DISCOVERIES

Serena, Food

& Stories

Feeding Friends Every Hour

of the Day

Serena Bass

Stewart, Tabori and Chang:

216 pp., $32.50

“Mother died when I was eight,” blurts Serena Bass before a single recipe, ingredient or measurement has been noted in this delightful cookbook. Pigs feet, tripe and blood pudding would have been the London-born caterer’s fate if left to her father’s devices. But older sisters swept to the rescue. This is a book for strictly social eaters: brunch, teatime (“it would take a committed narcissist to conjure up drop scones and chocolate cake at teatime just for themselves”), cocktails, buffets and dinner parties for each of the four seasons.

Bass directs these events with a practical specificity that comes, one imagines, from working for a living as a caterer; such admonitions as “Measure the dry ingredients before the wet so you don’t have to wash the measuring cups” might make the late M.F.K. Fisher’s eyes roll heavenward (in her case a lateral movement), but they are oddly comforting from a cook with as much obvious glamour, fizz and flair as Bass. By the end, she can be downright bullying: “Make Preserved Lemons Today,” exhorts the headline (I found myself at the market buying the dustiest mason jars this side of the Mississippi). Bass has all the charm but none of the severity of her predecessors -- Fisher, Elizabeth David, even Martha Stewart. The voice that floats in your head while you cook is light, gay and forgiving.

*

The Perfect Hour

The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginerva King,

His First Love

James L. West III

Random House: 200 pp., $24.95

It was a two-year affair of the heart, from 1915 to 1917. F. Scott Fitzgerald was 18, a sophomore at Princeton (not doing so well). Ginerva King was 16, a sophomore at the Westover finishing school in Middlebury, Conn. She was a rich girl from Lake Forest (what we East Coasters used to call “Fake Forest”), the daughter of a stockbroker. He was the son of a grocer. These facts so defined the parameters of the romance that it is hard to believe the enormous role she played in his fiction (the basis for dozens of characters, from Daisy Buchanan to Judy Jones) and how much he drew on copies of her letters for settings and details. The letters from Ginerva to Scott became available in April 2003, when her granddaughter Ginerva King Chandler found the transcripts in a box in the closet where King kept her evening dresses. King lost interest first and went on to marry a banker’s son. By 1937, both Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda Sayres and King’s to William Mitchell had fizzled. Fitzgerald died three years later and King in 1980. King coined the phrase “the perfect hour,” bemoaning the chaperons and social conventions that kept them from ever having any time alone together.

*

Wrong About Japan

A Father’s Journey With His Son

Peter Carey

Alfred A. Knopf: 158 pp., $17.95

The author of “Oscar and Lucinda” and “True History of the Kelly Gang” shares a fascination for Japanese comics, called manga, with his 12-year-old son. “Charley is a shy boy,” writes Peter Carey of his son’s growing love of Japanese culture, “and later I wondered if he had glimpsed a country where his own character might be seen as admirable.” He decides to take Charley to Japan and arranges several interviews with manga creators and anime directors to help pay for the trip. Off they go to find what both refer to ironically as “the Real Japan.” Charley is smitten with Tokyo’s Electric Town (where every gadget known to man can be purchased) and Sega town (a giant arcade); his father yearns for the old values, the ryokan, the Kabuki. After many disappointments and failed connections, the trip culminates not just in the meeting with Hayao Miazaki, “the most famous anime director in the world,” but also in a kiss on the cheek from an aged grandmother. “Must be the Real Japan,” says Charley. “Yes,” says his father. “Found it finally,” says Charley. “Let’s get out of here before we learn we’re wrong.”