This delightful cookbook brings Mrs. Appleyard back again, at her tart-sweet best, and is full of warmth, humor, and unfailing good taste in people as well as food which enchanted the many readers of Mrs. Appleyard's Year and Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen.

Here is the same heady mixture, in her own inimitable style — witty and tolerant — of New England wisdom, amusing "doings" of the people she loves more for their faults than their virtues, and reliable, mouth-watering recipes (receipts!) for country fare with the Appleyard flavor that feeds the heart, too — but with a new ingredient. Her daughter, Elizabeth Kent Gay, is very much a person in her own right, although her parts of the book blend in so smoothly that it will take extrasensory perception on the part of the reader to pick them out.

The Summer Kitchen, like Mrs. Appleyard's other books, is to be read for enjoyment: this time, of her entertaining account of summer life in Vermont. The chapters take you by seasons, from a picnic in May to a green garden in June, progressing through a riot of corn-eating to an October bake-off.

In her airy green and white summer kitchen, Mrs. Appleyard produces "food people like to eat in summer, and especially parties," and there are lots of parties: Birthday Picnic, A Croquet Lunch, Tea with the Fates, Covered-Dish Suppers. To be sure, a book which gives "helpful hints about what you serve when a poet and two composers and a subsistence farmer drop in for a game of croquet . . . ought to be practical," she says — and this one is, with its wealth of accurate, tested recipes for foods to fit any mood, ranging from the wholesome astringency of pie plant in a conserve to the bon vivant pampering of a mocha torte.

Mrs. Appleyard's special appeal for her readers comes through on every page in the sparkling humanness of her attitude toward food, social functions, and people.

From the dust jacket