There's something magical about gathering around a beautiful candlelit dining table with friends and family.  Going the extra mile shows how much you care about them.  When you take the time to prepare a lovely meal in a special setting, it lets your guests know how important they are to you.

Good food was always a part of the Fox family dinners.  An abundance of game (especially pheasant) in the mountains afforded guests many interesting meals - and John would send special delicacies home from time to time by rail from various parts of the world as he traveled the Author Circuit.  An evening meal at the Fox House was always exciting and full of surprises.

Dessert is the crowning touch to every meal and there was always something special being baked in the Fox House kitchen.

When John's sister, Minnie, wrote a cookbook in 1904 - The Blue Grass Cookbook - she asked him to write the introduction for it.  Here is an excerpt from that writing:  "It is now breakfast time.  There are strawberries in Japan, but there are also straw-berries in the Blue Grass, and I shall not risk international complications by invidious comparison.  In the Blue Grass they go with yellow cream of which I dare not think.  You shall find that same cream in a cup of fragrant coffee as well.  There is broiled ham with a grateful odor whose source is a mystery; there are plates of hot thin meal batter cakes, each encircled with crisp, delicate blank embroidery, and there is golden butter that melts and drips and seeps between the layers.  It is too early for game-birds, so those little brown, fat, broiled things resting in the big dish are spring chickens, "frying size", as we say in Virginia, and on another dish there they are again - fried, after Southern style, half submerged in rich cream of gravy, snow white.  I can go no further now, for the waffles are yet to come."

You don't want to miss this wonderful cookbook!