Book Review — The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery and Paris

The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery and Paris
Jackie Kai Ellis 
Appetite by Random House, 2018

Jackie Kai Ellis’ story should be an inspiring one. Despite a childhood in which her family predicted she would be a failure, she progressed from a designer to a self-employed designer to running a successful baked goods stall at farmers’ markets to the owner of a bricks and mortar bakery that was featured in Bon Apetit… which she then used as a base to become a food and travel writer, creator of bespoke food tours of Paris, and winner of many awards and accolades, both locally in her hometown of Vancouver, and internationally. Nice life, right? But the struggle to get to this point was hard fought, as Ellis suffered from severe depression, anorexia and bulimia, and had to deal with over-bearing parents and a husband who might just make it to the Narcissists Hall of Fame. So why does this story of a bootstrapping young gal trying to find a way to love life not sit more comfortably with me?

Told in an essay-type format that jumps around the timeline of Ellis’ life, we see her develop a love of food and art. The title, The Measure of My Powers, is a play on a series of chapters from M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, and quotes from Fisher begin many of Ellis’ chapters. But it feels as if a parallel is attempting to be drawn and despite the setting of Paris and an ultimately unhappy marriage, I don’t really see it. While Ellis knows food, her descriptions of such often feel forced.

However, food is what saves her from her unhappy life, where she can’t get out of bed, starves herself, punches her own face in the shower, and feels trapped by her husband G’s rigid rules about their decor, finances, and lifestyle. It is when she goes to Paris to study pastry that the envelope of darkness falls away from her, even though she still has to contend with G’s lack of enthusiasm for Paris (he spends his days meditating instead of enjoying the city), his gaslighting about their financial arrangements that leaves Jackie fairly screwed, and his disdain for her enjoyment of the experience, regularly telling her to “stop talking about food”. Clearly, the reader can see what Ellis was unable to acknowledge during most of her time with G, but somehow it’s hard to muster sympathy for her, even as she opens her bakery to great success. The stories about defecating herself (Twice! Once leaving the sheets unwashed for someone else to find and clean up!) because of lack of sleep/overwork don’t seem like someone enjoying the achievement of their goals, but rather someone who doesn’t know how to adult particularly well.

I might have liked this more if the essays were chronological. They tended to bounce around in time, often by decades, and this technique didn’t seem to have a real purpose with regards to the overall story. Some of the metaphors, like the whole bit about water, feeling flooded, drowning, etc, as Ellis was working on her bakery, might have been true for her, but felt trite and cliched, and I started to glaze a bit at this point.

The recipes at the end of each chapter were a nice touch, but tended to go on incredibly long with super-detailed instructions and many reference notes that became a bit of a turn-off.

I don’t regret taking the time to read this work, but it felt more like painful self-analysis at many points rather than the story of learning to love life through an appreciation of good food and cooking.

Book Review — Insects: An Edible Field Guide

Insects: An Edible Field Guide
Stefan Gates
Ebury Press, 2017

Food trend analysts predict that bugs will be our major source of protein within just a few years. However this may squick you, discounting an actual apocalypse, it’s probably safe to say that we’ll continue to eat beef, chicken, fish, and pork as long as it still exists. But bugs are a hot food trend, one that major supermarkets are getting in on, and that chefs are checking out, although mostly as a novelty, but with some creativity and an eye to nutrition and the environment.

Stefan Gates, food writer and presenter of TV shows, is no stranger to eating weird things. He’s based a big part of his career on it, in fact. Over the years he’s eaten plenty of bugs and is a fan of this alternative protein source. His latest book prepares us for the days when we turn to crickets and meal worms instead of a nice roast chicken.

Gates starts by pointing out that two billion people willingly choose to eat insects on a regular basis, and that people in the western world are actually eating more insects than we realize, both in the form of the red dye cochineal (made from the wings of the cochineal beetle, and thus permitted to be called “natural colour” which means it ends up in pretty much every prepared food that is red or pink — yes, even your strawberry yogurt), as well as all the little bits that show up in prepared food like jam or canned vegetables.

He offers a primer on the taste of insects, benefits and dangers, a bit about the science of entomology (the study of insects), and his own reasons for developing an interest in insects as cuisine. The book is then divided into geographical region with a listing for each edible insect with field notes that include an overview of the bug, habitat, taste, dangers (if any), and how to cook or prep each insect. For instance, Gates lists cicadas as nutty, with similarities to chicken, and offers up a recipe for Cicada Florentines.

Each entry is accompanied by a line drawing of the critter by Candela Riveros, and these lovely sketches hearken back to old style field guides of the Victorian era.

One issue that Gates doesn’t address particularly well is where the inquisitive bug-eater is suppose to find these delicacies. He points out that foraging is a serious business in countries like Thailand, and that farmed insects such as crickets are a growing business. But unless you want to stand out in the woods with a net and a jar like when you were a kid, the easiest way to try insects is to buy them from a pet store, where crickets and mealworms are readily available for feeding to pet reptiles and amphibians. (Here in Canada, a national grocery chain has just introduced packaged cricket powder — to be added to “smoothies, sauces chilis, curries, and baking batter” — but by weight it is currently 5 times the price of a top sirloin roast, so it’s unlikely that it will catch on as a regular purchase for most people.)

Ultimately, Insects: An Edible Field Guide is a fun book that most people are not going to take especially seriously, despite Gates’ enthusiasm and dedication to the issue. Trendy or not, it’s going to take a lot of effort (or an apocalypse) to get westerners to willingly eat insects on a regular basis.

(For more information about insect farming and eating, check out this article in The National Post by Laura Brehaut.)

Book Review — Incorrigible

Incorrigible
Velma Demerson

The Mercer Reformatory for Females is gone now, torn down in the late 1960s and replaced with Lamport Stadium near the intersection of King West and Dufferin in Toronto. I live nearby and walk past the place a few times every week. Since reading Incorrigible by Velma Demerson, I am haunted by what transpired at the Mercer.

Demerson was arrested in 1939, at age 18, for living with her Chinese boyfriend, which was against the law at the time. Her family reported her and she was at first taken to Belmont Home, a residence for “incorrigibles”. When the home closed down, the residents were all taken to the Mercer, even though they weren’t technically criminals.

When the Mercer closed in the 60s, the living conditions were considered to be utterly unacceptable — many cells didn’t have windows or toilets. But it was the treatment of the women there that was the most horrifying. At the same time the Nazis were doing medical tests on women at Ravensbruck, the Mercer was injecting inmates with sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis, and testing treatments on them. The women were not told about these tests, and were told little about their treatments. Demerson recounts being in constant pain caused by the tests done on her and it was only decades late that she was able to settle with the government for the abuses she suffered.

Incorrigible tells Demerson’s story in her own voice. It’s a rough style, told in the first person with no dialogue, and reads in places like a journal. There are details that are brushed over or left out, particularly about her later life and her relationship with the son she gave birth to while at the Mercer.

We like to think of Canada as socially aware, forward-thinking place, but it wasn’t always so. The treatments done on young women without their consent or understanding rank up there with the travesties of residential schools and the export and abuse of home children.

Demerson has written a satirical novel called Nazis in Canada, based on her experiences at the Mercer.

Book Review — Shrewed

Shrewed
Elizabeth Renzetti

Aw dudes, I suck so much at keeping my 2018 reading list up to date, mostly because it’s all food books and cookbooks (not all of them good, either!), but I want to mention this book somewhere that people see it (because while I seldom update here, this blog still gets a pile o’ hits every day… who are you people?!).

Anyway, Shrewed by Elizabeth Renzetti is a delightful collection of thoughtful, provocative essays on feminism that addresses real issues without wandering into the realm of self-pity or “social justice warrior” territory. “You’ll Pay For Those Breasts, or The Cost of Being a Lady” lays out the financial burden women face trying to meet the expectations of what society deems “attractive” and how it fucks with our heads. In an essay in the form of a letter to her daughter, Renzetti casts (warranted) aspersions on weddings and the whole wedding industry, and “Four Lions” recounts interviews Renzetti did with Germaine Greer, P. D. James, Hilary Mantel, and Setsuko Thurlow.

This is a great collection that speaks to women’s fear, frustration and anxiety. Recommended.

Book Review — The Fruit Forager’s Companion

The Fruit Forager’s Companion
Sara Bir
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018

If you know where to look, there is fruit growing everywhere, even in most cities. Much of this fruit gets wasted as it ripens, falls, and rots; either it is too much for the owner of the land on which the tree grows, or the property in uninhabited. Within my own city of Toronto, the growing season offers a variety of good things to eat, hidden away, or sometimes in plain sight, on public property; berries, quince, rosehips, greens like lamb’s quarters, and coveted black walnuts where a wily forager appears in a public park some evening in October with a ladder and a hook, and clears off entire stands of the trees, not a single precious nut left behind, like the Grinch at Christmas.

Having grown up in a semi-rural area in Nova Scotia, I spent my childhood in the woods, picking berries, fiddleheads, and mushrooms (with the guidance of my Grandmother), and on the beaches digging clams. Let’s just say Sara Bir is a gal after my own heart and I was excited to have the opportunity to read and review her book.

Bir concentrates on fruit, leaving other wild foods such as mushrooms to people with more experience. Rule number one of foraging – don’t eat the poison stuff. Rule number two – ask first, especially if the fruit you want to take is on private property. Bir encourages readers to knock on doors and ask, most people are usually happy to have you take all that fruit away. Bir also encourages readers to be safety-minded; if you can’t reach it easily, you probably don’t need it that badly. She also provides a list of necessary tools such as containers and the all-important gloves, because nature is pointy.

The recipe section of the book is comprised of fruit-based creations, sorted alphabetically, with each fruit introduced with a lovely drawing and basic overview of the fruit, its uses, storage, and cooking tips.

Recipes range from the expected sweet offerings (pastries, cakes, scones) to preserves and pickles, with a few main course dishes such as pork tenderloin with rosemary roasted figs and onions or trout with gooseberry sauce working the savoury abilities of the fruit. A few entries, such as the one for juniper, have no recipes, and Bir goes into varietal detail for some specific fruits but not all.

Happy to see: a reference to Not Far From the Tree, an organization here in Toronto that teams up with homeowners, volunteers, and charities to harvest fruit on private property and share it. Sad to see: Bir joyfully mentions Japonica quince but dismisses them as too much work. They’re not! I foraged Japonicas from my local park for years before they were removed in an effort to control some wandering bamboo, and they made the best face-puckering jam.

Depending on your geographical region, not all of The Fruit Forager’s Companion will apply to you, but even if you have no local lemon trees, the recipes can still be used for purchased fruit. And while the recipes are great, the real treasure here is the information Bir provides for aspiring foragers.

Usability (based on a pdf file): very good. Recipes are straightforward and easy to follow. Directions are in paragraph format with no step numbers or line breaks. Fonts appear to be a good size but this may depend on the overall dimensions of the finished printed format. Measurements include metric (yay!).

With thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing and NetGalley, this book was reviewed from an Advance Reader Copy and may not include exactly the same content or format when published.

Book Review — In the Restaurant: Society in Four Courses

In the Restaurant: Society in Four Courses
Christoph Ribbat
Pushkin Press, 2018

While the practice of making food for sale to others dates back as far as the human race (apparently the Egyptians were really into street food), the concept of a restaurant — a place where people were seated and served food and drink, then left when the meal was done — exists within Western society for only about the past 250 years. Started in France as a place to buy and consume restorative dishes such as soup, the concept grew and modernized over the centuries.

Of course, there are so many stories, so many chefs, so many food writers, that it’s impossible to talk about them all, but Christoph Ribbat gives it his best effort, interweaving stories of chefs, servers, writers, activists, and even sociologists studying parts of the restaurant industry into one book full of the most poignant stories and events.

Readers may find Ribbat’s style disconcerting. While still moving chronologically, he jumps from place to place, person to person, and restaurant to restaurant, interlacing the story of sociologist Frances Donovan writing about waitresses in 1917 with the first Parisian restaurants in the 1760s. I actually quite enjoyed this format; the reader is not bored by the unnecessary biographies and details of the chefs or servers featured, but is given the meat of the matter in a quick and concise format. Ribbat expects the reader to be familiar with most of the individuals mentioned, but for the most part we are, so it’s all good, and for those whose names we don’t immediately recognize, he does a good job of telling their story in a succinct manner. This felt like the written version of a Julien Temple documentary, with quick cuts and intense imagery. Paired with a cool soundtrack and some grainy historical footage worked in between vignettes, this would actually make a great documentary film.

Ribbat moves the story of restaurants forward by including pieces about Sartre setting up a pseudo office in his favourite cafe, George Orwell working as a dishwasher, Jacques Pepin as a young apprentice, a young Gael Green having sex with Elvis and then ordering him a fried egg sandwich from room service, the first meeting of Hitler henchmen Goring and Goebbels across a restaurant table, the civil rights protests at southern US lunch counters, and a discussion of the emotional labour required to work in a job as a server where you’re expected to smile all the time, usually for very little pay.

Like any documentary, there’s more left out than what gets included but when you look at the massive amount of information Ribbat had to work with, I think he curated the work in a very sharp and concise manner, touching on the most important aspects of the restaurant business (racism, classism, sexism, food activism), both historically and looking forward to the future.

In the final chapter Ribbat moves away from the disparate, inter-cut stories to a more academic tone in which he discusses why he chose to present the work in this format. This feels slightly unnecessary, even with his assertion that the tales and anecdotes presented may be taken (or presented) out of context, they work together to form a cohesive story with a strong, shared theme. He might be undermining his own work here because, while the various stories all spliced together feel a bit like a very delicious rock video, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just as the restaurant progresses through the ages with changing tastes and trends and the adaptation of modern technology, so too does they way we discuss, remember, and analyze the restaurant industry.

With thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley, this book was reviewed from an Advance Reader Copy and may not include exactly the same content or format when published.

Book Review — Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times

Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times
Amanda Hesser (Editor)
W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

I began my writing career wanting to be an essayist until I discovered that most people have little interest in reading essays. Or writing good ones, since it reminds them too much of being forced to do so at school. Having said that, someone other than me must enjoy the things because the New York Times ran a regular column of food essays, written not so much by food writers but by authors, columnists, and other people of note.

In her introduction, editor Amanda Hesser states:

There was just one rule: nothing sentimental. No one wants to read an overwrought paean to Grandma’s corn bread. But we might well be interested in why your grandma made it whenever she was lonely.

Hesser does a good job of weeding out the sentimental and serving up a collection of mostly fun and quirky stories. A few of them fell flat for me, as is the case with any anthology — you’re never going to love everything — but many of them were enjoyable reads.

Chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s piece on interviewing an aspiring line cook who happened to be blind was both amusing and relatable. There was a deaf man in many of my own classes at chef school, and while he had an ASL translator for the theory classes, the two of them together in the kitchens for practical labs became a real danger to themselves and others as we all moved around with hot pans.

Family Menu by Allen Shawn tells the story of his institutionalized sister celebrating her birthday outside of her home for the first time in decades and how she adapted so beautifully when her family all expected her to have a meltdown because things were different. This is a lovely look at the boxes we force each other into simply because we think they cannot accept change.

Tucker Carlson’s piece about working in a baked beans factory is one of the best of the collection, with a sharp wittiness and charm that is belied by his caustic TV persona.

Many of the essays come with a related recipe, including the excerpt from Julia Child’s My Life in France which offers the trio of recipes that caused Child to fail her first attempt at her chef’s diploma at Le Cordon Bleu.

Overall this is an enjoyable collection of essays that remains fairly timeless. Ten years after publication, none of them are especially dated. And while not all of the selected works are great or even memorable, there are enough gems here to make it a worthwhile read.

Book Review — Pomegranate Soup

Pomegranate Soup
Marsha Mehran
Random House, 2006

It’s 1986 and three Iranian sisters find themselves in the small town of Ballinacroagh, County Mayo, Ireland. They arrive suddenly, taking over a long-closed bakery space with plans to rush an opening of a Persian-themed cafe in only five days. They have escaped Iran via Pakistan and London, fleeing both the revolution and some personal demons.

Not all of the small town is receptive to their presence, including their neighbour, the publican, who had his hopes set on taking over the former Italian bakery to open a disco, never mind that the disco trend has long since passed.

Over time, with welcoming food, exotic spices, flavourful tea, and a desire to be part of the community, Marjan, Bahar, and Layla find acceptance and safety, but not without some small town drama to spice things up.

What starts out as a seemingly cozy story with a touch of magical realism (it’s rural Ireland, so there’s references to leprechauns and spirits, plus some allusions to the medical and spiritual aspects of the spices Marjan uses) goes to some dark places as we learn the story of the trio of women and how they have come to be in this town. They each have their own memories of Iran, and most of them are haunting. Behar is plagued with headaches and lives in fear of putting her sisters in further danger.

Mehran wrote this novel intending it to be the first in a series of seven books. She completed a follow-up, Rosewater and Soda Bread, but died tragically during the writing of the third book, leaving the story of the sisters incomplete. While Pomegranate Soup (named after the traditional Iranian dish which twice plays a vital role in the plot) ends on a happy note, the overall story feels incomplete — tied up with a bow, albeit a very loose one — with some characters requiring more fleshing out; presumably Mehran planned to do this with further titles.

As a work of food-themed fiction, Mehran creates good flow between the very descriptive passages about the food and the rest of the non-food bits of the story. Her descriptions of the flavourful, heady-scented Iranian dishes and teas are evocative and inviting, and she makes the food central to the overall plot. Recipes for pertinent dishes are included after each chapter as well and are a really nice touch.

Many reviewers on sites such as Goodreads have compared Pomegranate Soup (often unfavourably) to stories like Chocolat — the idea of the foreign or outsider woman setting up a food business in a small, conservative town and winning over the people there. But many of the aspects of the plot come from Mehran’s own life. Her family fled Iran during the revolution in the late 70s and ended up in Argentina where her parents ran a small Persian cafe. She married an Irishman and ended up living in a small town in Ireland, no doubt where she got the idea for the town and likely many of the townspeople. She even gives one of the minor characters an illness related to her gastro-intestinal system, which the author herself suffered from and later died from.

Rosewater and Soda Bread is in my “to read” pile, and I’m interested to see where Mehran takes these characters. There were enough loose ends here that the plot has many places it could go. I’m just sad that the world lost Mehran before she could complete the whole series.

Book Review — Going with the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life

Going with the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life
Susan Seligson
Simon & Schuster, 2002

If you don’t bake bread, can you write a book about bread? Susan Seligson attempts to do so in this book about bread-making in different cultures. She travels to Morocco to follow daily loaves through the fes; to upstate New York to try the sourdough; Jordan for Bedouin flatbreads; Ireland to study soda bread; Maine to understand the ubiquitous Wonderbread; Brooklyn to watch matzo being made; India for roti; New Mexico to get a look at the special, hundred year-old bread ovens called hornos; Alabama for biscuits; a military R&D kitchen to learn about how bread is made to last in MREs (meal, ready to eat) for soldiers; and finally to Paris where she cannot score an interview with the famous baker Lionel Poulaine, and so settles for his brother.

Despite the fact that this is a lot of bread, many of the chapters touch on bread only briefly — Seligson is more of a travel writer than a food writer, and while she asks questions and observes the processes, and describes them, this book often meanders off into the personal memoir realm, such as the chapter on India where she mostly talks about her rich friend, the friend’s home, and the friend’s servant, who, incidentally, is the one who makes the rotis covered in that chapter.

While I found myself laughing at Seligson’s often-caustic observations of the people and places she encounters, other readers might find her a bit too critical and mean-spirited as opposed to observant and forthrightly honest. To be fair, there are chapters where the author does come off as a grade-A jerk. In the chapter about the New Mexican hornos, she complains incessantly about her inability to access the local villages to get a good look at the ovens, the hostility of the Native American people on the pueblos towards Anglos, and the cheap jewelry and crafts sold to tourists. At other times this attitude can be be kind of charming, such as when she spends a day at a matzo factory where they are stringent about keeping out chametz (leavened bread of any kind), only to discover after she leaves that she’s been walking around with part of a chocolate chip cookie in her pocket.

The charming and interesting part of Going With the Grain is being able to see different types of bread and the culture around them (how loaves disappear into the Moroccan fes, for instance, and get returned, properly baked, to their rightful owners), or the intensity of the baking process for a sourdough savant. While Seligson occasionally meanders too far from the subject at hand, she paints vivid pictures of each type of bread and how it comes to life. The recipes at the end of each chapter are a nice touch.

This is a good food-lovers read if the reader can ignore — or find a way to enjoy — Seligson’s personality as it comes through her narrative.

Book Review — The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat

The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat
edited by Caroline M. Grant and Lisa Catherine Harper
Roost Books, 2013

How do you decide which books to read? I mean, how much research about the book do you do beforehand? Do you read author profiles? Scour Goodreads for reviews?

I picked up The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage because it is a collection of food-themed essays about food and family. Which is totally something that I love. The works of various writers (mostly food writers but a few more traditional journalists, novelists, and screenwriters) are divided into three sections: food, family and “how we learn to eat”. The first two sections touch on the topics of family recipes, an obsession with candy, and trying to find local, seasonal food in a place that should have plenty of it but doesn’t. However the third section is all about children, specifically kids learning to like different foods… learning to eat, as it were.

There is a logical step for the two editors who both specialize in writing about parenting issues (Grant and Harper met while working on a site called Literary Mama and ran a site together called Learning to Eat). And if you have kids, perhaps it’s a reasonable section to include in a book of essays (mostly) about family food traditions. For the unsuspecting child-free reader, however, especially one who doesn’t really care if your kid likes foie gras or not, it’s a bit of a turn off. I don’t want to listen to people talk about their kids’ eating habits in real life, and I really don’t want to read about them either.

So to be totally honest, I only read the first two sections. And in all fairness, those sections were full of great, honest, witty, intriguing essays that offered both familiar and unique perspectives of food and eating, both within and outside of the family dynamic. Lobster Lessons by Alexsandra Crapanzano tells the story of honouring a great-aunt and her food traditions while also getting her to try new things. Kosher. Or Not by Barbara Rushkoff explains the anxiety most non-Orthodox Jews feel when they don’t keep kosher. Chris Malcomb’s essay about his Italian restaurant-owning family and the evolution of their red sauce is sharp and poignant. And Lisa McNamara’s story about learning to bake pies to catch a husband calls up mid-century mores and how they play out in a modern context.

Readers with kids might well enjoy the third section as relatable and representative of their own experiences. This bit really wasn’t for me, however, so I’ll offer no critique of these works. YMMV as we say on the internet.

A nice touch throughout the collection is that every essay is accompanied by a related recipe which is fun and charming. Sadly the essay about red sauce does not include the recipe in question but one for eggplant Parmesan. Some things have to remain a family secret.