Christmas Memories With Recipes (Vintage Hardcover) by Julia Child (Editor)

It's a merry Christmas indeed when you can spend it with 25 brilliant food writers, chefs, and home cooks, picking and choosing among their favorite recipes and settling in to read their warm memories of Christmases past. In Memories of a Non-Christmas Lover's Christmas, Bert Greene who is a Christmas lover recounts the first Christmas dinner he put together after the Great Depression, much to his mother's voiced chagrin although she secretly was footing the bill.

Following the story are six marvelous dessert recipes from his mother's own Christmas dessert buffets, including creamy and decadent Pineapple Bavarois and Triple-Nutted Strudel, a crispy confection of buttered phyllo sheets and chopped almonds, hazelnuts, and walnuts. Beatrice Ojakangas prepares a smorgasbord of traditional cardamom-scented, Scandinavian Yuletide dishes still served in the Midwest, including Swedish Saffron Bread and Gorokakor, a Norwegian cookie.

We travel back to the family farm in Cesenatico, Italy with Marcella Hazan to celebrate the first Christmas home after the war, a bittersweet memory of food and family (and Capeletti in Brodo) triumphing over the ruins left by retreating Germans and advancing Allies. Many more revelers add to the mix, including Martha Stewart, Jacques Pépin, Maida Heatter, and Betty Fussell.

There are more than 150 recipes for an international array of Christmas favorites, including Jansson's Temptation- Swedish scalloped potatoes with anchovies, a Grand Marnier-flavored Eggnog recipe from Jehane Benoit in Quebec, and Lee Bailey's fine Southern Turkey and Corn-Bread Dressing.

Originally published in 1988, a few references to the Soviet Union and little descriptions such as Bryan Miller's reign as current restaurant critic for the New York Times are slightly funny and jarring, but in no way diminish the loveliness of the recipes and memories.