Dining at the Lineman's Shack

January 20, 2003
Until he was 11, Weston (The Boy Who Sang the Birds) lived with his family in an abandoned fence-tender's shack in Skull Valley, Ariz. There was no bathroom, the roof leaked, holes in the floor were covered with flattened coffee cans, and the family was constantly preoccupied with the "complex experience of finding enough to eat during the Great Depression." In this colorful but uneven culinary memoir, Weston recalls how his mother, Eloine, concocted meals out of whatever was at hand, sometimes nothing more than government beans, flour and rice, and the provisions her children obtained by poaching, foraging and raiding neighbors' cornfields and orchards. Even so, it wasn't a deprived childhood. There were dances at the Community Hall, annual Goat Picnics and Eloine's imaginative cooking: "a small repertoire from which she could coax ideas surprising even to herself," such as spaghetti with white gravy, salt pork, and raw egg—her version of carbonara sauce. After Weston's father died, the family moved to the nearby cowboy town of Prescott, where Weston discovered rodeos and Baptist summer camp and where Eloine "launched her quixotic deflection into Mexican cooking." Throughout the book, Weston skillfully draws the reader into the world of his childhood, then breaks the spell by letting his obsession with food lead him into rambling digressions about his experiences with gourmet cuisine as an adult. Even when he shares some of his mother's recipes, he can't resist adding more sophisticated versions that include ingredients unknown to his mother, such as wine, cognac, balsamic vinegar and heavy cream. These deviations undermine his theme, as do vignettes about love, loss and sexual awakening—detached narratives that jar this otherwise appealing memoir.

February 1, 2003
Weston, whose fiction includes Goat Songs and The Boy Who Sang the Birds, turns to nonfiction with this culinary memoir of growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in Arizona. Living in a lineman's shack in Skull Valley, Weston and his family knew the taste of poverty well, but Weston's mother, Eloine, always managed to create dishes out of skimpy offerings and available ingredients. Much of this memoir is devoted to her and to her necessarily inventive and practical approach to cooking. The small selection of recipes scattered throughout the book, including Basic Red Chile Sauce and Rodeo Pie, reflect the different culinary sources, including Eloine's Southern heritage and the regional Mexican influence, that inspired the foods that filled the author's childhood. Though for some readers the occasional shift to other places and times might cause momentary dissonance, Weston's writing is vivid and powerful. Recommended for libraries in the Southwest and public libraries where culinary biographies are popular.-John Charles, Scottsdale P.L., AZ

March 15, 2003
Weston has fond memories of his life in the Southwest, where he grew up during the Great Depression. Mostly he recalls his mother, Eloine, whose food he continues to relish. She started out as a southern cook, but the Southwest, with its game and its peppers, transformed her cuisine. Together, mother and son also learned to make the best of the deprivations brought on first by the Depression and then by wartime rationing. Within this text, Weston reproduces many of his mother's best recipes, turning this memoir into a virtual cookbook that proves as welcome in the kitchen as in the armchair. Weston's portraits of his teen friends ring true. Especially compelling is his rendering of Digger, in whose undertaker father's funeral home the boys acquired all sorts of useful anatomical information. Meantime, his adolescent impulses, experiences, and teachers draw him into the arts, first toward piano playing, then toward things literary, where Weston discovers his real calling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)