This book is about feasting. It is a collection of excerpts-sentences, and paragraphs, and even pages-concerned with man's fundamental need to celebrate the high points of his life by eating and drinking. It is true that such a subject is note always connected, perforce, with the fine art of gastronomy, but still it is honest and intrinsically necessary in any human scheme, any plan for the future, any racial memory. -M.F.K. Fisher