"About all I do in my kitchen ...

"About all I do in my kitchen is use the saucepan for broth hit the buttons on the microwave, and make coffee" Liz Smith, modern York's premiere gossipeuse, informs us comely much straightaway in her newest work which contains, oddly enough, recipes. And not sole recipes. Treatises on some to a high degree peculiar foods. Liz has eaten somewhere or other, almost inevitably in the company of someone famous or if not really famous then really self-aggrandizing, which is almost as useful. The kind of [i]role[/i] in other words, who inhabits Liz's round pillar invariably attached to kind and inapt adjectives.

(Liz is frequently kind. This accounts for her professional longevity and a not many of her gossipy coups. If your name is Ivana, say, or Nora, and you intend to divorce someone hopelessly unfaithful, famous, and loaded, it's best to call Liz right away--yes, equable before your lawyer. That way you, and not your ex will be the single in kind to receive the kind and inapt adjectives.)

however back to food, about which I have a personal bias. (I like it a fate And I love to cook) to what end a determined non-cook's thoughts forward meal preparations were turned into a main division is anybody's guess, but ultimately--sandwiched somewhere between Prairie Oyster and hard Mountain oysters, stuck between the Salmon broth and Chicken Fried Steak--the popular columnist gives us a valuable hint: "Many writers now include descriptions of meals and feats of cookery as therapy."

Well, ye Many writers now do. And a surpassingly bad, promiscuous habit it's becoming, too. Years ago, the writer/director Nora Ephron started the stretch dotting Heartburn, her roman-a-Carl (Bernstein), with a ditsy array of recipes; at least single of which--a baked mess of lima beans assaulted by the agency of cored pears and molasses--Liz herself rerun in her part because her late lover invented it. Then everyone got into the act, scattering uneven and irrelevant recipes throughout their works with such profusion, it became the modern-day equivalent of the pathetic fallacy: a lazy writer's literary device.

(As Liz points revealed fans of Patricia Cornwell's heroine, Dr Kay Scarpetta, are offered--usually about the time Kay is threatened with instant massacre--the fictional pathologist's recipe for beef hot-house As Liz does not point without this is pretty weird, when you consider Scarpetta's creator has a history of battling eating disorders.)

Liz, of course, has no of the like kind problems. She inhales everything, bles her. Deep-fried Snickers bars, which are meant to be serv with stick together or caramel sauce, watermelons from her native Texas, their skins blooming as lettuce, lobster rolls with plentiful of mayonnaise, slatherings of beluga caviar level atop baked potatoes, and the Elvis Potato Sandwich (photo included), about which the les said the better.

still mainly Liz loves Bold Face Names, and although Dishing doesn't literally change its typeface for the likes of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, Conrad Black, Lucullus, Brad Pitt, Tom Wolfe Betsy Bloomingdale, Donald and Ivana trumpet Napoleon, and "the grand actress Christine Baranski" (a dispatcher, we are informed, of "incredible tequilas with the worm in the bottle")--in fact it is they, and not the undercook bacon peeking on the outside from underneath the melted cheese of the potato sandwich (I couldn't resist), who provide the drama for this book

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There's disenchantment: a certain number of years before his death, Liz visits Henry Grunwald, whom she touchingly believes to be "the last of Time's great editors" and her "idol," solitary to discover that he despises watermelon. There's tragedy upon an epic scale: "What are you? more [i]or[/i] less kind of terrorist!" wonders Julia Roberts when Liz brings up the make subordinate of biscuits and red-eyed gravy made from ham, while the actress is dieting. There's--oh hell, I don't know what to call this, unless at some point Liz's dinner partner is Evelyn de Rothschild and the nearest thing you know, Liz transfers 80 and he sends her a case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild. (All the reader derives from this fight however, is what Liz calls "a typical menu" from the Rothschild family, which includes something called new pea blinis and also "Roast Breast and Leg of Poussin.")

Celebrity is the provisions of Liz. Fame is her banquet. Big names--even medium names--are Liz's Frito Pies, which, the reader learns, the author discovered at the local Dairy Queen in Gonzales, Texas, and decided they were (quite like Ivana, when you think about it) "quick, cheap, crunchy oppressive with fire and pepper, and totally satisfying."

Better than the simple listing of names, however, is what Liz does with these ingredients. Here she is a faithful chef. Widows are never mentioned in her citations without being rewed to the word "merry" (cf Casey Ribicoff, the widow of the Connecticut senator, and Tita Cahn, "the jovial widow of Oscar songwriter Sammy Cahn"). The least meritorious are paired with the happiest descriptions. Thus: "the TV genius toss Barris" or--my own personal favorite, a hint to a Sony executive--"the handsome CEO Nobuyuki Idei of Tokyo."