"food essays" news and stories

I've something of a crush on Molly O'Neill since I read her autobiography, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food and Baseball a couple of years ago. She communicates a love of and respect for food that is unlike many other writers I've encountered. So, when I came across a copy of her book, A Well-Seasoned Appetite at my library's used bookstore, I added it to towering stack in my arms.

Published in 1995, it was one of the first of the current crop of cookbooks to combine recipes and essays in this manner, and to organize them by season. She starts with Spring and moves forward through the seasons, allowing for those challenging in between times by including shorter sections devoted to the times of year when it is nearly Summer, but just not quite.

For those of us who always want more with our recipes--more information, more notes and more detail as to how the recipe came into being, then this is a wonderful book to have in the collection. There's not a single recipe in here that doesn't satisfy that desire for more. The only problem I've discovered in reading it is that after just two or three pages, I am absolutely ravenous and in need of instantaneous sustenance (preferably whatever I had just been reading about). Most of the time I have to satisfy my cravings with an apple or a handful of pretzels. I'm hoping that soon, I'll instead get to sate my hunger with her Spinach with Garlic and Lemon or the Sour Cherry Crumble.

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If you've been paying any attention to the cookbooks I've been featuring here, you may have noticed that I have something of a weakness for memoirs or collections of essays that revolve around food and offer some of the recipes that are mentioned in the writing. Last Friday, while I was up in New York, I made a stop at Kitchen Arts and Letters (a bookstore devoted exclusively to writing about food and wine). In addition to browsing the many shelves of cookbooks, I spent some time in the essay/memoir section. That's where I discovered Bonny Wolf's Talking with My Mouth Full.

I don't know how I've missed this book until now, being that I typically haunt the food section at my local Barnes and Noble. However, I am excessively grateful to have discovered it, as it is filled with wonderful essays about things ranging from the history of the Bundt pan (reading that section made me want to leap up and start baking) to An Ode to Toast (because who doesn't like toast?). If you are looking for a book that deals with food and has the ability to make you hungry but yet totally satisfied, look no further. And now, I'm off to bake a Bundt cake.

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I have a deep and abiding love for Laurie Colwin. I like her novels alright, but I love her two volumes of essays about food and cooking. I read and reread them each a couple of times a year, although for the last year or so I haven't been able to dive into More Home Cooking because I lent my copy to my mom. However, when I was back in Portland for the holidays, I reclaimed my copy and quickly fell back into her appealing prose and tasty food descriptions.

While it isn't exactly a cookbook, it is a book that contain many wonderful, delicious sounding recipes. This volume contains recipes for Mulligatawny Soup, Rosemary Walnuts, instructions on how to roast a turkey, a section exalting the beauty of pears and a Happy Winter Fudge Cake (I think that just about any fudge cake has the power to make many winters far more happy).

I haven't been doing this with every Cookbook of the Day post, but after the jump you'll find the recipe for the Happy Winter Fudge Cake (because it just sounds so good).

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As many of you know, the nation's screenwriters are currently on strike. Every time I hear a news report about the strike, I start to wonder how many of those screenwriters are spending their time. They can't all be out on the picket lines and, as I well know, the urge to write is strong. So strong, in fact, that some of the striking screenwriters, led by writer Amy Ephron, have started a food blog!

They have started One of the Table, a blog that is described as being about "Food, Politics and Love." Right now, on their stories page they have essays up by Laraine Newman, Delia Ephron, Holly Goldberg Sloan and Arianna Huffington. I am particularly taken with an essay by Denise Gruska entitled The Only Girl at School with a Liverwurst Sandwich. Not all the authors are striking writers, but many of them are. It's nice to see them channeling their talents into such a neat endeavor. Hopefully it will live on after a contract is negotiated and they return to work.

[via Epi Log]

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