Suggestions

CHRISTMAS is the holiday season so I asked Professor Kenneth Allan Robinson, who is an expert on good food and wines, to give me a list of the books best suited to Americans on the subjects. Mr. Robinson's list follows: The Gun Club Cook Book, by Charles

Browne. Charles Scribner's Sons. Invaluable. This is the best cook book for men in existence. It is not a book on camp-cooking though it contains a note or two on that subject. But it is a book that no man who likes to go into the kitchen and do things with cheese, steaks, and onion soup can afford to miss. Written with humor and gusto, it also makes excellent bedside reading though it is likely to drive you to the kitchen for a last bite before going to sleep.

American Wines and How To MakeThem, by Philip M.Wagner. Knopf. An excellent treatise on a popular science. The elements of wine-making at home lucidly and authoritatively explained.

The Complete Wine Book, by Frank Schoonmaker and Tom Marvel. Simon and Schuster.

A good introduction to the general subject. Wines of the different nationalities are explained and useful information is given about their respective qualities and vintage years. A chapter called "The Abracadabra of Wine" clears the business of choosing wines of much of the mumbo-jumbo that has grown up about it.

The Physiology of Taste, by BrillatSavarin. Boni & Liveright.

No list of books on food can leave this out. An English translation of the classic French work on the philosophy of gastronomy. Metaphysical justification (if you need it) for the pleasures of eating.

Notes on a Cellar Book, by George Saintsbury. Macmillan.

Another classic. An excellent study in humane letters by an amateur of wines and a famous Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh University. While Professor Saintsbury's taste in wines was not so catholic as his taste in books, this work has a delightful personal flavor.