James Villas' the Town & Country Cookbook

As food and wine editor of Town & Country, Villas (American Taste) has learned that ""the rich and successful love and respect a great hamburger as much as an elaborate fish baked in puff pastry.'' To accommodate these cosmopolitan tastes, he has assembled recipes ranging from peanut butter sandwiches to quail stuffed with spicy oysters, from baked beans to fiddlehead ferns with mushrooms. But the most ordinary dishes have the Town & Country touch: the peanut butter sandwich is finished with overlapping slices of peeled kiwi fruit, and the baked beans, eschewing any trace of tomato, contain clove-studded onion, dry mustard and dark rum; to vichyssoise, Villas adds cucumbers, and ordinary rump roast must be basted with three bottles of imported ale. The recipes throughout are simple enough for the novice. Illustrations not seen by PW. Foreign rights: Robin Straus. October 10