Jan Norris: Food and Florida

Editor’s note: Throughout the season, I’ll be featuring gift ideas for cooks; check back often. If you have a gift to suggest, click on the Contact button above and email me your favorite thing to share with my readers.

Cook’s gift: A Life in Food Cookbook

The Chesterfield Hotel in Palm Beach is part of the Red Carnation Hotel Collection, and it’s based out of England.  Beatrice Tollman is president and founder of the hotel group of small luxury properties, and she’s just published a cookbook based on her memoirs.

A Life in Food

Tollman has traveled around the world, learning recipes as well as kitchen techniques (teaching herself by tasting every dish in progress, she says), and adding them to her family favorites. Many made their way into the hotel menus, and the book tells how they are adapted from a family  recipe to a commercial kitchen.

Recipes are easy and ingredients are fairly common. She writes that “comfort food has alwas been my specialty.”

Books are $45, and can be found at the Chesterfield Hotel in Palm Beach,  363  Cocoanut Row, (561) 659-5800 – or any Red Carnation property around the world.

It’s a charitable purchase: All money raised from the books goes to two UK charities, the Starlight Children’s Foundation, granting seriously ill children wishes, and The Tick Tock Club, which supports research for kidney disease.