STOVES & SUITCASES

A woman looks back on a peripatetic life via recollections of memorable dishes in this rollicking memoir and cookbook.

Novelist and food writer Bertelsen recounts her youth growing up in Washington state and Florida and many periods spent abroad while working with the U.S. Peace Corps and accompanying her husband, an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, to foreign postings. Her travels took her from Milwaukee to Morocco to Machu Picchu and included some tense and even terrifying moments, from a bout of altitude sickness in Bolivia that had her vomiting until a cup of coca tea settled her stomach to a menacing encounter with a band of Sandinista rebels in Honduras and a riot in Port-au-Prince after the overthrow of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. These episodes are entwined with reminiscences about iconic meals—each chapter concludes with a recipe—and these culinary experiences resonate with the greater narrative. The warmth of her childhood home is conveyed by recollections of her father’s vegetable beef soup, while the grinding poverty of Burkina Faso is brought to life by her relationship with a sick woman who sold her produce that grew more withered as the dry season progressed. Bertelsen’s novelistic prose features dynamic scenes and vivid detail: “Mr. Tartar Sauce grabbed Lee and kissed her right on her big red lipsticked mouth,” she writes of an assault by a drunken man on a cook in a Florida seafood restaurant where she worked. Her food writing is also rich and sensuous—“the crunchiness of the flautas, paired with the creaminess of the guacamole and the crema, seasoned with a squirt of fresh lime, fired with the hot bite of green salsa”—and sometimes nearly carnal: “I ate like a wolf with a fresh kill, gulping the food on my plate in gasping, almost orgiastic bites, wadding up balls of bread and stuffing them into my mouth.” The end result is a truly mouthwatering read.

A tasty stew of gripping stories and evocative foodie lore.