The Metropolitan Opera Cookbook

Most opera fansincluding operaphile and cookbook writer Jules Bondagree that opera and food go together. Add a hefty dollop of musical nostalgia and a few too many glitzily romantic table settings, and you'll find yourself with a cookbook that may have to fight its way from the coffee table into the kitchen. Two hundred photographs dominate the array of mostly standard international recipes contributed by musical figures, Met administrators and others, from Jenny Lind to Herb Wekselblatt (tuba player in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra). The pictures of aproned opera greats puttering around the kitchen threaten to take over, but a marvelous campiness prevails, especially in the shots of an elegantly coiffed Anna Moffo kneeling in a chicken coop amid several hundred white hens, and a maniacally grinning Birgit Nillson brandishing garden shears. Recipes are easily prepared and, this being opera territory, hearty. (A notable exception is Caruso's pre-performance favorite, an iceberg lettuce casserole.) The potential for delicious food is here, but the book will appeal mainly to opera-lovers famished for a new kind of vicarious thrill: the pleasure of trying out an idol's treasured recipe. (Oct.)