Booktropic

The bittersweet taste of a mango and the wind blowing on my face as I sit on my porch in the summer are inextricably linked in my memory. What is it about summer days and food that seem to create our fondest memories? Recently, I was thinking about my college study abroad trip to Spain where I took a battered copy of James Michener’s Iberia on every excursion I took that semester. I still clearly remember stopping to eat at a restaurant in Sevilla, which Michener described in the book, where they served customers who had just left the bullfighting arena next door. The drying meat on hooks in the ceiling was almost too vivid a reminder of the events that had just recently taken place.

I have always loved being transported by writers to locales where food is a central part of the story. Interestingly, I am not fond of cooking. I hate planning a meal, and then having to prepare the dishes, and then worrying whether everything will be cooked on time to be served. I do love to eat, however, and could talk about special dishes all day…so long as someone else prepares them. In fact, my mother was a mediocre cook. She never learned to cook well due to her reliance for meals on our household staff in Cuba. Mom often told us about the month she spent with her mother-in-law just prior to our leaving Cuba where she was taught how to cook. Nana Chela was afraid if left to my mother’s cooking we would die from starvation when we moved to Miami. That crash course in Cuban cuisine was only mildly successful. Lucky for us, Nana Chela moved in with us a few years later.

Mary Urrutia’s book about Cuban cooking brought back many lovely memories of my Cuban childhood and meals with my family. I was brought to tears with her description of my favorite food, Yuca frita. I often refer to this book when people ask for Cuban recipes, since the only cookbook my mother brought from Cuba is in Spanish and would take too long to translate.

There is a description of a meal in one of Ruth Reichl’s books where she describes spending hours in an Italian restaurant where she consumed huge quantities of garlic and wine and literally became ‘high’ from the food. I love that story. Mayle’s descriptions of Tuscany made me want to call a travel agent and book a flight the next day. And if you love humor with your food, you have got to read Bourdain and Trillin.

Tony Bourdain is irreverent and willing to sample the most grotesque cuisines. Calvin Trillin, a food critic often published in The New Yorker, grew up in Kansas City and we are close friends of his nephew, who often tells us humorous anecdotes about his life. Trillin’s encounters with food in New York City are small gems.

Here’s a list of personal food favorites, in no particular order, and at the end you will find a list from a library’s readers advisory with many more titles. I hope you enjoy the pleasures of eating vicariously through these books. And just think, you never have to turn on the stove!

• Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain. This book comes 10 years after Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential made him a foodie superstar. Also, his shows on the travel channel are terrific.
• Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl
• Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table by Ruth Reichl
• Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen by Julie Powell
• My life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme. Captivating story of Julia Child’s years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found her true calling.
• Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford is a new classic of its type in which Buford reports on the life of a line cook and the fame of celebrity chef, Mario Batali.
• Alice, Let’s Eat by Calvin Trillin, is a funny, warm road trip devoted to eating. With his beloved wife by his side, Trillin explores American culture via a close up look at what we put in our stomachs.
• The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher. The author who mastered the food memoir. She authored so many titles, I just picked a couple, The Gastronomical Me.
• A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
• Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy by Michael Tucker. In this lighthearted memoir by television’s former L.A. Law star, Tucker delves into the rich lifestyle, cuisine and local wine of central Italy when he and his wife, actress Jill Eikenberry, make an impromptu purchase of a 350-year-old stone cottage in the Umbrian countryside.
• Memories of a Cuban Kitchen: More Than 200 Classic Recipes by Mary Urrutia Randelman and Joan Schwartz.  In 1957, when Randleman herself was 10 years old, her prosperous family emigrated to Miami from Cuba. Her memories of pre-Castro life and eating are filtered through a golden haze of childhood recollection: cousin Pepe entertains his family at merienda (afternoon tea), in which “steaming trays began appearing from the kitchen, borne by a parade of indulgent maids and cooks,” and glamorous Aunt Titi drives the young Randelman to the Havana Yacht Club for incomparable freshly fried potato chips and croquetas “filled with smoky creamed ham and splashed with lime juice.” Amazon review.
• Paula Deen: It Ain’t All About the Cookin’ by Paula Deen and Sherry Suib Cohen
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp . Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local.
• A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg, in which she recounts a life with the kitchen at its center. From her mother’s pound cake, a staple of summer picnics during her childhood in Oklahoma, to the eggs she cooked for her father during the weeks before his death, food and memories are intimately entwined.
• Iberia by James Michener.

Morton Grove Public Library’s Food for Thought: http://www.webrary.org/rs/bibfoodmem.html