Let Us Eat Cake: Adventures in Food and Friendship
Author: Sharon Boorstin
Every woman has poignant food memories: the times she licked the bowl when her mother baked a cake, or helped her grandmother make blintzes, tortillas, or Southern fried chicken. And how about the times she and her girlfriends baked chocolate-chip cookies or, later, prepared elaborate dinners to impress potential husbands?
One day when looking through an old desk she'd bought as a newlywed thirty years earlier, food writer and restaurant critic Sharon Boorstin discovered a notebook of recipes she'd collected from her mother, relatives, and girlfriends at the time. It inspired her to reconnect with the recipe givers -- some of whom she hadn't seen in years -- and to explore the power of cooking and food in establishing bonds among women.
Let Us Eat Cake celebrates these connections. As a young girl, Boorstin helped her mother make tuna casseroles; on a college trip to Europe, she and her girlfriends compared men and restaurants with equal zest; after she became a food writer, Boorstin bonded with women in the food world including Barbara Lazaroff (Mrs. Wolfgang) Puck, the Too Hot Tamales, and Julia Child. Today, after decades of enjoying food and cooking together, Boorstin and the women in her life have come to understand what truly makes for female friendships.
With dozens of delicious recipes and vintage photos, this moving book will inspire readers to remember and cherish their own experiences with food, family, and friends.
Publishers Weekly
Noted food writer Boorstin was cleaning out her desk one day when she came across a notebook of recipes she'd collected as a newlywed in the late 1960s. Each recipe brought back memories of the women who'd shared it with her and the friendships that resulted. Boorstin threads these recipes for dishes such as Mireille's Halibut in Champagne and Ina's Brownies through her memoir, tracing the evolution of her friendships with women through the years, from her 1950s suburban Seattle childhood (the "Age of Innocence and Frozen Marshmallows") to the days of "women's lib" and the psychotherapy-saturated '70s, when Boorstin marries, has a daughter and begins documenting the California restaurant revolution for magazines such as Bon App tit. Boorstin shares painful memories as well her sister's mental breakdown, her own broken engagement. As her daughter grows up and parental pressures ease, Boorstin begins to develop cherished relationships with women independent of her family. "When it comes right down to it," Boorstin writes, "a woman really is the sum of all the friends she has had in her life." The result is a charming homage to women's camaraderie. Although perhaps not as penetrating as M.F.K. Fisher's writings nor as sparkling as Laurie Colwin's, there are still treasures to be found in this likeable baby boomer memoir. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
Boorstin uses food as the central motif for this distinctly sweet-toned memoir. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Kirkus Reviews
A restaurant critic and food writer's engaging recollections: part memoir, part cookbook. Boorstin was clearing out an unused desk when she unearthed a notebook of 30-year-old recipes that recalled her youth and led her to examine cuisine connections among family and friends. She didn't just forage in her memory bank; she sought out and reconnected with friends from school days, as well as more recent acquaintances. The memories they share are often funny (mushrooms stuffed with marijuana, the snails that got away) and sometimes wistful, as divorce, sickness, and death play inescapable roles over three decades. Food professionals Boorstin encountered in the course of her work make cameo appearances and contribute recipes: Julia Child explains how to cook a lobster; Wolfgang Puck passes along his formula for matzoh; and Nell Newman reveals the makings of father Paul's favorite angel-food cake. Other recipes include avocado soup from London via Kenya, the perfect gazpacho from Spain, and a "husband-catcher cake" handed down for three generations (apparently it works). Especially winning are tales of her mother, who always kept a big chest freezer filled with frozen marshmallows, big oatmeal cookies, and Dungeness crab legs. (Dad was vice president of a Seattle fish company.) Mom was a good cook, but given to doctoring vegetables with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (an icon of 1950s cuisine) and "all business" with Sharon in the kitchen. Boorstin made it a point to welcome her own daughter warmly into the kitchen, where they listened to opera, gossiped, and became friends as they cooked sans canned mushroom soup. "Women bond over food the way men do over sports," she concludes. Bonappetit to readers who agree with that rather sweeping statement; even those who don't will enjoy the cheerful anecdotes and the memorable dishes. (photos, not seen)
What People Are Saying
Faye Levy
When I began reading Let Us Eat Cake, I couldn't stop. As I read about Sharon Boorstin's experience in Italy "cooking the world's biggest mushroom," her treasured notebook of recipes from friends, and her mother's sole cookbook and approach to cooking, I felt that she was writing about me! Food-lovers will enjoy her tales celebrating the connections women make through cooking. With the stories come some scrumptious-sounding recipes that I'm eager to try, especially Lily's Spaghetti Sauce, Ina's Brownies, and the book's grand finale, The Husband-Catcher Cake.
— Faye Levy, author of 1,000 Jewish Recipes
Dorie Greenspan
The literary equivalent of Proust's madeleine, Sharon Boorstin's warm, funny, touching and delicious stories of cooking with friends remind us of the pleasures of sharing food, the little intricacies of a recipe and the big secrets of our lives over the stove and around the table.
— Dorie Greenspan, author of Baking with Julia and Paris Sweets
Faye Kellerman
Sharon Boorstin's Let Us Eat Cake is an utterly charming celebration of four decades of culinary Americana -- a story of fabulous food and childhood friendships, of deep love and cherished life. It is a captivating memoir built around the kitchen where the great dishes as well as the bonds of amity are created and nurtured side by side.
— Faye Kellerman, author of The Forgotten, Sacred and Profane and Day of Atonement
New interesting book: Spiritual Science and the Art of Healing or Medicine Grove
World of Presidia
Author: Anya Fernald
The international Slow Food movement is well known for promoting and protecting the world's unique and traditional foods, and the people (farmers, fishermen, and artisan producers) who grow them or bring them to market. A World of Presidia celebrates the diversity and quality of real food and the human culture that surrounds it. The book features detailed descriptions and gorgeous color photographs of sixty-five exceptional products in thirty different countries, each identified with a particular region of the world and a traditional way of farming and living.
Presidia projects offer a safe haven for a wide range of local and traditional products, from the Araucana or "blue egg chicken" of Chile, to Ireland's wild smoked salmon, to the golden oil of Morocco's argan tree, whose cultivation is helping to keep the Sahara Desert at bay. Each of these products is valuable in and of itself and worth preserving as part of our collective food heritage.
Publishers Weekly
In southern Chile, only three fishermen still harvest the wild black-bordered oyster in the traditional way. The Slow Food Foundation is helping them preserve their technique and the oysters; to do so, it coordinates a small "presidium," a local project focusing on a group of producers of a single product that develops production and marketing techniques to allow them to be economically viable. This book introduces presidia from Canada to Madagascar to Nepal. Because the foods are all so closely related to local culture, the story of a particular product is often as much about the community that uses it as about the food itself (e.g., the pages devoted to India's mustard seed oil presidium tell of the seed's role in Hinduism). Most of the products have been neglected or adulterated as labor-intensive processes required to produce these foods are replaced by modern efficiency and advances in technology-but each presidium aims to show that the extra effort is worth it. Occasional longer sections discussing varied subjects (e.g., the importance of rice; the history of hot peppers) are scattered throughout. Anyone interested in biodiversity and sustainable agriculture, or who loves exotic and heritage foods, will find this a wonderful primer on some of the world's finest culinary products and the societies they have anchored. Photos. (Mar. 15) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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