June/July selection Kitchens of the Great Midwest

For the June / July edition I chose the novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal (July 2015)

On our club's website, we have a page where people can suggest readings. One of them caught my attention and when I followed up and looked at Stradal's books, I was intrigued by the words on the publisher's page "a novel about a young woman with a once-in-a-generation palate who becomes the iconic chef behind the country’s most coveted dinner reservation." Such an introduction is hard to resist. 

The structure of the book also sounds intriguing:  

Each chapter in J. Ryan Stradal’s startlingly original debut tells the story of a single dish and character, at once capturing the zeitgeist of the Midwest, the rise of foodie culture, and delving into the ways food creates community and a sense of identity.

I hope the novel will make for an pleasant read and a source of inspiration in the kitchen.

Simona, briciole

Deadline for contributing your post: Friday, July 31, 2026.

Leave a comment below with a link to your post or email me at simosite AT mac DOT com

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Remember that membership in our book club is open to anyone and we hope you will join us by reading these selections and creating inspired recipes. New participants are always welcome and so are returning ones. For more information about participating, click here.  

February/March selection: Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen

Please join me in reading Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen by Annabel Abbs for the February/March Cook the Books selection.

About the book (from HarperCollins Publishers)

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

Good Housekeeping Book Club Pick * A Country Living Best Book of Fall * A Washington Post Best Feel-Good Book of the Year * One of the New York Times's Best Historical Fiction Novels of Fall

In a novel perfect for fans of Hazel Gaynor’s A Memory of Violets and upstairs-downstairs stories, Annabel Abbs, the award-winning author of The Joyce Girl, returns with the brilliant real-life story of Eliza Acton and her assistant as they revolutionized British cooking and cookbooks around the world.

Before Mrs. Beeton and well before Julia Child, there was Eliza Acton, who changed the course of cookery writing forever.

England, 1835. London is awash with thrilling new ingredients, from rare spices to exotic fruits. But no one knows how to use them. When Eliza Acton is told by her publisher to write a cookery book instead of the poetry she loves, she refuses—until her bankrupt father is forced to flee the country. As a woman, Eliza has few options. Although she’s never set foot in a kitchen, she begins collecting recipes and teaching herself to cook. Much to her surprise she discovers a talent – and a passion – for the culinary arts.

Eliza hires young, destitute Ann Kirby to assist her. As they cook together, Ann learns about poetry, love and ambition. The two develop a radical friendship, breaking the boundaries of class while creating new ways of writing recipes. But when Ann discovers a secret in Eliza’s past, and finds a voice of her own, their friendship starts to fray.

Based on the true story of the first modern cookery writer, Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen is a spellbinding novel about female friend­ship, the struggle for independence, and the transcendent pleasures and solace of food. 

I hope you all enjoy this historical fiction novel as much as I did and find plenty of foodie inspiration!

Please comment below with your recipe link by Tuesday, March 31 to be added into the roundup.

Happy reading!

Amy (Amy's Cooking Adventures)

June/July Selection: A Bakery in Paris

I was pleased to be invited to host CTB for the upcoming months of June and July. I chose the historical novel A Bakery in Paris by Aimie Runyan (August 2023)

This is the story of two women, Lisette, born into wealth and privilege in France to parents who are cold and distant towards her. As she becomes an adult in 1870, she flees the marriage planned by her parents and runs into the arms of Theo, a National Guardsman, who is part of the resistance against the Prussian oligarchy in control of the country. Micheline is a young woman entering adulthood in 1945 as WWII is ending, and people are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. Micheline was raised in a loving, caring home above a cafe. Her father was killed in the war, and her mother disappeared, leaving her to care for her younger sisters. When the cafe tenants leave without warning, Micheline is unsure of how she will continue to provide for her siblings. She speaks with an elderly neighbor who encourages her to attend culinary school and restore the cafe into a bakery. The neighbor told Micheline that she was great friends with her grandmother and had many fond memories of joining her for treats after school when her mother, Lisette, owned the store. The novel skips back and forth between the lives of these two young, strong, and determined women as Micheline follows the recipes she has found in her great-grandmother's journal. These recipes are listed between chapters in the novel. I hope you enjoy this novel and will join me at the end of July when I do a roundup of the reviews and recipes inspired.

Wendy, A Day in the Life on the Farm

Deadline for contributing your post: Thursday, July 31, 2025.

 

Leave a comment below with a link to your post 

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Remember that membership in our book club is open to anyone and we hope you will join us by reading these selections and creating inspired recipes. New participants are always welcome and so are returning ones. For more information about participating, click here.  

October/November selection: Crying in H Mart

For the October / November 2024 edition I chose the memoir Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (April 2021)

In August 2018, the author had an essay published on The New Yorker with the same title. It starts thus:

Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart. For those of you who don’t know, H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The “H” stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly translates to “one arm full of groceries.” H Mart is where parachute kids go to get the exact brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It’s where Korean families buy rice cakes to make tteokguk, a beef soup that brings in the new year. It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat. H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle “ethnic” section in regular grocery stores.

From the book review on NPR:

[Crying in H Mart] powerfully maps a complicated mother-daughter relationship cut much too short. Stories of Korean food serve as the backbone of the book, as Zauner plumbs the connections between food and identity. That search takes on new urgency after her mother's death — in losing her mother, she also lost her strongest tether to Korean culture.

I'm looking forward to learning more about Korean cuisine. 

Simona, briciole

Deadline for contributing your post: Saturday, November 30, 2024.

 

Leave a comment below with a link to your post or email me at simosite AT mac DOT com

Note: I borrowed the book from the library. Both the ebook and the audio version had long waiting lists. If you also plan to borrow the book, I recommend you check your library soon.

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Remember that membership in our book club is open to anyone and we hope you will join us by reading these selections and creating inspired recipes. New participants are always welcome and so are returning ones. For more information about participating, click here.  

February/March selection: Relish

For the February / March 2024 edition of our book club, I chose the graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley (April 2013)

From the author's website:

In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy's original inventions. 

A welcome read for anyone who ever felt more passion for a sandwich than is strictly speaking proper, Relish is a graphic novel for our time: it invites the reader to celebrate food as a connection to our bodies and a connection to the earth, rather than an enemy, a compulsion, or a consumer product. 

And from the book review on NPR:

Lucy Knisley isn't a food hipster. She's a food nerd. 

Which is to say: she doesn't lecture. She enthuses.

Her knowledge of food isn't an excuse to lord her expertise over others. It's a means to connect with them, to get them to understand why she loves what she loves — and, maybe, to get them to love it, too.

Relish contains a series of stories from Knisley's life in the culinary world, from being toted along as a young girl to her mother's job at the first Dean and Deluca, to her own experiences in the Chicago food scene. These are broken up by some of her favorite recipes, lovingly illustrated and annotated in her bright, cartoony style.

I'm looking forward to reading outside my habits' boundaries. 

Simona, briciole

Deadline for contributing your post: Sunday, March 31, 2024

Leave a comment below with a link to your post or email me at simosite AT mac DOT com

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Remember that membership in our book club is open to anyone and we hope you will join us by reading these selections and creating inspired recipes. New participants are always welcome and so are returning ones. For more information about participating, click here.  

June/July selection: Food Americana

For the June / July 2023 edition I chose Food Americana by David Page (May 2021) based on the book's intriguing subtitle "The Remarkable People and Incredible Stories behind America’s Favorite Dishes."

The subtitle reminded me of an earlier choice I made for the club, Twain's Feast by Andrew Beahrs, which looked at foods popular in Twain's time. I thought Food Americana would be a way to jump forward to the present and look at foods popular today. 

From the publisher: 

The remarkable history of American food. What is American cuisine, what national menu do we share, what dishes have we chosen, how did they become “American,” and how are they likely to evolve from here? David Page answers all these questions and more.

From a review of the book by Ann Beman:

A reflection of the nation’s character, most of the highlighted foods immigrated to the U.S. from other countries. Page, a former network news producer and the creator of TV’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” flexes his journalism chops to capture local vernacular as well as the flavors, scents, and imagery of the foods’ cultures as they have evolved. Readers who enjoy microhistories will savor the tidbits of interesting facts and trivia peppered throughout the book. 

I'm looking forward to reading stories of foods that are common around me but weren't a short while ago. 

Simona, briciole

Deadline for contributing your post: Monday, July 31, 2023

Leave a comment below with a link to your post or email me at simosite AT mac DOT com

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Remember that membership in our book club is open to anyone and we hope you will join us by reading these selections and creating inspired recipes. New participants are always welcome and so are returning ones. For more information about participating, click here.  

October/November selection: Cooking with Fernet Branca

For the October / November 2022 edition I chose the novel Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson (September 2005)

Right around the time when we started talking about our next selections at the beginning of this year, I read an article on The Guardian titled Top 10 cooks in fiction written by Annabel Abbs. Number 10 is Gerald Sampler, protagonist of the novel I chose:   

Gerald is a ghostwriter for C-list celebrities who likes inventing recipes. From his Tuscan hilltop he cooks with great gusto, using copious amounts of an Italian digestif called Fernet Branca. The plot is fast-paced but daft, the characters ludicrous but hilarious, and the recipes imaginative but ridiculous. Mussels in chocolate, garlic ice cream, a pie made from cat and kerosene, all doused in Fernet Branca, and described by one reviewer “lingering in the mind like poems”. This farce of a novel is a perfect reminder that no cook should take themselves too seriously.  

The New Yorker's review clarifies that two expats are the novel's main characters:

In this comic novel, two expats try to live on the same Tuscan mountaintop for the summer without killing each other: Gerald, an effete English snob and amateur cook who makes his living as a ghostwriter; and Marta, a bohemian composer from a crime family in a former Soviet republic. Hamilton-Paterson quickly seduces the reader with the perfectly captured acerbic tone and timing of Gerald and Marta’s badinage. 

I'm looking forward to reading how Gerald uses Fernet Branca in the kitchen, since when I was growing up in Italy it was strictly drunk as a digestivo (digestif).

Simona, briciole

Deadline for contributing your post: Wednesday, November 30, 2022.

Leave a comment below with a link to your post or email me at simosite AT mac DOT com

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Remember that membership in our book club is open to anyone and we hope you will join us by reading these selections and creating inspired recipes. New participants are always welcome and so are returning ones. For more information about participating, click here.  

June/July selection: 97 Orchard by Jane Ziegelman

Among the proposals on our blog's Suggested Reading page, the title 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman intrigued me, so I chose it as my selection for this round. As with other titles in past editions, this book provides a historical perspective on the foods we bring on our table. Thank you, Lynda, for the suggestion.

A good part of the book's appeal is due to the fact that I am an immigrant myself and have direct experience of, and perspective on, the process of transplanting one's culinary traditions into another country's soil. 

From Publisher's Weekly

Ziegelman puts a historical spin to the notion that you are what you eat by looking at five immigrant families from what she calls the "elemental perspective of the foods they ate." They are German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish (both Orthodox and Reform) from Russia and Germany—they are new Americans, and each family, sometime between 1863 and 1935, lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Each represents the predicaments faced in adapting the food traditions it knew to the country it adopted. From census data, newspaper accounts, sociological studies, and cookbooks of the time, Ziegelman vividly renders a proud, diverse community learning to be American. She describes the funk of fermenting sauerkraut, the bounty of a pushcart market, the culinary versatility of a potato, as well as such treats as hamburger, spaghetti, and lager beer. Beyond the foodstuffs and recipes of the time, however, are the mores, histories, and identities that food evokes. Through food, the author records the immigrants’ struggle to reinterpret themselves in an American context and their reciprocal impact on American culture at large.

You may also find this interview with the author aired on NPR of interest. 

I am looking forward to reading this book and being inspired by it in the kitchen with all of you.

The deadline for contributing your post: Saturday, July 31, 2021.

Leave a comment below with a link to your post or email me at simosite AT mac DOT com.

Remember that anyone can participate in Cook the Books: simply pick up a copy of the selection from your local bookstore or library, take inspiration from said reading, cook and post the inspired dish. We look forward to having you read and cook along with us in this selection period and beyond. New participants are always welcome. (Leave a comment here or check out our Guidelines page if you have any questions.) 

Simona