The Best of Seasons Menu Cookbook

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

International haute cuisine and home-grown Prairie farm food come
together as uncomfortable partners in this very unusual book, targeted
at an upscale market interested in experimenting with new recipes and
exotic ingredients.

The structure of the work is tied to a menu for each month of the year.
This might be for a dinner party, a breakfast, a wedding, a barbecue, or
even for a supper served on a tray. For each month, the author provides
an essay to introduce her theme; a full-color, full-page photo; the
menu; recipes for each dish; directions for decorating the table; and
advice on appropriate wines.

The Prairie contribution to the work consists mainly of a few
casseroles and lots of comfort-food desserts such as rhubarb pie or plum
cobbler. These seem strangely out of place at the end of elaborate menus
drawn from the sophisticated world of international food fantasies.

For most Canadians, the majority of the recipes are more likely to
yield comic relief than dinner. The author revels in rare and obscure
ingredients, and even experienced cooks will be impressed with all the
foreign terms Schultz throws at the reader in her flights of culinary
showmanship. The text that introduces and accompanies the menus varies
from fun reading to excessively precious prose.