cover image Tiffany Taste

Tiffany Taste

John Loring. Doubleday Books, $56 (223pp) ISBN 978-0-385-23584-6

Although basically a showcase for Tiffany's lavish products, this volume nonetheless offers enticing, full-page color photographs and diversionary entertainment fantasies. Loring (coauthor of The New Tiffany Table Settings, design director and senior vice-president of Tiffany & Co., offers 44 photographic variations combining recipes, ambience and, of course, Tiffany patterns for ultimate effect. In a Texas ranch house, the author serves up a table setting in which ""Tiffany gold-and-enamel bracelets . . . are used as napkin rings'' because ``Texans will be Texans.'' Bottles of Chanel No. 5 perfume grace a crowded marble table in the office of the American president of Chanel Kitty D'Alessio, where a lunch of grilled sole, followed by fresh cantaloupe sherbet is served. The author imagines the satirist Jonathan Swift eating in solitary splendor at the head of his table in the Deanery of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin in 1729: ``Could the stuffed roast chickens suggest the roast Irish infants Dr. Swift is about to mockingly propose to the English?'' First serial to the New York Times magazine. (October 3)