Lucky dip - Serge Dansereau - Food and Friends - food (and books) for the elite.

"a behind the scenes look at some of the best restaurants, food and wine produces and hotels in France and Italy." Serge Dansereau

I have no idea how much this book cost originally, but I do know that my friend found it in an op shop where it cost just a few dollars, so she bought it and gave it to me, because she is generous like that, and because she had it already. It was the book I chose as a lucky dip the other day.

It is not the kind of book I normally buy. For several reasons quite apart from the expense. There are no recipes. It's really a travel book - the account of a journey that Serge Dansereau and his wife Yvette took in 1997 to France and Italy. His aim was:

"to demonstrate just how much effort and dedication is involved in achieving excellence."

It involved wining and dining around some of the best restaurants of France and Italy, and visiting the producers of some of the finest products. Hence we get descriptions of towns like Portofino (it was on the next page of the page I chose), meals at expensive restaurants and visits to high end producers of things like chocolates, foie gras, wine and cheese. The sort of food that you get in the most expensive restaurants, which is another reason why it's not really a book for me. I shall never dine in these places, and part of me almost thinks that they shouldn't exist at all. But then it's a bit like haute couture isn't it? It's art really and not for the populace. Food at its most refined and most perfect. Which is sad, because art - paintings, sculptures, etc. is available for everyone to view. Many of the world's art galleries are entirely free to visit. If you want to make this kind of art - haute cuisine - available to the mob then you should provide at least a few recipes so that they can try them out themselves and get just a small taste of what it's like to be able to dine like a millionaire.

It's a coffee table book. For show. And I don't think it's even particularly well-written. He took the photographs himself - after a short photography course - and most of them are in black and white. I suspect that somebody more proficient in photography has attacked the photographs themselves, because even mere mortals like myself can often make a pretty average photograph look good with the help of the editing tools now available to us on our computers. A professional would do a much better job. Because the photographs are, on the whole, fairly classy looking. Well it's a nicely designed book. Again somebody else's job.

Here and there there is a page on a particular dish or product - such as pesto or parmigiana reggianot, but again no recipes, although there is a vague description of how to make pesto. No quantities though.

I do dip into it every now and again, but I have yet to be entranced I have to say. Whereas I can read pages of some of my favourite cooks, this one doesn't appeal.

Serge Dansereau himself is a French-Canadian who settled in Australia and ran the Sydney Regent Hotel's fine dining restaurant for a decade or so - money no object. Two years after the journey described in this book he left the Regent to become the head chef and partner in The Bather's Pavilion which I think he continues to run. He fell out with his original business partner there over their different views of casual versus fine dining. He was for the fine dining. And thus it remains I think to this day, although there is also a cafe. His hope with the books is to "inspire young chefs" which is very different from the aims of people like Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith, Donna Hay, delicious magazine even upper crust Nigella - to get ordinary people excited about making their own quick and healthy but delicious meals. It's very definitely elitist.

The book too is for the elite. At its original price and it's heavy, glossy format, it's not something you have in your kitchen where it might get spattered with fat and juice. No - it's really for show. And much as I like to have it in my library - I also like to have beautiful things around me - it is not something I would have chosen to buy myself.

And continuing with the coincidence theme that seems to have taken over this blog of late, the page I opened it at was the first page of the section on Italy and featured the same photograph as on the cover. So here you have what Italy means in terms of food - spaghetti - with a few of the typical photographs scattered throughout the book. France is represented by a snail. The book doesn't cover all of Italy though - just the north, down to Rome. But then I guess the purpose of the book was not to cover everything. His itinerary was largely determined by the restaurants he wanted to visit I think.

So what would you have chosen to represent visually Italy's food? Most likely we would all have plumped for pasta, or maybe pizza or tomatoes. All of which were not possible until around the time of the Renaissance. And France? Well yes we think the French eat snails - and they do - but not hugely. More typical is steak and chips or mussels and chips. Though that is not the food of the refined is it?

And a last word on coffee table books. It is possible to have a coffee table book in the sense of it being beautifully produced but also having useful information, good writing and/or excellent recipes - and yes interesting stuff about the places represented by the recipes. I have several - Provence the Beautiful Cookbook, Luke Nguyen's France, Donna Hay's Modern Classics, Greg and Lucy Malouf's books on the Middle East - there are many more. Indeed it is rare for a cookery book to be plain and unillustrated these days.

The book weighs a ton - as do my other glossy books. Now why is that?