The Fort Cookbook: New Foods of the Old West from the Famous Denver Restaurant

Mix a little theme-park flavor with a taste for the history of the Old West, add a hearty appetite and the yen to cook, and you might come close to The Fort--after 40 years of business, more a Denver institution than a restaurant. It was Samuel P. Arnold who first built his home as a replica of Fort Bent, a Colorado fur-trading post, circa 1840. And it was Sam Arnold who invited the public to share his enthusiasm for a time long gone but not forgotten. The Fort Cookbook tells the whole amazing story, dishing up some of the restaurant's more memorable recipes. The meat recipes (elk, venison, buffalo, lamb, and loads of beef) are alone worth the purchase price, but don't think for a minute that Arnold focuses on historic relics that taste as though they might best be left in a museum. He's a man with a modern palate, an eye on Southwestern cuisine as it has developed over the last 20 years, and the good sense to take any and all modern ingredients into account.