Beard's' cookbook of the year', a puzzler

Anyone with a hankering for hash of snails or powdered duck or a host of other centuries old British cookery should be plenty pleased with this year's James Beard Foundation cookbook of the year.

But for the rest of us-by which I mean, virtually every last one of us-the selection of Hes ton Blumenthal's Historic Heston, a 431 page epic exploration of mostly antiquated recipes, will be a head scratcher.

It's one of those books so fabulously out of touch with any cook who doesn't have an army of sous chefs at his side, one has to ask for whom this book was written.