Ruth Reichl ed.: Endless Feasts

By LINDA HERRICK

It must have seemed like madness, setting up a glossy food magazine just as the world staggered from the depression into World War II. But people need to dream, and America's Gourmet magazine has survived for 60-plus years because its content goes beyond food and embraces "good living" - and sublime writing.

In editing this collection, Reichl, of Comfort Me With Apples and Tender At the Bone fame, faced a tough task; how to select when you're choosing the best from the best? The result, for a New Zealand reader, is inevitably American in content. That is not a bad thing because enthusiasts already aware of M.F.K. Fisher and bon vivant George Plimpton can enjoy them all over again, while novices are introduced to names that further stir the reading appetite.

Reichl opens with a section called "Gourmet Travels", in which various writers - not necessarily specific food writers - reminisce about places in their past, such as Don Dresden's comparison of restaurants in pre- and post-war Paris; Claudia Roden's evocative "Arabian Picnic", and Edna O'Brien's musings on childhood "ghosts of taste".

Once you get through the two rather dense chapters on the Prohibition in the "American Scene" section, the prose of Robert P. Coffin (who I'd never heard of) dazzles in his three superb regionalist essays. Annie Proulx recollects a family at war over garlic, and Paul Theroux has a grand tour on a private train across the Rockies. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes author Anita Loos humorously laments the 1920s cocktail party in Manhattan, where men and women fuelled lust over more than a few cocktails. These days (1970), says Loos, "gentlemen have begun to prefer gentlemen".

"Personalities of Gourmet" includes a profile of Edouard de Pomiane that is certainly worth reading, because it's penned by Elizabeth David, and an amusing account of "The Last Magnifico" (read rich glutton) Lucius Beebe, who dropped dead after one last blow-out. Two long chapters on gourmand James Beard drag, but the pace livens up in "Matters of Taste" particularly when Joseph Wechsburg muses on his days as an unwitting young booze smuggler.

Not consistently compelling, Endless Feasts is nevertheless a high-end destination for food-writing addicts tired of hip chefs making a fast buck out of kitchen confessions. They are fast-food; these feasting writers have staying power.

Allen & Unwin

$36.95

* Linda Herrick is Herald arts editor.