Sheryl Kirby

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.

Book Review- Give a Girl a Knife

Give a Girl a Knife
Amy Thielen
Clarkson Potter, 2017

There’s a point in any professional cook’s life where you have to decide whether to keep cooking professionally — to really push for your own restaurant, your own empire, as it were —or whether to move on to another career, hopefully food-related. The human body can’t stand the physical abuse of the professional kitchen past (usually) the mid-30s and by that time, you’ve got to have some other line of work figured out. Amy Thielen very smartly used her English degree, the one she earned before deciding to become a chef in New York City, to take her cooking career into the realm of food writing, and readers should be thankful that she did.

Thielen is a cookbook author and TV host, and is a regular contributor to Saveur and other publications, but it is her food memoir, Give a Girl a Knife that resonated with me.

Growing up in suburban Minnesota, Thielen began cooking seriously when she paired up with artist Aaron Spangler and moved into his off-the-grid cabin in the woods. Growing and cooking most of their own food, Thielen learned about seasonal, local cooking. But this wasn’t enough for her, so when Spangler needed to move to New York to further his career, Thielen went with him, took a quickie chef’s course, and started working in some of the best restaurants of the late 90s, doing time with David Boulay and Daniel Boulud.

Travelling back and forth to their farm every summer, Thielen had the opportunity to explore not only the down to earth cooking she did at home as it compared to the high-end fine dining cuisine she prepared in various restaurants, but the influences of her mother and grandmother as they played into the mid-Western, middle class cuisine of the late 20th century.

Told in a slightly awkward three parts — her time cooking in the 90s in New York, then childhood, meeting Spangler and becoming a couple, and then present day and the decision to leave professional cooking behind to live on her farm full time — Thielen shares the life of a professional cook, interweaving it with her experiences cooking in a rural setting (they initially had no electricity or running water), and flavouring it with family food traditions.

More than the story itself, which is interesting and inspiring, is the way that Thielen writes. She is observant, and able to put those observations into words in the most evocative way, at one point discussing pickles she recounts opening a jar where,

Tons of bubbles hopped from the surface like baby frogs in wet grass.

In writing about her mother’s Minnesotan cooking she says,

My mom’s dish of room-temperature butter was more than a mere cooking fat, it was an ointment, filling, spackle, emotional salvo, as essential to combating the deep Minnesota winter as lotion.

A good and interesting story is only as good as the way it is told and Thielen has the knack of a great storyteller. At one point in the book she mentions writing fiction but dismisses the idea because she doesn’t consider herself creative in that way, but I think she is wrong. I think Thielen’s narrative voice would be perfect for fiction; she writes evocative descriptions that allow the reader to feel as if they’re right beside her, whether that is refusing to eat the rabbit that Aaron kills in their garden, or working a station in the hectic kitchen of a high-end restaurant, she makes the event come to life.

Give a Girl a Knife is a first hand look into two (maybe three) very different styles of cooking and eating and should be an inspiration for both aspiring chefs and aspiring writers.

Book Review – Pizza Cultura: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Dish

Pizza Cultura: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Dish
Mark Cirillo
Italian Chamber of Commerce of Ontario/Mansfield Press, 2017

How did a simple street food eaten by Napoli’s poor become beloved around the world as one of our favourite treats?

Food writer Mark Cirillo traces the history of the pizza pie back to Roman times where various areas of Italy had their own version of a flatbread that was baked and sold as a quick snack. It took the discovery of the new world and the importing of tomatoes to Italy (and then the perfection of the San Marzano variety) to start to create what we now know as pizza. The creation of the bread, tomato, and cheese concoction, baked quickly at a very high heat, can be traced to Naples in the mid-1800s. From there it spread across Italy, with regional variations based on dough, tomatoes, and cheese. For instance, even though the ingredients are essentially the same, pizza from Naples is different from pizza made in Rome.

It took until World War 2 and US forces stationed in Italy to truly spread the love of pizza to North America, but once those soldier returned home, their love of pizza grew, with more regional variations and styles popping up in North America.

Cirillo traces all of this, with an emphasis on Ontario and Toronto-area pizzerias, and charts the current trend away from a preference for a more fast-food style, manufactured product to authentic pizzas in the style of Naples or Rome, right down to the inclusion of custom-made ovens by a bespoke artisan from Italy.

This book is fascinating in the way that it delves into the specifics of the products; Cirillo looks at the various pizza-like flatbreads from across Italy, but also explores the different methods and ingredients that so minutely affect the final product such as type of flour and even the day-to-day minutia of how the weather might change the texture of that day’s dough.

He interviews the owners of Canadian pizza chain Pizza Nova; the man considered to be Italy’s best pizza maker; and the artisan who builds the stoves that are so important to a perfect final product.

There’s a section of equipment and what it’s used for, and a really interesting chapter on the various kinds of pizzas based on topping that will cause readers to laugh out loud, likely in confusion — while pizza Napoletana and Pizza Romana are typically used to describe the style of crust (and style of pizza overall), there is a specific set of toppings (tomato, anchovy and oregano) that is called “Napoletana” in most of Italy, except in Naples where it is called “Romana”. No wonder Canadians just order Hawaiian and have done with it.

Pizza Cultura will most definitely make every reader crave pizza, whether it’s their favourite American-style fast food version or a gourmet pizza cooked in a 900°F oven for 90 seconds. This is a must-read for pizza lovers everywhere.

Book Review – Friday Food Fiction — Pasta, Pinot & Murder: A Willa Friday Food & Wine Mystery

Pasta, Pinot & Murder: A Willa Friday Food & Wine Mystery
Jamie Lee Scott
LBB Company, 2017

There is a whole food and wine sub-genre of mystery fiction, and it ranges from incredibly well done to rather horrific (the writing, that is, not necessarily the plot line; most of these types of mysteries and known as cozys because the murder takes place off-scene or is not described in all its bloody, gory detail). This first book of food fiction by best-selling mystery writer Jamie Lee Scott falls somewhere in-between.

Willa Friday is a food blogger and stylist who still lives with her ex-husband and his family at his Sonoma Valley winery and restaurant. Willa discovers the body of of another wealthy vineyard owner and takes it upon herself to try and find out whodunnit, mostly because she suspects the young chef she’s just hired as an assistant, whose last gig just happened to be working for the deceased where words were had before his departure.

Willa butts into police investigations (and then is pretty much welcomed by the local police chief, I’m never really sure how mystery writers get away with this bit of plot manipulation), and unwinds the convoluted story to find the killer. It’s all a bit of a leap of logic, but it’s fine if you don’t think about it too much.

While I’m not familiar with Scott’s other works, I’d offer that this first attempt at food fiction is a bit clunky. While she’s got an easy setting to work with, the transition from the food stuff to the mystery stuff is not smooth and while Scott has obviously done a lot of research into food styling and photography, details about running a blog for money, and restaurants (both front and back of house), it still feels like two different stories at various points. There’s also a lot of references (and overly-detailed descriptions) of coffee and cocktails, which begin to feel like filler.

There are two more books in the Willa Friday Culinary Cozy Mystery Series, so maybe Scott is able to tighten things up and give her characters more depth.

Having said that, this was a fun, light mystery that I finished in an afternoon, and it would be a fine read for the beach or a rainy day for anyone who likes to read about food even when they’re reading about something else.

Book Review – Oyster: A Global History

Oyster: A Global History
Carolyn Tillie
Reaktion Books, 2017

Consider the oyster. No, I mean really. Having existed for 234 million years and having been consumed by humans in quantity for 164,000 years, they are our oldest food. Oyster shells have been found in excavations of ancient Troy and the first reference to oysters in a cookbook appears in the third century AD.

Carolyn Tillie fills her book about oysters (part of the extensive Edible Series about different foodstuffs) with a monumental quantity of facts about the history of the humble oyster, from cultivation and use, the globalized system of farming, the role oysters have played in cultures around the world, oysters as aphrodisiacs, and even how oyster farming has affected population and culture.

Once considered the food of the poor, as oysters became depleted in certain areas due to over-farming and pollution, the bi-valve rose in popularity as a food of the rich. German-Jewish immigrants to North America also broke kosher laws to enjoy oysters, justifying their indulgence with the theory that oysters were considered treyfe (forbidden) because the oysters in Palestine grew in waters that were extremely polluted.

Tillie has thoroughly researched her subject matter here and this little book is full of awesome facts and anecdotes about everything to do with oysters, often correcting common misconceptions. For instance, the “rule” about only eating oysters in a month with an “r” in it comes not from the theory that the waters might be polluted during the summer (although they might in certain places) but from the fact that oysters spawn in the warmer months and thus are less plump and flavourful. Or the incorrect theory from olde tymes that a squeeze of lemon on an oyster would kill off water-borne diseases such as typhoid or cholera.

The final chapters offer tips on buying, storing, and shucking oysters, as well as a selection of classic recipes if you’re inclined to cook your oysters rather than down them raw. Also, wonderfully, there’s a selected bibliography, a page of websites and blogs, a list of oyster-related apps, a list of oyster bars and farms, and finally an international list of oyster festivals. Phew!

Reading Tillie’s delightful work on oysters has made me feel much more knowledgeable and confident on the subject of the world’s favourite bi-valve. It’s also left me craving oysters, a problem I’ll need to do something about forthwith.

Book Review — The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart

The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart
Emily Nunn
Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2017

While it’s generally not recommended to read other reviews of something before writing your own, I was drawn to reviews of The Comfort Food Diaries not for the critique of the writing style or the events depicted, but out of genuine curiosity as to what other readers got out of this book. Because, to me, the main theme was not Nunn’s stated premise of a comfort food road tour and emotional support that she received after her brother’s suicide, descent into alcoholism, and subsequent break-up with her fiancee, but rather an over-arching theme of dysfunctional families, the destruction caused by narcissistic personality disorder, and finding “family” wherever you can. Maybe that can only be seen by someone who is also from a dysfunctional family, but that was a much more prevalent theme for me than Nunn’s search for comfort food.

Nunn is living in Chicago with a man she refers to as The Engineer, along with his daughter (The Princess). She has been made redundant after a great career as a food and features writer. When her closeted gay brother commits suicide, Nunn finds solace in a bottle (or rather a lot of bottles) and has a nervous breakdown of sorts that her partner is not emotionally equipped to handle.

She returns to her family, moving to California to attend the Betty Ford clinic and stay with her sister, but family, despite best intentions, are not always the best people to help and support us, and Nunn finds herself at odds with her sister Elaine once she moves on to stay with other extended family members. This is apparently a typical situation within Nunn’s family with some of her three remaining siblings and divorced parents estranged from someone else at any given point (neither Nunn’s mother or younger sister attend her brother’s funeral, for instance). As the story unfolds, Nunn gives the reader a more nuanced look at her family situation, and I’m happy to award both Nunn’s mother and older sister the official “Piece of Work” award for their head games and narcissism.

All of this leaves Nunn rather more of a mess than she needs to be, and certainly does nothing to help her heal and recover, and much of the book is about her working out feelings towards herself that resonate back to childhood. (Like most auto-biographies, a lot is left unsaid regarding Nunn’s role in the dynamic of these relationships, but I know enough about how narcissists constantly pull the rug out from under the people around them that I can feel real empathy and sympathy for her.)

So wait, where does the food bit come into this? Nunn’s original plan, when she first reached out to friends on Facebook, was to go and visit various friends and relatives, cooking with them and writing about what they consider to be comfort food. And she does do that to some extent, staying with cousins. aunts and uncles, and reconnecting with many friends from her youth, all of whom welcomed her into their homes and lives. One of the key points Nunn discovers is that “comfort food” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, and a dish that represents love and caring to one person might bring up terrible memories or distaste for another. This lack of universal agreement reflects the idea that family, the other entity we think of as “comfort” and where we’re most likely to associate food memories, may not be universally accepting either.

There are great-looking recipes throughout, but they feel a bit secondary within this interpretation of the theme, more of a way to avoid the issues Nunn must face on her journey rather than something that enhances it (she admits to avoiding her issues throughout the book), although many of her moments of enlightenment and self-awareness come while cooking and eating the various permutations of southern comfort food she seeks as a form of solace.

I suspect that the rift in Nunn’s family is likely permanent after the publication of this book, but my educated opinion is that she’s probably better off for it. Nunn has found herself and her healing within her family of choice, not her family of birth, and while her journey as an alcoholic and ACON (Adult Child of Narcissists) will always colour her feelings and decisions, the life changes she has made in The Comfort Food Diaries seem like a good base on which to restart her life.

This is a sharp and witty work — Nunn is a great writer — although it leaves a lot unsaid that might have pushed the story in a different direction. At minimum, it will give the reader cause to rethink their ideas of family and comfort and comfort food and how those things interweave throughout the course of a person’s life.