Summer Reading: You Are What You Eat

My first bread-making attempt

Lately I've been tearing eagerly through a series of food-writer memoirs. I think it's because I spent most of June having a love affair with my kitchen, and learning how to do a lot of new things: pickling, making jam, and baking bread. My mother is an amazing cook, and I can't hold a candle to her repertoire of Indian food, so I love taking pioneer steps (as far as my experience goes) into different cuisines and techniques.

As an extension of the my physical efforts in the kitchen, I've also taken to reading a lot of food memoirs and autobiographies. I have to credit my close friend, Katy, who has been building her place in the foodie world for several years now. I have spent many happy afternoons in her Berkeley apartment, flicking through her library of 80+ cookbooks (all of which she cooks from), and plying her with questions about spices and equipment. You can follow her personal cooking exploits at Dining With Dostoevsky, as well as her blog dedicated to Jam: Jam Experiments.

As to the foodie memoirs, they have been an utter delight. My family loves to tease me about my "relationship with food," which means to say that I am *not* a functional eater. I have plenty of friends who have a similar appreciation for cooking and dining, but we don't discuss them. It seems too intimate and even embarrassing to rhapsodize about things like grocery shopping or cast-iron skillets. Yet these are everyday delights in my life....which is why reading these books has been so wonderful.

Source: Time Magazine

Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires is a memoir of her time as the chief food critic at the New York Times. Even before she started the job, Reichl discovered that every restaurant in the city had a pinup and bio of her. To maintain the necessary anonymity of a critic, she cultivated a series of amazing disguises, each of which was really an incarnation of herself. Reichl uses this undercover strategy to experience New York fine dining from the every(wo)man perspective, thereby making the unhappy discovery that status and power dictate one's restaurant experience, from seating to the number of raspberries on a dessert dish. The writing is candid and smart, and even while Reichl struggles with her newfound celebrity, she remains sympathetic, warm, and utterly human.

Source: Elle Magazine

Molly Wizenberg, author of the popular food blog Orangette, strikes a similar note in Delancey, the memoir of her experience opening and running a restaurant with her husband. To be fair, it's really the story of how she came to terms with her husband getting into the restaurant business, and the effect it wrought on both her marriage and relationship with cooking. As with Garlic and Sapphires, the book has a clear narrative arc focused on a specific period in the writer's life. I also love that Wizenberg's relationship with food and cooking inflects her marriage and her livelihood -- it shows that our feelings about food go a long way beyond sustenance, into the realm of emotion and psyche.

Both books have a smattering of recipes, but neither claims to be a cookbook, and the recipes aren't always connected to the narrative. Reichl's has a little more depth and heart to it, but if you've ever considered opening a restaurant, Delancey may be the sanity-check you need.