Description
Hastings House Country Estate, Published 2006. Hardcover, 96 pp.; 28 cm; color photographs throughout.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Grey paper-covered boards, silver lettering on spine. Mild shelf and edge wear. Binding tight, pages clean and unmarked. Ivory pictorial jacket, front panel with a plated dish beside a curtained window, rear panel with a view over Ganges Harbour through leaded windows. Light bumping and creasing to jacket edges and corners, mild shelf wear, a few faint marks to rear panel. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Published by the hotel itself and dedicated by owners Bonny O'Connor and Jerry Parks to the staff of its first twenty-five years, part house history and part cookbook from the kitchen of Hastings House, the Relais & Chateaux country-house estate on 22 acres above Ganges Harbour, Salt Spring Island. The history follows the property from 1937, when naval architect Warren Hastings and his wife Barbara moved from Sussex and built the Manor House to resemble his eleventh-century family home, through Shan and Donald Cross, who renovated for twenty months with Salt Spring contractors and opened the ten-room hotel in the autumn of 1981, to O'Connor and Parks, returning guests from Seattle who took possession in December 1995. Swiss-born Executive Chef Marcel Kauer, profiled in his own chapter, came to Canada in 1981 speaking no English, joined Hastings House as sous chef in 1992 and was promoted four years later; still in the kitchen in 2025, his thirty-fifth season, Frommer's credits him with the only five-star dining in the Gulf Islands. The recipes keep the Crosses' rule of a daily menu built on what the island delivers that morning, arranged by season as Awakening, Solstice and Harvest and in courses of Beginning, Interlude and Finale, with Salt Spring Island lamb on every menu, alongside sablefish in soy ginger emulsion, wild sockeye, venison carpaccio and Sacher torte, and chapters on the island's producers and wine. The hotel replaced this volume with a new history, Hastings House Then and Now, in 2023. Contents: Introduction; History and Owners; About the Chef; Awakening; About Salt Spring Island; Salt Spring Island Bounty; Solstice; Harvest; Salt Spring Island Wine; Index; Acknowledgements.