December 2003

Features

• Passions: Cooking the Books | Literary Meals

  From Captain Nemo to Don Quixote, characters in great literature often love to eat. A voracious reader explains why he's driven to re-create their meals.

• Holiday Special: Entertaining

  Cocktail Hour | Dinner Buffet | Cookie Party

• Christmas in the Alps

  The fashionable French town of Megève is one of the most peaceful places in the world to spend Christmas. Here, the family behind four of its most stylish resorts gathers for a cozy holiday dinner of beef with morel cream sauce and baked apples in buttery pastry.

• Decoration: Worker's Gild | Gilding at Home

  In her spectacular farmhouse kitchen in the Hamptons, a gilder shows how easy it is to add a luxurious touch—whether to a plate or a pendant.

• 10 Best Cookbooks Of the Year

  To produce F&W's annual Best of the Best cookbook, our testers reviewed a year's worth of contenders (about 150) to find 10 keepers.

• A Yucatán Adventure

  On the latest of many visits to Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, a top chef is inspired anew by the unique cuisine. In between visits to Mayan ruins and snack shops, she creates recipes in a beautiful hacienda.

• After Hours: Dine Like Napoleon | A Historian's Feast

  French courtly dinners were once served as buffets—until, some say, Napoleon stole the idea of course-by-course feasts from Russia. A party given by a historian of hospitality updates that tradition.

• Awards: Spirits of the Year 2003

  How to choose fom the hundreds of new spirits released every year? No need: we've done the work for you. Here, our top 10 picks, chosen in a blind tasting.

• Back in the U.S.S.R.

  Raised on a Soviet diet of frankfurters and canned peas, a writer returns to a Moscow where expensive French cheeses and Japanese soba noodles are everywhere. Over cocktails at a stylish café, she wonders whether to feel excited or guilty.

• Tastemakers: Greek Classicist: Terra Medi olive products

• Tastemakers: Palette Teasers: Palette Fine Foods

• Tastemakers: Sweet Specialists: Tiny Trapeze Confections