Dear Friends and Family,

      I'd never heard of the Key West Literary Seminar when I got the invitation. I could not have guessed they were in their 29th year. One winter they focus on poetry. Another on "Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth." Or "The Immigrant Voice in American Fiction." This January the subject would be "The Hungry Muse." Ruth Reichl's keynote address, "A Toast to Toast," launched the first weekend with its starry congress: Calvin Trillin, Jonathan Gold, Madhur Jaffrey, Roy Blount Jr., Judith Jones, Frank Bruni, Molly O'Neill.

        It's not that the second weekend was just chicken liver. Not with the arrival of prodigious Marc Kurlansky ("Salt: A World History" and "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World") and the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, unleashing a doctoral thesis keynoter on "The Rituals of Taste: Molars and Morals." Listening to him quoting everyone from Thucydides to Montesquieu, I found myself deeply regretting for the first time that I'd schemed to graduate college without freshman Great Books. Learned panels discussed "How We Write about Food: Obsessions with Food and Writing." "Food as a Tool in Language, Story and Character." And "Passionate About Our Fruits and Vegetables." Poets mused about meat, oysters, last meals

        Talk about being stuffed. It was rich and delicious.

        As Calvin Trillin and Roy Blount, Jr. sprawled in easy chairs, sipping what might have been real hootch, and delivering the John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Event that last night, Molly and Madhur, dressed as French maids, wheeled in a cart surprising the guys with bowls of conch chowder. Actually, Molly tip-toed in, more Geisha than Gaul. "What is it?" Trillin asked. "An Irish-Indian dish," Madhur replied.

        Our colors today are stormy gray and Key West blue skies.

        Of course we would visit the Hemingway house. My Gods: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. I didn't have time for Dostoyevsky. I had already written 150 pages of pure Hemingway by the age of 17. (Hemingway was easier to teethe on than Faulkner or Fitzgerald. I could do Gertrude Stein too.) I knew I would be a novelist at 17.

        In Paris I headed right to Les Deux Magots hoping to sit at Hemingway's table and absorb literary vibrations. Even Literary Guild vibrations would do. In bed I always expected the earth to move. And sometimes it did. Alas, it took me 23 years to actually find the time and the challenge to write my novel Blue Skies, No Candy. I was having too much fun eating on somebody else's dollar and taking the whole world to dinner. It was finally the fear that I might never be a novelist if I didn't sit down and write it.

        Last week I tried to imagine young Ernest in that modest two-story house set in the lush tropical garden on its own acre, and in the bed where a pair of cats was sleeping as our guide did his spiel. I did feel his ghost in the studio when I saw the ancient typewriter. He wrote "The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber" there and sold it to Cosmopolitan. So, we had Cosmo in common. I wrote "Low Fidelity Wives" and "How Not to Get Dumped on His Way Up."
  

we would eat at his house in town. But then the sun came out and we joined him, the fabulous Sarah (20 years with Gourmet magazine and former Pier House cook) and another couple from New York (Laurent and Phyllis, handshakes), speeding the eight miles to Ballast Key, the island he was clever enough to buy about the time he built Key West's first hotel, Pier House Resort, facing the ocean. Truman Capote wrote "Answered Prayers" in Wolkowsky's own double trailer, forcing the hotel owner to move to a suite in his own hotel. Both Jimmy Buffett and Bob Marley started their careers in the hotel's funky "Chart Room Bar," according to Wikipedia.

        Sarah tossed together a panettone bread pudding while we sipped white wine. Our host brought out more copies of Insatiable for me to sign and several copies of Babar books. It seems Laurent the quiet Frenchmnn on the boat was Babar's "father," Laurent de Brunhoff, a young-looking 80, who has carried on his father Jean's legacy of storytelling since 1948. I was so struck by the idea of being in the same room with Babar's animator, I sang him a song from the Babar record I had as a child: "Hooray, hoorah, hoorum, for Arthur and Celeste," it begins. Steven looked at me as if he had never seen me before. Everyone else was kind.

        There was a choice of mustard mayo or drawn butter and more stone crab than we could all eat on the terrace overlooking the water. Then we were expected to eat chicken hot dogs. Our host is known for always serving chicken dogs, white wine and potato chips to royalty, writer friends, Vanderbilts and Mellons. He devoured his with relish and two chips. He is 92.

        So now I own a signed copy of "Babar and the Succotash Bird."

As easy and welcoming as it is, I can't imagine The National in the Benjamin Hotel will attract Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, Charlie Rose or the Empress Farah Diba on leave from the Peacock throne of Iran, as The Lambs Club has. But it seems to have the restless chef Geoffrey Zakarian's attention for the moment.

        The National wasn't designed for fickle first-nighters and tall babes on spindly spikes who certify what's chic in New York, nor for addled blogotrons, or chef groupies. With its easy, relaxed air, timeless good looks, and fine food at temperate prices - entrees $13 for an artichoke sandwich to $28 for that steak frites - it could serve a busy neighborhood for a very long time. Come for breakfast at 7 am. Linger to use the Wifi. Stop at the bar for coffee and a sandwich. Get married in the party room. And if it's lunch or dinner you hunger for click here to find out what you'll want to eat.

Molly O'NeIll set out to document how Americans had stopped cooking. Instead, she encountered impassioned cooks -- everywhere. Ten years and over 300,000 miles later, she had crossed forks with cooks, amateur and professional, from trailer parks to small town beaneries and barbecues, to ticky-tacky suburbs and big city gourmet kitchens, and collected 20,000 recipes and somehow - is it possible she actually tasted? - somehow winnowed that down to 600 for "One Big Table, A Portrait of America Cooking" (Simon & Schuster $50).

        I was a big fan of her food writing in the New York Times till one day she abruptly departed. But I never quite appreciated her appetite till now.

        You need two brawny guys and a crane to carry the book home from your independent book store. I don't see how one could actually cook with it. It's too fat to Xerox a page so you could try "Kate's Compost Social Soup" from Seattle, or "Chipotle Ceasar salad with Tequilla-Cured Salmon" from Salt Lake or "Jerry Bum's Revenge Chili" from Massachusetts. You need to enlist Arnold Schwarzenegger to hold it up for you while you roll out the dough. But it's full of historic photographs, folk art, vintage ads and signs, family snapshots, and homey reminiscing. Set it on a dictionary table or a bible stand and leaf through it. Like your grandma's china armoire that doesn't quite fit into your studio apartment, it's a real treasure. So make room. Click here to buy it now from Amazon.

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Photographs of me confessing to delicious excess at The Hungry Muse, server at Bo's Fish Wagon, Fried green tomatoes and fabulous wings at Hogfish, stone crab on David's island, and the fine burger at The National may not be used without permission from Steven Richter.