WEEKEND COOKING
My Reviews of Three Food Memoirs
Food-centric memoirs are a favorite subgenre of mine. I recently read three of them back-to-back, which felt like gluttony even to me. That doesn’t mean I am not looking forward to the next one to pop up on my TBR shelf!
Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir by Ina Garten
My reaction surprised me a bit. I really didn't know anything about Ina Garten before I read this new memoir. I knew she is famous, had a business called The Barefoot Contessa, and posted a pandemic video of a giant cosmo cocktail that went viral. But I never watched her on tv and don't have any of her cookbooks. I was curious, though and I love reading about food people, so I looked forward to reading it. It didn't disappoint. What an interesting life!
The book starts with Garten’s childhood, which was not all that nice. Her parents were not supportive. In fact, they were psychologically, and sometimes physically, abusive. Now, as a woman in her 70s who’s clearly had plenty of counseling, she has distance from this background and can reflect on the wisdom she gained from it. Most of the book is about her marriage to Jeffrey and her career. Theirs is a long and successful marriage, but it had rough patches early on, even a lengthy separation. The support Jeffrey gave her, and her difficult childhood, are touchstones for Garten and she returns to both throughout the book.
My favorite thing about the book was learning about her career. She was working for the White House Office of Management and Budget, writing nuclear policy, and bored out of her socks, when she up and decided to buy The Barefoot Contessa food shop in the Hamptons. After 18 years, she wanted to do something new, so turned her hand to writing cookbooks. That led to TV shows, magazine columns, and other ventures. As a woman who started and ran my own business for the last 12 years, Garten’s risk taking and entrepreneurial spirit appeal to me enormously. I loved hearing about her professional growth and need for new business challenges. She is inspiring.
A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg
Unfortunately, I did not care for the second food memoir I read nearly as much as I loved Ina Garten’s book. A Homemade Life has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a while now, so I included it in my stack of books for the TBR 25 in ’25 Challenge. I’m glad I read it, and even more glad to get it off my shelf. But it wasn’t for me. I might be too old for it.
Molly Wizenberg is a self-taught chef (like Garten) who started a food blog called Orangette back in 2004. The blog led to this book, a 2009 memoir (with recipes) of her life from childhood to her wedding in 2008. That description appealed to me and is what made me buy the book in the first place. But the execution didn’t live up to my expectations.
It's not that the book or the recipes are bad. Wizenberg writes well and generally knows how to tell a good story. It’s just that she didn’t strike me as someone who really likes food or knows much about cooking. For example, she described wanting to make (up) a cake with apricots and honey baked into the top. But she put the apricots filled with honey on top of the cake batter before it went into the oven and was surprised that the apricots sunk! Even my husband knows that if you want fruit on the top of the cake, you put it in the bottom of the pan. Flip over, fruit on top. It’s not a mystery.
As for not really liking food, I’m sure she does – she made it her life. But she had an odd relationship with food and no clear philosophy about food and cooking. Like, does she view cooking as a private pleasure for herself and family? Or does she prefer cooking as a form of hospitality and entertainment? Does she like basic recipes, traditional cooking, festive meals? She never frames her approach to food. The book has bits of all those things, in no particular order. For instance, it sounds like she was a vegetarian for a while, so many (too many in my opinion) of the recipes are for baked goods and salad. But then she’s roasting chickens and making meatballs, with no explanation for why she switched. Her boyfriend/husband was a vegetarian and the master of making dinner out of a few scraps of things. That might have been interesting to experience, but not so much to read about. For example, I really don’t believe that a “salad” made by piling arugula and fresh figs on a chopping board with a hunk of “hard cheese” and – yes – chocolate shavings would be good. And no, I don’t need to try it myself. I’ll pass, like I wish I had passed on the book.
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl
The third of my food memoirs was Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl’s first memoir. I’ve read all her other nonfiction and one of her novels, so I know about how Reichl went from writing restaurant reviews in Los Angeles to be the restaurant reviewer at the New York Times and then Editor of Gourmet magazine until it shut down in 2009. This book is about her life before she became a restaurant reviewer.
Like Garten, Reichl had a difficult childhood. Her parents were loving, but her mother was bipolar. Reichl describes what it was like growing up in the chaotic environment her mother’s illness created, how that experience shaped her, and how (also like Garten) it led in part to her early marriage.
Knowing from her other books how her career took off later, this one was interesting, but not riveting like it was to read about her later life. But Reichl’s origin story is still worth reading, if only for the anecdotes about living in a commune in Berkley and cooking at a cooperatively owned restaurant. I enjoyed it very much, the story and the recipes, but it didn't knock my socks off like her later books did. I am sure I would have reacted differently had I read it first.
NOTES
Weekend Cooking is a weekly blog event hosted by Marg at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader. Beth Fish Reads started the event in 2009 and bloggers have been sharing book and food related posts ever since.
My sister gave me the book book of Be Ready When the Luck Happens and I love it because it has a ton of photographs. But I decided to read the text with my ears because Garten reads the audiobook herself. I really like it when authors narrate their own nonfiction books. You get a better sense of the tone the author wanted to convey.
