Fun Food and Gourmet Games Book

Swankily enough, this scribbler, at least, would like to presume that his dinner parties get up a good head of steam without the need for artificial stimulation of the kind described in Fun Food Gourmet Games (dissenters please keep your opinions to yourselves). However, if you harbour any doubts at all on that score regarding your own efforts, then this book may be just the thing to push the pressure gauge into the red, being a comprehensive dinner party kit, complete with shopping lists, recipes, preparation and cooking timetables, and--this is the whole point, of course--party games. From a simple, summery dinner involving no more than "Baked Peppers", "Oriental Salmon", "Chocoffi Ice Cream" and a game that requires items of small change to be clenched between the buttocks, to an entire wacky weekend away in which are implicated, among other things, "Sausages and Puy Lentils with Salad and Grilled Polenta", "Malteser Ice Cream with Honey Chocolate Sauce", French Cricket and a spanking game called "Wott a Bott", just about every sophisticated party possibility is catered for. Oh, it all culminates in the amazingly impressive Rotational Dinner Party: four simultaneous events, in different houses and colour co-ordinated, around which some 30 guests are shuttled between courses by pre-booked taxis. Zoe Ball is certainly impressed: her accolade is on the cover ("Wow!"). The book is enlivened by photos, with a vaguely mock-50s air, of models acting out the games. Some of them look merely worried, though one chap seems quite demented, with a mad, intense, bad-lot-in-a-cravat sort of leer. Irresistible, if this is the sort of thing you can't resist. -- Robin DavidsonRead More