HOME MADE

A moving memoir about how “systems fail but food is revolutionary.”

In 2006, Hauck began an unusual volunteer project at a group home for adolescent boys in state care. She had conceived the project with her father, a social worker and co-founder of the nonprofit residence; after he died, the author decided to make the plan a reality. “Cooking at the House,” she writes in this highly affecting story, “would be a way to finish one item on my father’s largely unfinished to-do list.” A high school Spanish teacher, Hauck had no clear plans for her future, and she was burdened by an abiding sense of grief over her father’s death. “The project,” she reflects, “was less about retracing his steps than understanding the map of the world he lived in, to figure out how it might also be mine.” The boys—eight at any one time—picked the menus, she arrived once a week with groceries that she paid for herself, and they cooked and ate together for nearly three years. The boys’ food choices usually leaned toward pizza, stir-fry, and quesadillas, but once they asked for fried chicken, which Hauck had never made. Armed with a recipe from a friend’s mother, she soon realized that it was far different from what the boys had eaten. “Until the fried chicken, we hadn’t really addressed race,” she writes. “It was obviously always present, but we never talked about the ways race inflected our food, our bodies, our everything. Until the fried chicken, we cooked around it.” Hauck creates indelible portraits of the wounded, lonely, and disillusioned boys, some of whom lashed out in anger at a world that had failed them. When the residence closed in 2009 due to lack of funding, the director implored Hauck to write about her experience: “You have to tell the story. That something happened here. Or there will be no trace of any of it.” Hauck’s sensitive memoir honors the boys she nourished.

A captivating debut.