Kitchen Yarns

August 13, 2018
In this moving collection of essays, Hood (The Knitting Circle), now in her 60s, looks back on her life through the lens of her love of food and cooking. Hood grew up in Providence, R.I., in an Italian-American family that loved food, with her grandmother doing the cooking. Hood’s father, who was in the Navy, loved to cook but his rather pedestrian repertoire ranged from runny mashed potatoes to lopsided cake; her mother, who worked for a time in a candy factory, was more adept in the kitchen, making elegant “fancy lady” sandwiches and pies (her lemon meringue pie and meatball recipes are among the many included here). The essays reference major life events, revealing how preparing food helped Hood deal with the death of her older brother and the death of her five-year-old daughter from virulent form of strep (“Now I was cooking to keep from losing my mind from grief,” she says while making pork roast with garlic). Cooking also inspired such happy memories as baking with her children or preparing meals for friends. Hood covers her teens as a department store Jordan Marsh girl, her early adulthood as a TWA flight attendant, motherhood, and her recent marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman. Hood’s sharp essays emphasize food as emotional nourishment, bringing family and friends together—both to celebrate the joys and to heal the wounds of life.

October 1, 2018
In this culinary confessional from the acclaimed author, it's less about the kitchen and more about the yarns.Writing a compelling food memoir is a delicate act; the recipes have to live up to the memories they evoke. In the hands of prolific author Hood (Morningstar: Growing Up with Books, 2017, etc.), the stories themselves are the main dish--but the food still has to be delicious. "I grew up eating. A lot," she writes at the beginning. "As the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher said, 'First we eat, then we do everything else.' That describes my childhood home." From the kitchen of her Italian grandmother Gogo through her career as a flight attendant, a seemingly perfect American suburban existence, the death of a child, divorce, and fairy tale-like second chance at true romance, Hood recalls each moment through the meals she was preparing, recipes both great and, well, not-so-great. The good ones include her family's traditional meatballs: "The secret to [the] meatballs is how you roll them, a skill my father could never master. Neither could I." The bad ones include her father's scrambled eggs made with sugar. Then there are the heartbreaking ones: the "doctored" ramen Hood makes on the anniversary of her 5-year-old daughter Gracie's death (which she movingly chronicled in her 2008 book, Comfort). "It still hits me when I see seckel pears in the grocery store," she writes. "Little blonde girls in glasses. Hear the Beatles singing 'Eight Days a Week.' The sharp stab of a memory rises to the surface out of nowhere." But her ramen, featuring a poached egg, butter, and American cheese, helps. While some of the stories feel redundant, with repeated bits of history rephrased, when Hood is focused on her prose, it's like a classic recipe--all the flavors sing.A full plate of heart and hearty eats.

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Novelist Hood (The Book That Matters Most) recounts the events of her life in a series of autobiographical essays that center on the foods she loves and craves and the dishes that have helped her through hardship. The author grew up in Providence, RI, in an Italian American family, where her grandmother cooked gallons of red sauce every week, and her mother crafted delicious meatballs and "fancy lady sandwiches" that Hood took to school functions. Hood details her teenage years working for the department store Jordan Marsh and subsequent 15 years as a TWA flight attendant. As her travels allowed her to explore more sophisticated foods around the world, it was the simple dishes from her childhood (e.g., her father's Indiana fried chicken made from three simple ingredients: flour, salt, and pepper) to which she always returned. Hood writes movingly about her failed marriage, the tragic deaths of her father, brother, and five-year-old daughter, and the recipes that kept her going through these difficult periods. VERDICT This warm, humorous, touching, and wonderfully readable book will appeal to food lovers and fans of culinary biographies.--Phillip Oliver, formerly with Univ. of North Alabama, Florence