This book features recipes for over 270 taste-tested dishes, from the healthy low-fat variety to the richest of gourmet splurges, all designed in an easy-to-read layout with simple directions and helpful hints. A valuable guide to entertaining , this book will help you serve Dottie's favorite dishes along with many of her internationally-known friends. It is heavily illustrated with photos of Dottie and over 95 celebrities.

The open hearth is where English families took their tea, French country families prepared their "pot au feu", and Italian mothers stirred their polenta. This is an exploration of both the techniques of hearth cooking and the poetry of the hearth and flame through the ages. The recipe collection offers a glimpse into the past with renditions of Brisket Baked under Ashes, Pot Roast, String-Roasted Turkey, Stockfish Stew and Tarte Tatin. Why cook by the hearth when our modern stoves offer such convenience? William Rubel's remarkable The Magic of Fire provides unexpected answers to the question, not immediately apparent to those interested in pursuing live-fire cooking and the intense flavors it produces. To be sure, the book is definitive in its exploration of open-hearth technique; readers learn everything they need to know about equipment, methods (including ash baking, ember roasting, and hearthside grilling, among others), and even about fire itself (it has various life stages, each best for a particular cooking task). Rubel also provides 100 delicious hearthside recipes for fundamental foods like roasted red peppers, ember-baked fish, pot roasts, and desserts, including bread pudding and baked apples-formulas he conscientiously walks us through. But the book's greatest-and most exciting-virtue lies in its presentation of fire cooking not merely as a "hobbyist" project but as a means for understanding cooking itself. It does this by revealing the relationship of fire to the things it cooks; in learning, for example, that a hearthside frittata requires "a moderately mature fire with gentle to moderate flames" to cook while simple toast needs "a new to moderately mature fire with moderate to high flames," we begin to see just how cooking works. For anyone interested in this everyday but still magical feat, this is thrilling stuff. With over 100 color illustrations of the required fires (whose preparation is thoroughly detailed); a discussion of alternative cooking "venues," including campsites; and a useful food glossary, this guide, both practical and illuminating, is an unexpected treasure. [+]