The Frances Virginia Tea Room Cookbook.
By Mildred Huff Coleman.
Atlanta: Self-published, 1981, 1983, rev. ed. 1996.
196 pages, spiral bound. $14.95.
Call 404-351-1313.

There was a day not too long past when tearooms were the exclusive province of the Ladies Who Lunch set, dolled up dining rooms where the tables were set with china and silver and the curtains dripped with lace. A few of the old Southern rooms remain, though for the most part, they are now in their dotage, victims of a shrinking leisure class and a dearth of white gloves.

Atlanta once claimed numerous such luncheon spots, among them the Frances Virginia Tea Room, a grand palace on Peachtree Street that closed its doors in 1962. Mildred Huff Coleman's Frances Virginia Tea Room Cookbook conjures up those days of yore and offers a bounty of oh-so-Southern recipes to boot, including eleven variations on the aspic salad theme, ranging from that old standby, tomato aspic, to a coleslaw soufflé aspic.

You will also find recipes for salmon croquettes, celery and almonds au gratin, deviled eggplant, and coconut chiffon pie among the 100-plus offerings, but what distinguishes this spiral-bound book from the plethora of others published each year is the author’s decision to include a lengthy and surprisingly thorough historical essay about the restaurant itself.

Sure, the prose can read a bit saccharine at times, and the recollections of days past might strike some as merely romantic, but this is not just a paean to days gone by. “We wore gloves and girdles,” writes Coleman, the niece of one of the owners. “We starched our collars. We always cut our corn off the cob and segregated the races. ‘Yes Ma’am.’ Those were the rules. We feared what might happen if we broke [them] or tried to change them.” Though ostensibly written as a cookbook, Coleman’s prose gives voice to the white middle-class ladies of the 20th-century South; it's a tale well told.

John T. Edge