Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table, a Collection of Essays from the - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393337464 ISBN 13: 9780393337464

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

“Draws with literary aplomb the correlation of what and how we eat to who we are.”―Austin Chronicle

Memorable moments with food―collected by "one of the best of the young food writers" (Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue food critic). New York Times Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser has showcased the food-inspired recollections of some of America's leading writers―playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, poets, journalists―in the magazine. Eat, Memory collects the best stories and recipes to accompany them.

Ann Patchett confronts her stubbornness in a heated argument she once had with her then-boyfriend, now husband, over dinner at the famed Paris restaurant Taillevent. Tom Perrotta explains how his long list of food aversions almost landed him in an East German prison. Gabrielle Hamilton finds that hiring a blind cook leads her into ethical terrain she wasn't prepared to navigate. And poet Billy Collins muses over his relationship with a fish he once ate.

Also included are stories by Chang-rae Lee, Patricia Marx, John Burnham Schwartz, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Kiran Desai, Pico Iyer, and Heidi Julavits, among others. 6 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Amanda Hesser, co-founder and CEO of Food52, is the author of the award-winning The Essential New York Times Cookbook, Cooking for Mr. Latte, and The Cook and the Gardener, as well as the editor of the essay collection Eat, Memory. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tad Friend, and their two children.

From Publishers Weekly

Editor and food writer Hesser (Cooking for Mr. Latte) selects 26 essays that originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine to conjure up foreign places and familiar people through tastes and smells. While some of the essays follow a classic Proustian remembrance—a pungent clove of garlic evokes Gary Shteyngart's escape from the bland boiled dinners of his parents' home in Little Neck, Queens, N.Y., and dizzying orange blossom oil stirs up embarrassing moments from Henry Alford's trip to Morocco—the collection's wide-ranging essays also include less conventional descriptions of meals, such as Ann Patchett's elusive word game with her future husband in the Paris restaurant Taillevent, where the conversation is memorable but the sole and a sublime dessert escape her recollection. Empty Tang bottles become a powerful signifier in Yiyun Li's China, and the sound of crashing pots and pans invites a memorable excursion with John Burnham Schwartz and his expat friends in Paris. Chef Gabrielle Hamilton's faces a profound test of patience with a blind line cook emptying French fries into the drain, while George Saunders offers a hilarious and hyperbolic recipe for air. Illus. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393337464
• ISBN 13: 9780393337464
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206
• Editor: Hesser Amanda