Delightful book. Would love to have a drink with Julia Reed sometime.

I am very sorry I spent money on this snobbery.

I got this pick from Reese Witherspoon’s book whiskey in a teacup. Fun read. Reminds me of ruth reichl’s books. Great stories that include recipes for food and a lot of cocktails. Looking forward to trying a few.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I wasn't familiar with the author, but I was hoping it would be a humorous look at Southern cooking. It turned out to be like reading the social calendar of someone you don't know (and don't care to know). The author just relates story after story about various and sundry people, with not a lot of transition. In Chapter 2, for instance, we get to hear about the wife of Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece (it says "princess", but since it was a wife, I'm assuming this was a mistake), Nan Kemper, Ruth Draper (?), Jean Harris (of Scarsdale fame), Charles Revson, Dick Cheney, Joe Alsop (cousin of the Roosevelts), the Roosevelts, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Arden, the Duchess of Windsor, Pat Buckley, Bill Blass, Evangeline Bruce (?), Princess Margaret, Sally Quinn, Ben Bradlee, Margaret Visser, Baronne Staffe, Winston Churchill, Laura Delano, and Brooke Astor (I'm sure I missed a few). The chapter is only 5 pages of text and two recipes, so you can see how the anecdotes wear a little thin when packed so tightly. It's all very tedious reading. I couldn't get too enthused about the included recipes because of all the gratuitous name-dropping and statements such as, "I attended a dinner at the British Embassy" and "In my last lunch with (Bill) Blass at his Connecticut country home . . ." Yawn. I'm not really sure what audience this book is aiming for, but chances are, if you're not mentioned in the book (and it's entirely possible you might be, with all the names thrown about), you'll grow tired of it quickly.

This book was written as if several wordy food blog posts were bound in print. The recipes looked good, and some of the stories were interesting, but some of the anecdotes came off as bragging. The author and I share a love of entertaining and cooking delicious food, and maybe I’m jealous of her regular black tie dinner parties, but I’m not sure I’d want to be invited to hers anyway.

The recipes look good, and the stories are mildly entertaining. I don't mind the name dropping; I think it's an effective way to communicate the lifestyle that she leads, which is what she's trying to sell. Had this only been a memoir, it would have been too dull. As a cookbook, I'm not sure I would have bothered. But it fits nicely somewhere in between.