Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food - Hardcover

Hood, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393249506 ISBN 13: 9780393249507

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

Synopsis

In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls.

From her Italian American childhood through singlehood, raising and feeding a growing family, divorce, and a new marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Growing up, she tasted love in her grandmother’s tomato sauce and dreamed of her mother’s special-occasion Fancy Lady Sandwiches. Later, the kitchen became the heart of Hood’s own home. She cooked pork roast to warm her first apartment, used two cups of dried basil for her first attempt at making pesto, taught her children how to make their favorite potatoes, found hope in her daughter’s omelet after a divorce, and fell in love again―with both her husband and his foolproof chicken stock.

Hood tracks her lifelong journey in the kitchen with twenty-seven heartfelt essays, each accompanied by a recipe (or a few). In “Carbonara Quest,” searching for the perfect spaghetti helped her cope with lonely nights as a flight attendant. In the award-winning essay “The Golden Silver Palate,” she recounts the history of her fail-safe dinner party recipe for Chicken Marbella―and how it did fail her when she was falling in love. Hood’s simple, comforting recipes also include her mother’s famous meatballs, hearty Italian Beef Stew, classic Indiana Fried Chicken, the perfect grilled cheese, and a deliciously summery peach pie.

With Hood’s signature humor and tenderness, Kitchen Yarns spills tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Praise for Ann Hood

"Hood is larger than life, living, loving, and grieving on an operatic scale."
– New York Times Book Review

"Ann Hood is a captivating storyteller."
– Lily King

"I can think of no better guide than Ann Hood, whose generosity of spirit, courage, humor, gumption, and grace are a powerful reminder that language and story have the capacity to heal, to instruct, and to change our lives."
– Dani Shapiro

"Ann Hood’s writing is an unusual combination of the delicate and the fierce."
– Meg Wolitzer

"Hood never for a paragraph or a page loses control over the story that suffuses her, the sound of the words, the impact of images."
– Philadelphia Inquirer

"Hood’s words...pull you along, like a knitting pattern, one mesmerizing, settling click at a time, stitch by stitch, row by row, until you find yourself with something solid and real."
– Oregonian

About the Author

Ann Hood is the author of eight previous books, including the best-selling memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief and best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most and The Knitting Circle. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0393249506
• ISBN 13: 9780393249507
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256