An exploratory, celebratory memoir that elevates family repasts.
A combination of a culinary travel adventure and a search for the author’s Italian family’s home cooking.
In a knowledgeable, robust narrative that emphasizes proud traditions, Lust (Italian/Dartmouth Coll.; Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings From the Kitchen, 1998) chronicles her trips of discovery to Italy's backcountry. After years working in a New England restaurant, she headed for Rocca Canavese in the Piedmont, where a sumptuous meal by her mother’s cousin proved to be inspirational. In early chapters, the author details specific dishes from that menu, including gnocchi, braised rabbit, stewed turnips, bagna cauda (a fonduelike dish with garlic and anchovies), and trout baked in parchment. Gastronomic history and the lore behind certain dishes intertwine with memories of the author’s relatives. She also describes her stateside quest to re-create rustic flavors, which highlights the differences in food culture between Italy and the U.S.—e.g., in America, rabbit never took hold as a staple. The many included recipes feature fresh ingredients and minimal steps, with helpful suggestions for substitutions. In the middle section of the book, Lust takes readers to the coastal area of Maremma, where she immersed herself in language study. “To make myself at home at the Italian table would require real fluency,” she writes. Throughout the book, Lust emerges as both an observer and apprentice, and her journey toward an authentic, down-to-earth cuisine is sincere rather than pretentious. Beloved regional dishes and lessons from a skillful hostess make clear the seasonality and intuitive approach of Italian cookery. The final section, set in Le Marche, focuses on foraging, with a dense botanical appreciation that is sometimes dry but reflects Lust's farm-to-table ethos. A mildly humorous essay on the effects of eating asparagus offers a few curious historical references, but its place in the collection is tangential. For foodies, Lust hits all the right notes; she demonstrates abundant love and respect for the food and the people dedicated to making it right.
An exploratory, celebratory memoir that elevates family repasts.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-330-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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