulless not to be charmed by "The Christening" in which a Parisian mother brings the plans for the party to celebrate her child's entry into the church to the hospital with her as she is about to deliver her baby and one cannot help to sigh over "Paris's Haute Chocolaterie." And then there is the sensation of being born too late when one reads "After the War" written in 1947 when the author bemoans the fact that the average check a Maxim's is an outrageous $16.00 and that a meal in an average bistro has "increased tenfold" - to $1.00 (!!).

In our hard economic times when travel - well, at least my travel - has become extremely limited, a book like this one is a delicious bon bon to be consumed in little bites to savor over the days, or to be gorged upon in one big gulp. ( )