Kitchen Book

NICOLAS FREELING is known for producing some of the finest modern crime fiction. He began his working life as an apprentice cook in a large French hotel, and continued cooking professionally for many years.A fine writer who ranks right along with Simenon, the Minneapolis Tribune says of him, and he is the creator of that superb policeman Inspector Van der Valk. But just before Nicolas Freeling decided to be a writer, he was a cook in many of the great hotels of Europe.This is a kitchen book. It is a book about Nicolas Freeling in the kitchen. It is a book about his papa in the kitchen. It is a book about the dull and sickening smells of burned fat and boiling stock, and the pungent odor of freshly strewn sawdust. It is a book about the view from the kitchen window of the Restaurant Lapérouse in Paris, and about Fred Roblin of Annecy. larder chef (and one of the nicest men Freeling ever met) whose passion was boxing. It is about how to handle a knife when you are carving a side of beef (and how to get all the meat off the bones); it is about a sour and sullen roast cook named Louis (roast cooks are generally nasty people); it is about carving a block of salt into the likeness of two pigeons drinking out of a birdbath, and about how to make hors d'oeuvres out of leftovers. It is about the Hotel Atlantic in Belleplage, a really splendid example of Grand Hotel Thermes et Bains de Mer-where the staff quarters were seven stories up under the slates of the roof, with two hundred staff in each wing (men east, women west) and room above the central block for two hundred more-the maids, the valets, and chauffeurs brought by the guests.This is a book about the very strange people who live in hotels, such as the Countess Dracula, and the very rich people who visit hotels, and the people who run hotels. And especially the kitchens of hotels.All fascinating-all observed with Freeling's knowledgeable eyes, and reported on with his magnificently trenchant and skillful pen.