Word: waverley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least as far back as Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, novelists have been interested in setting imaginary characters loose against a background of authentic, tumultuous events. Small wonder. History is, after all, drama readymade, an endless pageant playing at all hours in the public domain. Writers who elect to fuse their private inventions with the collective memory of an actual past can create electrifying effects. Witness the towering achievements of War and Peace or the enduring popular appeal of Gone With the Wind. The formula has its pitfalls, of course, in the hands of the inept: cardboard people posing stiffly...
...France, it is said, there is only one way to make a bechamel sauce; in Italy, salsa bolognese can be interpreted 50 ways. As Waverley Root observed in The Food of Italy, "While French cooking has become professional cooking even when it is executed by amateurs, Italian cooking has remained basically amateur cooking even when it is executed by professionals. It is, in short, home cooking, la cucina casalinga, human, lighthearted and informal...
...DIED. Waverley Root, 79, prolific Paris-based foreign correspondent and author of compendious books on haute cuisine; of lung disease; in Paris. Despite writing such weighty tomes as his two-volume The Secret History of the War and The Truth about Wagner, Root was savored most for gastronomic texts like The Food of France (1958). Root's cardinal rule for eating in Paris: Follow the taxi drivers...