Entertaining and Celebrating: An Elegant Feast for Every Season

By: Ellie Dolan-Yates

If you’re looking to host the “dinner-party of the year” then this book is for you! Packed with advice and an abundance of a la carte menus, Entertaining and Celebrating: An Elegant Feast for Every Season is the go-to handbook for dinner party planners. As the elegantly presented front cover suggests, the menus set out in this book represent top quality dining with suggestions on how to serve your food down to what china to serve food on!

The book starts with a short chapter of inspiration and advice from author/chef Kristal Damron on how it’s never too late to begin your dream career.  A few notes on how to recapture elegance follow, before we are led into the menus. The book is split into seasons, which are sub-sectioned into months. This means you’re equipped to host a dinner party any time of the year! Each month begins with a photograph not only presenting an idea of how to decorate your event, but also giving you a feel for the season. Each menu is divided into courses with a suggested wine pairing. Serving suggestions for each menu are laid out at the bottom of the page highlighting how best to serve each course, be it in a buffet style or through servers. Course highlights are set out to the right of the page which is a good idea for those who may not be able to fulfil the whole menu.

Damron takes the time to thank her family and friends for supporting her and highlights how important the support is from those around us, showing that a lot of love and hard work went into preparing this book. The appendix of the book follows and sets out an array of china, ordered into seasons, so that the reader can purchase if they wish. Following this is a summary of the wine pairings given for each course, again split into seasons for ease of the reader. Each wine pairing comes with an in-depth description, helping the reader get a sense for the taste pairings.

Although this book is centred around menus rather than recipes, you can find instructions for cooking at author Kristal Damon’s website and five free recipes are available with purchase of the book.

I do feel that the book is aimed at a certain demographic. Of course, not everyone will be able to lay out china laden tables for thirty guests and have servers to share each course, but the book is still a good source of inspiration for what types of food are best made throughout the year.

Entertaining guests can be quite daunting, but this book is presented almost as a step-by-step guide to those wishing to put on an elegant feast for their friends and family. If you have the means to host such events, you can’t go wrong with this book.