Well-written, mouthwatering, and nostalgic—an excellent addition to the literature of North American cooking.
This memoir of a Canadian girlhood affectionately combines recollections with recipes.
In her debut book, Kerr—a former chef and restaurant owner—shares nostalgic memories of growing up in and moving around Canada and the special dishes she encountered along the way. After arriving in an ethnically mixed neighborhood in Montreal as a small child in 1938, Kerr learned to love kosher delis, cheese blintzes, and Newfoundland molasses taffy. Meanwhile, she experienced childhood pleasures that will ring familiar to Canadian readers and awaken new interest in the era for Americans, including reading the Eaton’s catalog at Christmastime, wearing Red River coats (“Everyone has a story about this famous coat”), and riding open-air streetcars for sightseeing. As an adult, Kerr wound up in Vancouver, but in her various stops, she experienced an intriguing variety of culinary traditions. Period photos help tell the story, and an epilogue provides background on Canadian history. Kerr’s culinary journey embraces home-style goodies such as poutine à trou and maple syrup pie in Montreal; fried fiddleheads and Acadian bread pudding in New Brunswick; “bakeapple” pie in Newfoundland; Mennonite onion pie in Manitoba; and coquilles St-Jacques à la Corbeille (Kerr’s restaurant) in British Columbia. In between anecdotes and recipes, the author traces the varied influences on Canadian cooking, such as patterns of immigration or expulsion, the importance of seafood in the Maritimes, and foods linked to special holidays. Kerr’s family’s stories and anecdotes are absorbing, but home cuisine is the star of this book. Its evocative prose, excellent photos, and luscious-sounding recipes will stoke readers’ appetites and spark their imaginations. The instructions are written clearly and aimed at readers who are experienced enough to have, for example, a favorite pastry-crust recipe; indeed, all the entries are based on tried-and-true family recipes. Another plus is Kerr’s emphasis on local food customs, which include ingredients such as fiddlehead ferns, Saskatoon berries, or Newfoundland cod and techniques such as boiling dinner in a gauze bag. The recipes may be old-fashioned, but they have timeless appeal.
Well-written, mouthwatering, and nostalgic—an excellent addition to the literature of North American cooking.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6762-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.
From the former Talking Heads frontman, a supremely intelligent, superbly written dissection of music as an art form and way of life.
Drawing on a lifetime of music-making as an amateur, professional, performer, producer, band member and solo artist, Byrne (Bicycle Diaries, 2009) tackles the question implicit in his title from multiple angles: How does music work on the ear, brain and body? How do words relate to music in a song? How does live performance relate to recorded performance? What effect has technology had on music, and music on technology? Fans of the Talking Heads should find plenty to love about this book. Steering clear of the conflicts leading to the band’s breakup, Byrne walks through the history, album by album, to illustrate how his views about performance and recording changed with the onset of fame and (small) fortune. He devotes a chapter to the circumstances that made the gritty CBGB nightclub an ideal scene for adventurous artists like Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Tom Verlaine and Television. Always an intensely thoughtful experimenter, here he lets us in on the thinking behind the experiments. But this book is not just, or even primarily, a rock memoir. It’s also an exploration of the radical transformation—or surprising durability—of music from the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction through the era of iTunes and MP3s. Byrne touches on all kinds of music from all ages and every part of the world.
Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936365-53-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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