Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good

August 18, 2014
In Flinn's (The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry) recipe-rich memoir of her childhood in Flint, Mich., food is a source of sustenance and familial affection. Her Irish-Swedish family's long history of living on working farms allowed them to feed themselves when they were broke. Her father would go out in the morning before his full time job and pick whatever looked ready and her mother would can dozens of jars of applesauce, pickles, beans, and jams, (a skill taught by Flinn's maternal grandparents). The time-consuming and arduous task on her hands earned her mother the nickname "The Claw." With five children in the house, this way of life was once commonplace through the first half of the 20th century, but people abandoned the practice for grocery store conveniences and shortcuts. The family worked incredibly hard on the farm and had few luxuries, (a splurge was going to McDonald's and spending money the kids had earned picking strawberries on another farm in the summer). Surrounded by a warm, extended family, Flinn's childhood sounds like a wonderful way to grow up, and her additions of mouthwatering Michigan recipes adds even more flavor to her memoir.

June 15, 2014
An award-winning nonfiction writer and journalist's recipe-packed memoir of her Midwestern childhood and how she came "to [her] love of the kitchen."Even before Flinn (The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks, 2011, etc.) was born, cooking defined her family. In the late 1950s, her parents left Michigan to help her Irish uncle run an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. When they returned a short time later to care for her father's dying sister, they went to live on a run-down farm. The family lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and the Flinn children "never had new clothes, fancy bikes, or enough money for hot lunch at school." However, between the chickens they raised and fruits and vegetables they grew, the Flinns never lacked for good food. In fact, cooking was the conduit through which previous generations of her working-class family expressed their love for each other. Her maternal grandfather courted her grandmother "not with flowers but with food," and Flinn's paternal grandmother kept her children from starving during the Depression with the soups she made from just about anything she could find. When the author's parents married, her father took his new wife on a fishing honeymoon. After the family's finances improved, they indulged in the more expensive convenience foods more prosperous families took for granted. Longing for homemade food, Flinn began to experiment in the kitchen and discovered "there was nothing better than feeding people." Cooking eventually became the way she could forget her status as a social outcast and bond with her dying father when the family moved to Florida. As a young adult, Flinn aspired to attend her culinary idol Julia Child's alma mater, Le Cordon Bleu. More than a decade later, following along the well-worn path of a family love affair with food, she lived out her dream.A warm, quietly poignant treat.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2014
Flinn affectionately recalls her family and growing up in the counties surrounding Flint, Michigan, in the days before America's mighty auto industry collapsed. Typical of midwesterners in the middle of the twentieth century, the Flinns frequently motored around Michigan, and they had a place on Florida's Gulf Coast that offered some respite from harsh winters. But they equally cherished Michigan's charms, such as Frankenmuth's famous fried-chicken dinners. As she recounts the years of her youth, Flinn summons up memories of family dinners and of foods the older women of her extended family cooked so carefully and lovingly. Not all her recollections are unsullied by sadness: her grandfather took a fall in her presence that proved fatal. Recipes for Flinn's family's favorite feasts appear throughout the text, most of them readily replicated, yet carefully detailed, even to the level of creating specific spice mixtures.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)