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Visiting With Some Old Foodie Friends: Brooklyn in Love, Picnic in Provence, Home is Where the Eggs Are, and This Might Be Too Personal

27 Dec

This year marked my 20th year here at the library, which of course got me feeling nostalgic about back when I first started working here in 2003, a newly graduated MLIS student, single and excited about living just across the river from that legendary city, NYC, though Hoboken is not shabby on its own legends either. Although the blog hasn’t been around quite that long it got me to thinking about some of the memoirs, I had reviewed early on and what their authors might have been up to now. Here are a few. Like me they found love and started families, but of course their adventures in their delicious “next chapter,” as Amy Thomas describes her own part two, only continued.

Brooklyn in Love: A Delicious Memoir of Food, Family and Finding Yourself
by Amy Thomas
In 2012, Amy Thomas published Paris My Sweet, a memoir about the years she spent in her dream job getting to write ad copy for Louis Vuitton in the city of lights. When I blogged about it back then, it was clear that as much as Thomas enjoyed and celebrated Paris, it wasn’t where she was going to put down roots. In 2018’s Brooklyn in Love, on the other hand, it definitely has more a feeling of figuring out where her long term home is. As with Paris My Sweet where she includes recommendations for bakeries and Cafes in Paris, In Brooklyn in Love she focuses on the unique and delicious places she encounters in Brooklyn. I think it is notable that I felt of the previous work that, “wonderful descriptions of the sweets is what truly caries this work,” but in this memoir I was more interested in what she had to say about her life, her relationship, and her first experiences of motherhood.

Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes
by Elizabeth Bard
I had also blogged back in 2012 about another French Memoir along with Thomas’s, Elizabeth Bard’s Lunch in Paris. Unlike Thomas, Bard married a Parisian and became of French citizen. That book as does her more recent memoir (2015) Picnic in Provence include recipes at the ends of chapters. This memoir follows her pregnancy and adventures in motherhood. At first Bard is a bit disconnected from motherhood and feels like she hasn’t fully bonded with her son, but then she uses a shared love of cooking to form a stronger connection with him. The later half of the memoir also focuses on her and her husband starting an artisanal ice cream shop that serves scoops inspired by the local Provencal flavors that they have fallen in love with and her efforts to become officially a French citizen. Francophiles, foodies, and other moms and entrepreneurs will find this book a treat! Bard followed up Picnic in Provence in 2017 with Dinner Chez Moi: 50 French Secrets to Joyful Eating and Entertaining, a book of advice and easy to follow recipes.

Home is Where the Eggs Are: Farmhouse Food for the People You Love
by Molly Yeh
Molly Yeh rose to culinary fame with her award winning food blog, My Name is Yeh. Her memoir Molly on the Range published in 2016, follows her time studying classical music at Julliard and her childhood in a Chicago suburb in addition to her moving to sugar beet farm that her in-laws had been running for generations. Since her first book came out Molly has gone on to being a host of the Food Network show Girl Meets Farm as well as hosting some of their food competition shows. Her cookbook Home is Where the Eggs Are: Farmhouse Food for the People You Love published in 2022, is in a way a reverse of Picnic in Provence which is a memoir with some recipes, in that it is a cookbook with bits of memoir included in each section and recipes including pictures of Molly, her husband, and oldest daughter throughout. Her recipes take inspiration from her own Jewish and Chinese heritage as well as her husband’s family Scandinavian/Midwest background, but I find there is also sort of playfulness often that is uniquely her own. Several recipes in the book caught my eye including goat cheese and dill baked eggs, cheesy kimchi fried rice, and watermelon basil bug juice. We made her marzipan chocolate chunk cookie recipe this year as one of our Christmas bakes and they were DELICIOUS!

This Might Be Too Personal
by Alyssa Shelasky
Alyssa Shelasky chronicled her nervousness about cooking while dating a celebrity chef (Spike Mendelhsohn) in Apron Anxiety which I had found to be a fun read. It was interesting to hear about Shelasky overcoming her cooking fear even if her relationship with “chef” doesn’t last. This Might Be Too Personal contains essays, mainly about Shelasky’s life chronicling her time working for New York Magazine’s Sex Diaries and eventually adapting them to a TV series as well as her choice to become a single mom before finding the love of her life. There is a brief mention of catching up with “chef” who is now happily married. Those looking for a foodie memoir will enjoy her previous work, but for fans of gossipy party girl fun similar to Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City memoirs balanced with sweet mom moments with Shelasky’s daughter Hazel, this will be an enjoyable read. The audiobook made me feel like I was hearing about the adventures from one of my bffs.

Written by:
Aimee Harris
Information and Digital Services Manager

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Cooking Up Local Cuisine and Preserving the Past: Dishing Up NJ and Endangered Eating

25 Oct

Dishing Up New Jersey: 100 Recipes from the Garden State
by John Holl
If you are new to the Garden State, Dishing Up New Jersey is a great resource to familiarize yourself with all that New Jersey has to offer. Long time residents such as myself may also find a few new recipes to try as well as enjoy hearing the stories behind their favorite dishes. It wouldn’t be an authentic New Jersey cookbook if it didn’t mention the buttered roll, a simple NJ breakfast classic, though for those looking to use a little more culinary skills there is also the Taylor Egg and Ham Sandwich or the award winning Pork Roll Surprise to get things started in the morning. Many recipes come from local NJ businesses including my favorite food truck, The Cinnamon Snail, and Anthony and David’s one of the best restaurants in Hoboken that my husband and I used to dine at frequently when we first married and lived a block away. I’m looking forward to trying to make the Bacon-Cheddar Boxty, a delicious Irish Spin on the potato pancake from The Shannon Rose in Clifton. A nice addition in the book, is a listing of harvest dates for New Jersey’s produce including everything from blueberries to our famous Garden State Tomatoes. Coming up in the fall there are apples, grapes and of course for Halloween, pumpkins. Dishing Up New Jersey also has additional resources at the end including festivals like Hoboken’s St Ann Italian Festival and links to local Restaurant Weeks including the one here in Hudson County. If you love learning more about State Cuisines check out a previous post I wrote about the TV series State Plate.

Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods
by Sarah Lohman
Endangered Eating is the latest by culinary historian, Sarah Lohman. Lohman’s previous book Eight Flavors is available to check out in print from BCCLS Libraries and as a digital audiobook from Hoopla. The foods she writes about in Endangered Eating are produced or prepared in unique ways that as the title suggests may not be around that much longer. Lohman picked the food she covered from the Ark of Taste a project that encourages biodiversity and tries to prevent losing unique foods due to industrialization, genetic erosion, climate change, and migration. It was fascinating to learn about foods such as variety of dates unique to California and sugarcane in Hawaii. I had visited a date farm and sampled fresh sugar cane juice in Australia, but had never before considered how those foods might have uniquely American counterparts. Lohman also examines a special Native American fishing practice, reef net fishing that was developed by the Straits Salish people, and the unusual Navajo-Churro sheep breed by the Dibé people, as well as Anishinaabe wild rice, and Choctaw Filé Powder, which is a classic ingredient in gumbos. I was most interested to learn more about the Heirloom Cider Apples that were once ubiquitous in this area of North Jersey and New York before Prohibition. Recipes are included for each of the ingredients she writes about and I’m curious to try the dishes such as a date shake, The Bright and Sunny Cocktail, gumbo, and the Charleston Groundnut Cake, based on a treat from circa 1855 for use with Carolina Africa Runner Peanuts, one of America’s oldest cultivated peanuts. I received an an advance copy of Endangered Eating from Netgalley and the publisher in order to provide you with an honest review. I’m planning to include one of the cider cocktail recipes for my Thanksgiving meal with my family and friends; what better way to celebrate our country’s bounty than with some uniquely American dishes.

Written by:
Aimée Harris
Information and Digital Services Manager

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