Books

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I love foodie memoirs.  When I first heard of Adrienne Kane’s book, Cooking and Screaming: Finding My Own Recipe for Recovery, I was especially intrigued. 

As a healthcare worker, I’ve worked with countless stroke survivors.  In my personal life, I love food and writing.  I also see the impact good food or lack thereof has on my patients.  Family members bring food to nurture and comfort recovering patients, and it’s devastating when people can’t or won’t eat or drink. 

Kane’s memoir recalls her persoanal triumph of surviving an AVM (an arterio-venous malformation – symptoms are similar to that of a stroke) at the young age of 21.  Eating, cooking, and writing were all crucial parts of her rehab and recovery.  This book ties together so many of my interests – I couldn’t wait to read her inspring story.

Adrienne Kane is best known as a food blogger and has been featured in magazines and websites prior to the release of her book this past February.  Her book first pulled me in through its structure.  Each chapter begins with a mouth-watering recipe that has personal significance to Kane.  She uses the recipes as natural transitions to tell her life story.  Many foodie memoirs lack structure and this is a real pet peeve when I read them, but that is never an issue with Cooking and Screaming.

Kane’s story is honest without feeling like a gory tell-all.  Her writing style is fluid and natural, and you quickly feel like a friend is sharing a personal story.  She tells of her failures and triumphs and, in the process, elicits empathy and an understanding of the real healing power that food can have.  As a new graduate, Kane was a dancer and an aspiring teacher.  Yet, before she had the opportunity to begin her career, she endured an AVM and was in a coma for three weeks.  She awoke to significant physical impairments as well as milder speech and cognitive defecits. 

Kane’s first foray back into the kitchen was where she began to rediscover herself – despite having the full use of only one hand.  Her perseverance leads her from the therapy kitchen to her home kitchen to a catering job, and on to a blog and a book.  I was incredibly interested by the direction her life took, and incredibly inspired and awed.  Her book is a great read and I can’t wait to try her recipes.  I’m hoping a cookbook is released soon!

Some people remember what they were wearing on important days of their lives, others remember the music or sounds in the background.  Ruth Reichl remembers what she was eating – in vivid detail.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table is Reichl’s first memoir; a very personal account of a fascinating upbringing and early adulthood.  She shares honestly about growing up with a mother who had a mental illness, a mother who cooked and served questionable foods.  Moldy food seems like an unlikely start for  a gourmand, but Reichl was clearly born to be a foodie.  It is clear in reading this memoir that every important event in Reichl’s life led to where she is today.   She tells tales of her travels where she tried new and exotic foods, and stories of family and friends showing her the do’s and dont’s of cooking.  Even her stories about being virtually abandoned at  a French boarding school in Montreal (despite little previous knowledge of the French language) led Reichl to new food discoveries and helped her to refine her palate. 

All of the stories in this memoir are tied seamlessly together with a singular theme – food.  Reichl describes food in a way that makes you salivate – even when she is describing a dish that she ate over 3o years ago.  It is fascinating and inspiring to me that Reichl did not seek out a career in food, she attended school and pursued other vocations before seemingly falling into a field where she was meant to stay.

As in Reichl’s other books, Reichl writes with equal measures of honesty, humor, and humility.  And, like her other books, she shares the recipes that were special to her in this time in her life.  Tender at the Bone is an easy and enjoyable read for anyone who loves food  and fascinating memoirs.

I genuinely wanted to like Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (other editions are titled Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and, more simply Julie and Julia) by Julie Powell.  I was intrigued by her “Project:” to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.  It’s an enormous undertaking (especially with a full-time job to contend with as well), and it makes you consider how much cooking has changed in the forty-some-odd years since Child’s book was first published – the techniques, the ingredients (coming by kidneys and bone marrow isn’t so easy these days), and the time and effort most of us put into our meals.

Unfortunately, the Project is just a thread that barely ties Powell’s book together.  She uses the book as a sounding board to share fictionalized stories about her friend’s drunken sexcapades, true stories about her own marriage, and anything else that she feels like talking about – everything from her political leanings to her apartment’s plumbing problems to her laments about her depressing dead-end job.  In between reading e-mails from friends, yelling at her husband, and trying to sleep with another married man, there are some tales of Powell actually cooking some of Child’s recipes.  I wouldn’t even have minded the rest of her stories, but some of them were kind of offensive (and I think I’m usually pretty open-minded)  and most of them weren’t as funny as the book cover would have you believe.  Furthermore, Powell invents a lot of stories about Paul and Julia Child, which seemed unnecessary given the amount of information available on them.  It seems to be a weak attempt to draw parallels between her life and Child’s.

That said, the portions where Powell is actually cooking are interesting.  She places a cooking icon in a modern-day world and we get to see how relevant Child and her recipes are today.  It also causes one to give though to how different food and food television might be if it weren’t for Child.  Some of Powell’s adventures really are amusing - attempting to euthanize a lobster, poaching eggs in red wine and watching them turn blue, or figuring out how to get the bone marrow out of a large animal thigh bone.  The book is a quick read – I probably would have given up on it, but I was able to finish it quickly and move on to other foodie adventures.

Powell’s book is being released as a movie (also titled Julie and Julia)  this August, starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep (the movie will purportedly follow Julia and Paul’s lives more truthfully than the book does).  Powell also has another book due in August, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession.

I stumbled upon Ruth Reichl’s books purely by accident.  It was a happy accident that has me working through all of her books (though working is really the wrong word) anecdote by anecdote, recipe by recipe.  She is, in my eyes, the foodie of all foodies.

My first Reichl book was Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (though this is not the first of her books, if you wish to read them chronologically).  The premise of this particular book centers on Reichl’s work as a food editor to the New York times; a job with serious responsibility and serious implications.  Reichl had worked previously as a food editor, but never for such a high profile publication with such power to make or break a restaurant.  After uprooting her family and moving cross-country, Reichl quickly learned that restaurants across New York City were all but stalking her  – her picture and personal information were widely circulated (rather unnerving!) prior to her arrival.  Admirably, Reichl did not let this stop her or affect her ability to garner honest reviews of restaurants of all calibers.

Her inventive solution was to design and don disguises when dining in restaurants that she wished to review.  Reichl often returned to restaurants several times, often in different disguises.  The results are fascinating, and often hysterical.   Her candid revelations shed light on some of the most famous restaurants in the city (and, often, the country) and, in turn, about society.   In the process, Reichl learned a lot about herself and those around her.  Reichl has a way with food, and with words; you can practically taste the food that she describes.  Many of her reviews are reprinted in the book and she shares several recipes as well.  I can’t recommend this book highly enough to anyone with an interest in food or the restaurant world.  Even non-foodies will enjoy her observations.

Reichl is editor-in-chief at Gourmet magazine and has authored three books, with one more due out in April (I can’t wait!).  She has also co-authored and edited several other books.