Home Cooking

Pick it up: If you want to read a warm, funny, well-written collection of essays about food and cooking written by an enthusiastic cook who knew how to have fun in the kitchen.

Laurie Colwin is a novelist who liked to cook. She wrote five popular novels, three collections of short stories, and two collections of essays about food and life in the kitchen. As she says in the introduction to this book,

"One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about food while eating with friends. People who like to cook, like to talk about food".

That, in effect, is what this book is, a collection of food stories and memories interspersed with recipes. A celebration of ingredients and dishes, meals planned and accomplished, some magnificent successes, and some spectacular disasters. Reading this book is like engaging in a conversation with a close friend, the writing is warm, engaging, honest, and funny.

Colwin writes about the perfect scrambled eggs, the best way to make fried chicken, the simple, and often cheap, but hearty dishes that she used to make as a young writer living in a tiny apartment in New York, when she had nothing but a hot plate to cook on, the many variations of potato salad, the perfect fried chicken, the perils of cooking for a dinner party where every guest has a food restriction of some kind, and more.

This is a delightful collection of essays written by an author who was passionate about food and life, and able to express that passion with an elegance and intimacy that make this makes this a special read.