Kitchen Report

If you are looking for a good read this summer and you are a fan of food memoirs, I highly recommend chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Blood, Bones and Butter.”

Don’t be turned off by the title, there is really nothing gory about this book (OK, there is an unfortunate chicken episode) and Hamilton is a provocative and descriptive writer.

“I went everywhere she went. In the car, in the woods, in the market, in the kitchen. She took me to the farm to get our milk. As only a Frenchwoman can – in a heel, a silk scarf, and a cashmere skirt – she’d pull up the long driveway  of the dairy farm in her chocolate brown antique Mercedes-Benz, and without a single awkward gesture, get down and fill four rinsed-out gallon plastic jugs with raw milk from a stainless steel tank while forty woolly Holsteins chewed and pissed in the over-humid next room. We left our money in the honor system coffee can.” (p. 23)

I wrote a full review of “Blood, Bones and Butter” for the Monitor here.

Get the book. Definitely.

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A well-crafted meal creates a space for all kinds of wonderful things to happen – family ties can be strengthened, a sense of community nurtured, and love welcomed in. Hours of hard, careful work in the kitchen may reap the rewards of appreciative smiles, warm feelings, and good conversation.

But what happens – if anything – when no one is there except you? In 2000, the Utne Reader featured a short essay that described this kind of day-to-day existence as being “quirkyalone,” meaning subsisting without a partner but not necessarily as a social recluse.

Quirky or otherwise, feeding ourselves remains a daily problem, an unavoidable necessity with or without a companion with whom to break bread. Cookbook guru Deborah Madison and her artist husband Patrik McFarlin explore this question in What We Eat When We Eat Alone with stories from solitary cooks accompanied by 100 recipes. McFarlin’s doodle-like drawings add whimsy to the peculiar confessions.

To read the full review and hear an interview with the author, click here.

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Food memoirs are rapidly filling bookstore shelves these days, and just when you would think that there is simply nothing new to add to the topic along comes an original voice like Molly Wizenberg and her book A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table.

Read the full review here.

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Mark Bittman, food columnist for The New York Times, has joined the Greek chorus of foodies for a better planet. Openly acknowledging that he is building on the investigative work of Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) and others, Bittman has taken up the mantra of: eat more plants, fewer animals, and less in general.

Although Bittman’s new book, Food Matters, largely repeats well-documented food research, he does bring something new to the table: recipes and a four-week meal plan.

Read the full review here and a post about meeting Mark Bittman here.

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No one can deny the power of a steaming, full plate to transport one to some other time or place. And yet food, or a meal, can also play a minor character in an intense drama.

Everyone has an expert opinion about food these days but it takes a good writer to decipher the emotions that surround the daily act of eating. Eat, Memory is a collection of 26 essays by noted authors who do just that.

The essays first appeared in The New York Times Magazine under its “Eat, Memory” column after being skillfully edited by Amanda Hesser, a former food editor there and a delightful writer herself.

To read a full review and listen to an interview with Amanda Hesser, click here.

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