Host and Guest

A practical household guide to dinners, desserts, wines, and general food management that blends hands-on advice with historical and anecdotal material. It traces culinary developments from earlier periods to more recent fashions, extracts useful lessons from older treatises, and recommends approaches to menu planning, provisioning, and entertaining. Practical chapters cover wine-cellar requisites, service, and dessert preparation, while numerous illustrative menus and an appendix of historic bills of fare offer concrete examples for readers arranging formal banquets or everyday meals.