I found myself marking similar felicities on almost every page. The omelet is almost ready. Fold it while the middle is still creamy and slip it onto a warm dish. Its fragrance is most alluring. Your mouth is watering.
Hollandaise sauce is the supreme essence of gastronomy.
But enough of poetry. Pomiane's book is a delightful relic of an earlier era. This time, though, the author comes from the United States. Chamberlain clearly relished the good life, and his mildly messianic desire to share it with his compatriots is mildly winning. Laura Shapiro's splendidly researched 1986 study of the devastation that reform-minded women brought to American cooking more than a century ago.